Word: wozzeck
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that belies their tight structure) reflects his individuality. An acknowledged egotist ("And you can be sure, as I grow older I will become even more so"), Boulez possesses a blazing aphoristic gift for denouncing all those who do not agree with him. On everyone who writes opera today: "Since Wozzeck and Lulu, no opera worth discussing has been composed." On the Paris Opera: "Full of dust and dung." On the French musical community, which he left in 1959 to settle in Germany: "There is more stupidity there than anywhere else." On the verbiage of conductors who talk too much: "Sheer...
...life. They expressed this in a new voice of polychromatic sounds of momentary durations. The fluid immediacy of impresssonism and the starker psychology of expressionism began to lose their distinctiveness and prove permeable and complementary. The last magnificent statements of the musical expressionistic esthetic were Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), and his Violin Concerto (1935), an elegy written upon the death on Mahler's daughter Manon. The neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works to a testament and a valedictory. The plasticity of musical idioms was clearly responding to a mellower comprehension of what...
...turned out, this was the kind of carping that a student aims at the teachers who mean the most to him. In 1948, for example, Boulez castigated Berg for having introduced a polka into the atonal fabric of Wozzeck. Today, admitting that he "may have been a little too aggressive," he praises the way in which Berg joined music to dramatic expression in the same opera. "In Wozzeck, the contradiction between pure and theatrical music has completely disappeared." Boulez's recent recording of the opera (CBS Masterworks) signals this change of attitude with its unfailing projection of just...
ALBAN BERG: WOZZECK (2 LPs; CBS Masterworks). To many students of music, Berg's masterpiece represents an enduring statement about human nature and musical revolution. To others, it is nothing but a stumble through an atonal desert. This recording will be appreciated by Berg's admirers, for Pierre Boulez's conducting is impeccable, and so is the courage of Walter Berry, who convincingly sings his way to murder and death through the cactus-like orchestration...
...connoisseur of "serious" music may sample Bomarzo, the hero of which is "sexually ambivalent and frustrated, ghost-ridden, and obsessed with death." One shudders to consider the effects of Mr. McLendon's taste on works such as Tristan und Isolde (premarital sex), Salome (fetishism and degeneracy) and Wozzeck (sadism and murder). "English records that deal with sex, sin and drugs" are what make the best popular music true, if controversial art, precisely because they deal with an imagery that is valid for youth today...