Background

Alban Berg insisted that with Wozzeck he wished ‘simply’ to ‘develop musically the contents of Georg Büchner's immortal drama’ and that his

Music analysts and critics have tended to assume that Berg's ‘transformation’ was an unproblematic affair and have felt free to set about uncovering how the music articulates the drama and the themes as if the meaning of play and opera were identical. As we shall see, however, German literature scholars’ understanding of Woyzeck differs quite markedly from most musicologists’ understanding of Wozzeck.

In his three published essays and a radio talk, Adorno contributed a wealth of nuanced insights into Wozzeck – picking up, for example, on just how Berg's adaptation of Büchner's Woyzeck acknowledged the historical meaning that had accrued in the intervening years.Footnote ¹¹ The insights themselves are not at issue here but rather the idealist metaphysics in which they are couched, which filter down into subsequent critiques of the opera – those of Joseph Kerman and Julian Johnson will serve as complementary examples later in this article. Adorno's utopian vision was grounded in the Hegelian conception of a free Subject: the end of history, the eschaton, would arrive when the Subject attained absolute freedom, when the will of the individual became identical to the will of the collective.Footnote ¹² The time spent in the preparation of art was a question of conscience: art was obliged to reveal the gulf separating the non-freedom of a reified existence under capital and the lie of freedom promoted by its ideology. Adorno's metaphysics resonates strongly with Schoenberg's ‘aesthetic theology’, which is why Adorno saw the latter's music as the most authentic style of modernism.Footnote ¹³ The difference between Schoenberg's expressionism and Adorno's mature philosophy, though, is that while Schoenberg could still envisage mankind's future reunion with nature (and struggling to understand his music could help to bring that about), Adorno thought that a Hegelian utopia should already have arrived and, because it had not, it now never would.

Giorgio Agamben has characterised this feature of Adorno's work as a ‘philosophy of impotential’: aesthetic beauty aroused a feeling of guilt that was a ‘chastisement for philosophy having missed its moment’.Footnote ¹⁴ What does he mean by this? Agamben quotes the closing aphorism of Adorno's Minima Moralia: ‘The only philosophy that can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.’Footnote ¹⁵ For Agamben, ‘[this] text … shows itself to be nothing other than an aestheticisation of the messianic in the form of the as if’.Footnote ¹⁶ Philosophy may have ‘missed its moment’, but Adorno prizes art that, although it authentically captures the current historical realities, still somehow makes it seem as if utopia were still a possibility.

Schoenberg's music contains just this kind of credible promissory note, which is why Adorno finds it so compelling. Adorno's praise for Wozzeck can be attributed to his as if-aesthetics, and his approval of the ‘let it be’ that hangs over the final bars of Wozzeck falls into this category.Footnote ¹⁷ The Hegelian wheel of history is bound to crush many victims as it rolls towards the perfect state. And even though it seemed clear that the wheel would never reach its goal, in Adorno's aesthetic economy of impotential, it is still right that we mourn and celebrate these innocent victims, as if their suffering were to be redeemed in the future. Ultimately for Adorno, however, Wozzeck is a failure because it does not manage to retrieve even a scrap of subjective freedom from reified modernity. My aim here is not to argue for or against Adorno on this point, as Kerman and Johnson effectively do. Instead I propose to critique the opera within a framework derived from Büchner – a materialist philosophy of potential that is fundamentally incompatible with Adorno's Freud-infused Hegelianism, not to mention any of the other flavours of idealism that have been brought to bear on Wozzeck.

In the first part of the article, I argue that the Woyzeck fragments can be seen as Büchner's preliminary artistic or imaginative step towards developing a ‘philosophy of potential’. In the second part, I challenge the widespread assumption that Berg somehow managed to set the text in a neutral way, arguing that the libretto is not so much a ‘remarkably authentic practical version of the drama’, as George Perle would have it, but reflects Berg's attempt to impose upon the fragments a set of aesthetic values drawn from ideas inimical to Büchner's thought.Footnote ¹⁸ In the final two sections, I argue that, despite the violence Berg does to Büchner's plan, the music in the nature scenes can be heard to generate the very philosophy of potential that Büchner was searching for in the original fragments.

Büchner's Woyzeck…

Leo Treitler, one of the few musicologists to recognise Büchner's anti-idealism, contends that Woyzeck is actually ‘a powerful statement of opposition’ against the prevailing Enlightenment view of history:

Treitler is certainly right that Büchner was more interested in seeing concrete incremental improvement in current living conditions than dreaming about some future heaven on earth. However, he reads too much pessimism into Büchner's vision. For Treitler, in the drama ‘there is no larger meaning; things move irresistibly forward, but to no greater purpose’.Footnote ²⁰ The play presents Marie's murder and Woyzeck's hanging as outcomes towards which ‘events and circumstances seem to move ineluctably’.Footnote ²¹ Berg's music, according to Treitler, reinforces ‘the sense that the things that happen were bound from the first to happen’, thus making the ‘sense of doom’ ‘an essential aspect of the drama's expression’.Footnote ²² But Woyzeck actually represents Büchner's search for a means of escape from an apparently predetermined fate. Indeed, I will argue that it was the very indeterminability of the historical Johann Christian Woyzeck's guilt that captivated Büchner in the first place – it seemed to gesture towards some power, capacity or principle that could replace the Enlightenment's misguided faith in reason and freedom.

When he died, Büchner had just completed his doctorate and taken up a post at the University of Zurich, where he was hoping to lecture on philosophy, as well as the anatomy he had officially qualified for.Footnote ²³ After his youthful attempts to stoke up revolution in his native Darmstadt, his notes for his projected philosophy course see him attempting to find a politically satisfying notion of freedom that squared with his scientific understanding of nature.Footnote ²⁴ Büchner's notes show that, against the prevailing idealist current, he accepted Spinoza's determinism and rejected Kant's notion of the free, moral subject.Footnote ²⁵ For Büchner, in opposition to the Kantian/Hegelian conceptions of subjectivity implicated in Adorno's and later interpretations of Wozzeck, free will was not prevented by social and political arrangements; it was already fundamentally incompatible with Newtonian, deterministic natural laws.Footnote ²⁶ According to this view, which animates Woyzeck, the Subject-based utopia Adorno thought art should gesture towards had never been possible in the first place.

Because these ideas are sourced from unpublished, undelivered lectures, some scholars have chosen to emphasise the apparently pro-idealist stance he takes in the introduction to his anatomy lecture ‘On Cranial Nerves’ (‘Über Schädelnerven’, 1836).Footnote ²⁷ The lecture reflected the continuing influence of Goethe and Schelling's Naturphilosophie on German biology as opposed to the what Büchner called the ‘teleological standpoint’ dominant in France and England.Footnote ²⁸ Whereas the teleological biologist investigated the purpose of an organ and how it contributed to the survival of the individual and hence the species, the ‘philosophical’ biologist (such as Büchner) was interested in how that organ reveals a ‘primordial law, a law of beauty’ that governed the ‘entire organic world’.Footnote ²⁹ For example, the eye did not come into existence for the purpose of seeing, as the teleologists believed, but as the manifestation of a ‘single law’ so that seeing became its effect rather than its purpose. There were only two paths open to understanding what Büchner called the Urgesetz: ‘the intuition of the mystic’ and the ‘dogmatism of the rationalist’. His scientific investigations were aimed at the latter, and we learn from his letters that he had also experienced mystic encounters with the Urgesetz during a fever, something he was trying to recreate artistically in Lenz (1835) and Woyzeck.

But Büchner's recourse to the Urgesetz does not undermine his fundamental materialism. He felt the need to imbue nature with an apparently mystical or transcendent force because ‘a very great distance separated’ what can be discovered through rationality ‘from green, fresh life’, and science is unlikely ever to ‘close the gap’.Footnote ³⁰ From today's vantage point we can see that what Büchner (not to mention Goethe and Schelling) was ‘intuiting’ through the Urgesetz was indeed a gap: the gap between the deterministic efficient (mechanical) causality that the best science of his day told him held sway and the indeterministic emergent causality we now know is responsible for the complex phenomena that characterise life.Footnote ³¹ Rather than an idealist fiction, the Urgesetz was a way of accounting for phenomena that lay outside the explanatory power of the reigning conceptual model – rather like dark matter today.

Because Büchner recognised that rationality could not explain the behaviour he observed in the fish and amphibians he studied, he rejected any kind of idealism in art. If Newton's beautiful and surprisingly accurate descriptions of planetary movement could not account for biological occurrences, then there was even less chance that a priori philosophical systems could illuminate human behaviour. For Büchner, the Urgesetz would remain radically unknowable, so the closest science or art could get to its truth was through a commitment to faithful observation. Rather than having the arrogance to think he knew how the world ‘should be’, his duty as a writer was to represent the world ‘as it is’.Footnote ³² This meant presenting human beings whose ‘sorrows and joys’ can be ‘shared emotionally’, whether their deeds fill one with ‘revulsion or admiration’.Footnote ³³

In Lenz, Büchner puts his own artistic creed into the mouth of his literary hero:

Woyzeck was Büchner's attempt to realise this aspiration, to continue what Lenz himself had begun in plays such as Die Soldaten (1776).Footnote ³⁵ Literary protagonists should be ‘ordinary’ or ‘lowly’ because the educated minority, not to mention the power-wielding aristocracy, were too far removed from their ‘essential being’.Footnote ³⁶ For them, it was cloaked in civilisation, in manners, in fixed modes of thought: their actions and ideas were already ‘copied from outside’. Büchner turned Spinoza's serene contemplation of the harmony of the heavens on its head: the mystery and the wonder are to be found in contemplation of human nature in all its manifest disharmony.

One further reason will help us appreciate why the case of convicted murderer J.C. Woyzeck so appealed to Büchner. Büchner believed that genuine revolutionary activity must be led from below. The problem with a deterministic view of nature is that it cannot account for the genesis of anything new, including revolution. If the new were to arise, then it would have to be through the mysterious workings of the Urgesetz. Having established that subjective freedom is a fiction, and also that living beings are not predictable automata, the Urgesetz must manifest itself at the human level in those actions that appear to be volitional, those for which the individual may be held accountable. These might be creative, artistic or political acts, but they might also be moral acts.

J.C. Woyzeck was arrested shortly after murdering his partner Johanna Christiane Woost on 2 June 1821 in Leipzig.Footnote ³⁷ Despite confessing immediately, his trial dragged on and he was not finally sentenced to death until three years later. The reason for the delay – also the reason the case attracted such widespread media and public attention – was that the court had trouble deciding whether Woyzeck was insane. If the voices he had been hearing were due to madness, he could not have been held responsible for the murder.Footnote ³⁸ What surely fascinated Büchner about the report of Johann Christian August Clarus, the doctor called upon to adjudicate, was that although Clarus fully accepted that Woyzeck's hallucinations were real – even going so far as to postulate their medical cause – he still concluded that the accused never ‘in his life’ and particularly when ‘perpetrating the murder, [suffered] from a disturbed mind’.Footnote ³⁹ Clarus justified his decision by arguing that if Woyzeck were declared innocent, scientific determinism could then be used to exonerate any crime. For Clarus, Woyzeck's case marked the border between civilisation and anarchy, reason and unreason. But his own report limns the border between rationality and irrationality: it is irrational, because the science told him Woyzeck was not responsible for the crime, but it is also rational, because if Woyzeck were found innocent, then any criminal could be found innocent, a conclusion that would lead to a collapse of the social order.

The source of Clarus's confusion is the two contradictory and irreconcilable versions of subjectivity stemming from contemporary science. The first of these, according to Charles Taylor, was already evident in Francis Bacon's early formulation of the scientific method.Footnote ⁴⁰ The appeal of Baconian science was not in any technological payoff, but rather in the flattering belief that one could know and even control a passive and malleable nature. This ‘correlative to a self-defining subject’ was, Taylor points out, ‘accompanied by a sense of exhilaration and power’.Footnote ⁴¹ The medieval view that the individual should strive to conform to the external divine perfection of nature was replaced by one in which an internally generated volition conferred on the individual the ability to act freely within nature. But there was an opposing view: the human subject was itself embedded in nature, a passive object capable of being observed and therefore ultimately beholden to the physical laws of nature. Outside of an idealist fudge, there was no way in which such a subject could be considered free.

Büchner was dissatisfied with each of these extreme subjective and objective conceptions of human volition and satirised both mercilessly in Woyzeck, encouraging the spectator to realise that the truth must lie elsewhere. Baconian subjectivity is caricatured in the ludicrous attitudes of the Captain and the Doctor, for whom human beings can exercise complete control over their animal urges and bodily functions. They are interested, respectively, in the comings and goings of Woyzeck's penis: by contrasting their dominion over their own with Woyzeck's inability to control his, they draw the boundary between civilisation and animal life. The Captain considers Woyzeck to lack ‘morality’ or ‘virtue’ because he has ‘a child not blessed by the church’. Although the Captain too is ‘flesh and blood’, aroused when glimpsing women's ‘white stockings skipping down the street’ after the rain, he is able to restrain himself.Footnote ⁴² The Doctor, who is using Woyzeck for dietary experiments, needs urine samples from him and is upset to have seen him ‘pissing in the street’.Footnote ⁴³ Woyzeck protests that ‘when nature calls’ one has no choice, but the Doctor insists that ‘nature’ is nothing but ‘superstition’ and that ‘the musculus sphincter vesicae are subject to the human will’.Footnote ⁴⁴ When Woyzeck is then unable to piss on demand, the Doctor comically demonstrates his own self-control by refusing to get angry, which he views as ‘bad for the health’ and ‘unscientific’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Woyzeck, by contrast, is likened to an animal, a ‘newt’ – no doubt chosen because of Büchner's expertise concerning amphibians – that has ‘lost all self-control’.Footnote ⁴⁶

But Büchner also satirises the other extreme, that the human is an object compelled to obey the unchanging laws of nature, through the attitude of the fairground Showman. The Showman believes that civilisation – rational thought, science, manners, morality – is just a mask concealing humanity's essential bestiality and that all human life can be reduced to eating, shitting and fucking. He tries to convince his audience that his performing animals, having learnt to imitate the trappings of civilisation, are now ‘human beings in animal form’.Footnote ⁴⁷ His sales pitch begins: ‘Consider the creature as God first made it: nothing, just nothing. Add civilisation and see what you've got: walks upright, wears trousers and carries a sword.’ He proves his point by exhibiting a monkey dressed as a soldier that can shoot a pistol, and a donkey that can count by nodding its head.Footnote ⁴⁸ The scene culminates in the donkey, having just been likened to a human being, defecating on the stage. This does not invalidate the Showman's claims: ‘Go on, put society to shame! There, you see, the beast is still a part of nature, unspoilt nature. You should follow his example. Just ask your doctor, it does terrible ’arm (to keep it in). That's the motto: man, be natural.’Footnote ⁴⁹ There is no difference between the donkey and the human, both are nothing but ‘dust, sand, dirt’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Running alongside these brazen parodies is a more nuanced treatment of the religion he saw providing occasional intuition of the Urgesetz. Despite Büchner's trenchant materialism, he always insisted that some form of religion or myth would be necessary in any future improved society. Instead of the grotesquery aimed at the subject–object splitting of the human, the play more thoughtfully explores how religion is irrevocably implicated in the individual's personal experience of social life and nature. It returns repeatedly to the contradiction at the heart of both Christianity and secular romantic mysticism between, on the one hand, the promise of a deeper understanding of nature and some form of salvation, and on the other, a tendency to keep understanding and salvation forever tantalisingly out of reach.

The scene in which Marie leafs through her Bible looking for some form of comfort, pithily encapsulates the same dilemma that defines Woyzeck's own experience throughout the play. After her infidelity to Woyzeck, it is unsurprising to find her dwelling on the story of the adulteress about to be stoned.Footnote ⁵¹ Although she freely admits her wrongdoing and feels deep regret for her actions, she understands her own sexual needs and cannot make the promise Jesus asks of the adulteress, that she ‘go and sin no more’.Footnote ⁵² As Nietzsche was to articulate later, Christianity may offer some comfort, but the price is guilt: the individual is made to feel that their own biological drives are their own fault.Footnote ⁵³

Although Woyzeck seems to be tortured by his visions, their mix of romantic and Christian imagery does offer him the hope that there is a reason for his wretched existence, if only he could uncover it. He is frustrated by his inability to interpret the signs he sees around him: ‘if only one could read them!’ he complains of the circles of toadstools. Instead he is forced to rely on half-remembered quotations from the Bible.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the beginning of the play this marks him out as distinct from the Doctor and the Captain, who are incapable of genuine thought, simply repeating platitudes and stock opinions. An uneducated individual such as Woyzeck was more fully open to the mysteries of nature. The only way he has of harnessing the indescribable power of the truth he glimpses, however, is to fall back on transcendent mythologies and to succumb to reactionary forces. Later in the play, Woyzeck reduces nature's mysteries to his limited understanding of what might constitute ‘natural justice’. He hears the earth and the wind instruct him to kill Marie: ‘stich die Zickwolfin tot’ (‘stab the bitch dead’) (H4:12).Footnote ⁵⁵ At the moment of the murder nature is reduced from a swarm of pure potentials to a moral calculus with only one possible outcome.

…becomes Berg's Wozzeck

None of this necessarily means that musicologists’ idealist readings of Wozzeck are misguided – they resonate convincingly with most opera-goers’ experience of the opera in performance. This is partly due to the numerous differences between what would now be considered a reasonable performing text of Woyzeck and the editions Berg was using.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most pertinently, the scene order that Berg borrowed from Landau is responsible for shifting the play's primary emphasis on metaphysical questions onto the secondary question of social criticism. Franzos, Landau and then Berg all begin with the scene in which Woyzeck shaves the Captain, thereby giving more weight to issues of poverty and class distinction. Most modern editors agree that the play was meant to start with Woyzeck and Andres in the country collecting sticks (H4:1), which puts the questions about social hierarchy and wealth into a broader context. Audiences witnessing Woyzeck's terrifying visions at the very beginning of the play are more likely to expect an investigation into the meaning of human existence, the nature of reality, and the relationship between man and the natural world.Footnote ⁵⁷

However, I want to argue here that the long-standing musicological assessments of Wozzeck as either nihilist or redemptive have endured mainly because of the specific ways that Berg went about adapting the play. The excision of words and phrases, the omission of entire scenes and the conflation of others may well have been a practical way of fitting the play into a neat three-act scheme, and surely even contributed to the dramatic economy of the opera, but these modifications also inadvertently dismantled the delicately balanced apparatus Büchner had designed to provoke audiences into thinking about the source of volition or creativity, specifically Büchner's juxtaposition of the humanist belief in humankind's ability to dominate nature and the determinist conclusion that human agency is at the mercy of a predictable universe.Footnote ⁵⁸ Berg's decisions conform to a set of aesthetic and ethical premises that are not congruent with Büchner's. And he cemented the resulting nihilistic acceptance of inevitably imprisoned subjectivity with prominently positioned music that ‘redeems’ Marie and Wozzeck's suffering – albeit in a more Hegelian than Wagnerian manner.

Berg's own philosophical views are notoriously difficult to pin down: he never attempted to build a metaphysical or aesthetic system in the manner of Schoenberg, and his thought usually has to be inferred from cryptic references in his letters.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, he seems to have been caught in the same bind as Büchner. On the one hand, he held the strange belief that numbers exerted some control over him, which can be understood as an acceptance of the deterministic view of nature. On the other, like Büchner, Berg valued what he called ‘Life’ above everything else: Wagner (for instance) is ‘much more modern than Schopenhauer, because, like Ibsen and Nietzsche, he “says yes to life”’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Berg took his personal credo from the famous ‘God is dead’ passage in Nietzsche's The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882/7). To paraphrase: now man is no longer beholden to religious deities, he is able to direct his drives towards discovering just what the human body (individually, collectively, in concert with other non-human bodies) is capable of; one cannot possibly predict the consequences of opening up to the productive forces that comprise Life (Berg talks of ‘new seas’, Nietzsche of ‘open seas’), but taking this risk (acknowledging and analysing the mistakes made and making course corrections accordingly) is better than the oppressive repetition involved in submitting to fictional transcendent beings.Footnote ⁶¹ If Berg had attempted to set out a philosophical system, then it seems he would, like Büchner, have been looking to Life to escape the determinist bind.

However, we can discern an important divergence between Berg's and Büchner's respective conceptions of Life. Born of his determination to base philosophy on the empirical observation of nature and not on abstractions, Büchner held a much harsher view of Life than Berg. Although the extent to which an individual can override or escape the fact that they are part of nature is left open by Büchner, he figures nature as operating in ways that not only produce Life, but are also inimical to it, that act to stifle or snuff it out. While Berg would have seen the forces of death as opposing those of Life, Büchner saw sickness, decay, and death as an integral part of Life that must also be affirmed. Ideas similar to Büchner's are found in the same mid- to late period Nietzsche that produced the passage on ‘open seas’, but Berg had inherited a peculiar way of interpreting Nietzsche's later work. Partly through his association with Mahler, Berg was heir to a complex of ideas that had grown up with the anti-liberal Pernerstorfer circle in Vienna in the 1870s.Footnote ⁶² Their aesthetics drew primarily on the writing of Schopenhauer, Wagner and the early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy (1871) and Untimely Meditations (1873).Footnote ⁶³ As William McGrath cautions, their Nietzsche was not the one we are familiar with today from Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) and the group tended to understand the later works in terms of The Birth of Tragedy, which they saw as a materialist rewriting of Schopenhauer's metaphysics.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Pernerstorfers took their view of nature from Wagner, who in turn had absorbed it from Schopenhauer and E.T.A. Hoffmann.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although Wagner maintained a materialist reading of both, he preserved the idea that there is a non-rational state of perfection that escapes ordinary language (or mathematical formulae) in nature, which may be glimpsed through the emotional states that arise in art – especially extreme states like sexual or religious bliss, or insanity.Footnote ⁶⁶ Suffering arises not from nature, as in Büchner and late Nietzsche, but from man's detachment or alienation from it. Thus, while Wagner did not believe that music gave transcendent visions of the true nature beneath the surface appearance, he did think it could give the auditor a close impression of the source of the unity of the universe, wherein lay its redemptive potential.Footnote ⁶⁷ Berg never lost his faith in the high-minded aims of Bayreuth: he found it ‘inconceivable and despicable’ when Nietzsche attacked Wagner, evidence that he always remained a Birth-of-Tragedy-Nietzschean.Footnote ⁶⁸ He even sided with Wagner against the intellectual he trusted most, Karl Kraus, who, after 1905, became increasingly critical of the Wagnerian project.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is, therefore, unsurprising that the lines, passages and scenes Berg removed or altered were often those most likely to disturb the Schopenhauerian/Wagnerian/early Nietzschean view of a pure, harmonious, redemptive nature.Footnote ⁷⁰

In the scene with the Doctor, for example, Berg cut the words in square brackets: ‘Herr Doktor, [haben Sie schon was von der doppelten Natur gesehen?] Wenn die Sonne im Mittag steht, und es ist, als ging’ die Welt in Feuer auf, hat schon eine fürchterliche Stimme zu mir geredet.’ (‘Doctor, [have you seen anything of double nature?] At that time when the sun reaches its highpoint, and it is as if the world has gone up in flames, a terrifying voice spoke to me.’)Footnote ⁷¹ Büchner's original line, which Franzos transcribed perfectly from H4, would have been troubling to Berg, since the nature that Woyzeck sees behind the appearance of the sun and sky itself is the source of the torment. Unlike Schopenhauer's splitting of nature between appearance and transcendent essence, the dialectic in Büchner is between the forces of life and the forces of death, both of which are immanent in a single world.Footnote ⁷² That is, the usually obscure nature, which Woyzeck is able to perceive due to his irrational state of mind, is not the source of a pure redemptive unity, but contains radical evil. One can see a similar logic at work in Berg's decision not to include any of H4:12, in which voices from nature command Woyzeck to kill Marie, even though it was available in his Landau edition.

Most ruinously to Büchner's careful balancing act, Berg retained the scenes in which the Doctor and the Captain insist that a civilised man can exercise complete control over his bodily functions (H4:5, H4:8), but excluded the scenes at the fairground that counter this view (H2:3, H2:5, H1:1, H1:2).Footnote ⁷³ In these latter scenes, as we have discussed, Büchner was critiquing the prevalent notion that nature functioned via predictable, mechanical causality, that despite pretentions to civilisation the human is controlled completely by biological imperatives and can do no more than ‘be natural’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Büchner assumes his audience will agree the showman is as mistaken as the Captain and the Doctor: human beings, to say nothing of animals and plants, exhibit a profound creative energy that somehow escapes any reductive explanation in terms of drives. However, Berg might have read these passages as crudely anti-nature, which would explain why he cut them despite their key role in parodying the mechanical view of nature, which is as misguided as the Captain's and the Doctor's belief in their power to exert complete mastery over their bodies.

No one would argue that Wozzeck is redemptive in the same way as an opera by Wagner, but Berg did make significant enough changes to the religious scenes that it does now at least offer Marie and Wozzeck the possibility of a Hegelian redemption.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Büchner, religion is a helpful way of making sense of an otherwise incomprehensible and unfair world and it promises existential comfort. More ominously, it also provides Woyzeck with a language, even a justification, for his murderous act, and it causes Marie to feel shame and guilt for her sexual drives.Footnote ⁷⁶ The original play in no way redeems Woyzeck and Marie's lives. Their horrific and cruel deaths are carefully arranged so that within the Christian paradigm, they are both guilty and therefore – barring God's grace, of which there is no evidence in the play – they are both damned.

Perhaps influenced by Wagner's Feuerbachian Christian universalism, Berg made just enough minor changes to the libretto to absolve Marie and Wozzeck.Footnote ⁷⁷ And while the music certainly does not redeem them in a Wagnerian fashion, it allows the audience emotional release by being able to pity them and mourn their lives. First, he diluted the violence. In (H4:12), which Berg left out as mentioned previously, Woyzeck verbally imitates the thrusting of the knife as he imagines murdering Marie: ‘stich, stich die Zickwolfin tot? stich, stich die Zickwolfin tot. … stich tot, tot’ (‘stab, stab the bitch dead? [etc.]’). Büchner's murder scene (H1:15) is also much more disturbing than Berg's. Where Berg used the tame ‘Ich nicht, Marie! Und kein Andrer auch nicht!’ (‘Not me, Marie! And no one else either!’) and then the stage instruction to plunge the knife into her throat, Büchner's murder is far more frenzied and, no doubt given his meticulous research, more realistic: ‘Nimm das und das! Kannst du nicht sterbe. So! so! Ha sie zuckt noch, noch nicht noch nicht? Immer noch? (stößt zu) Bist du tot? Tot! Tot!’ (‘Take that and that! Can't you just die. So! so! Ha, she's still twitching – not yet, not yet? Still not? [he stabs her] Are you dead? Dead! Dead!’) (This is not to say Berg's version, with its ferocious timpani blows, is not itself highly disturbing.) In this case, it was Franzos who wished to spare audiences the distressing experience of a realistic knife murder. However, the redemptive catharsis of the D minor interlude would have been impossible had Berg included it, and so we can speculate that Berg would have approved of Franzos's changes.

Second, Berg altered Marie's character. Susan Greene has already noticed this and approves of the change, arguing that ‘Berg transforms her from Büchner's virtual harlot into a less promiscuous woman of genuine conscience’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Büchner's Marie, with her dark black curls, full red lips and feisty attitude is more like Carmen, but would Carmen's asking for divine forgiveness for her sexual appetites have made her a more ‘genuine’ character? This is effectively what Berg does in Act III scene 1 (H4:16, with Berg's own interpolation of some of H4:17), in which Marie looks to the Bible for comfort.Footnote ⁷⁹ Büchner has Marie quote directly from 1 Peter 2:22 and John 8:3, 8:11. The latter (as noted previously) is the story of the Pharisees who bring an adulterous woman to Jesus, arguing that by the law of Moses she should be stoned. Büchner's elliptical writing leaves out Jesus's most famous pronouncement, but does have ‘So verdamme ich dich auch nicht, geh’ hin, und sündige hinfort nicht mehr!’ (‘Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.’) Marie then exclaims, with Berg's cut marked in square brackets: ‘Herr Gott! [Herrgott! – ich kann nicht – Herrgott! gib mir nur so viel, dass ich beten kann]’ (‘Lord God! [God! – I can't – God! just give me enough [strength] to pray]’).Footnote ⁸⁰ Büchner's Marie refuses to partake in the hypocritical Christian cycle of sin – admission of guilt, contrition, request for forgiveness, sin again, and so on. She cannot promise to ‘go and sin no more’ because she knows she will undoubtedly sin again. Berg thereby removed her honesty and, pace Greene, her conscience. Büchner ended the scene with Marie crying ‘Heiland! ich möchte Dir Füsse salben’ after reading from Luke 7:38, where a sinful women washes Jesus's feet with her hair and tears. In Büchner this is understood as ‘I would like to atone by washing your feet [but can't]’, but with Berg's earlier cut it becomes ‘I would like to now atone.’ Berg then added the line: ‘Heiland, Du hast Dich ihrer erbarmt, erbarme Dich auch meiner!’ (‘Saviour, you have mercy on theirs [their souls], have mercy on mine too!), which has her requesting forgiveness and thus completing the absolution ritual. In Büchner's fragments, she certainly feels guilty, but she stumbles at contrition and therefore neither atonement nor forgiveness is possible. As a result of Berg's changes, Wozzeck's murder now releases her from her suffering and sends her to heaven. Berg's more insipid Marie thus makes it easier to mourn musically for Wozzeck and his suffering at the end of Act III scene 4.

Berg reinforced these various changes to the text through the music. The Bible scene comprises a seven-bar theme, followed by seven variations, each of which also has seven bars, and finishes with a double fugue, the first theme of which has seven notes. The theme itself is made up of a four-bar fugal antecedent and a three-bar consequent and has what Berg referred to as a ‘dual’ nature that is preserved in most of the subsequent variations, including the two halves of the double fugue.Footnote ⁸¹ The antecedent is built up of tonal chains of notes, including perfect fourths, and ends on a bi-tonal superimposition of a D major chord on top of an E♭ major chord.Footnote ⁸² The long notes, consonances and fugal texture suggest renaissance choral polyphony: this half of the theme is used when Marie reads from the Bible. The consequent, with its dissonant minor seconds, semiquaver parallel major seconds and disjunct bass that outlines all twelve notes, conveys her guilt and self-loathing. In the second half of the concluding double fugue, her atonement and request for forgiveness emerge out of the guilt music, lending extra psychological veracity to her spiritual transformation – perhaps the source of the ‘genuine conscience’ Greene perceives here.Footnote ⁸³

Erika Reiman argues that that the tonal passages in the opera are expressions of ‘unreality’ marking the characters’ attempts to escape from the everyday.Footnote ⁸⁴ Indeed, the nearly tonal antecedent and its variations are earthbound in comparison to Variation 5, which comes as a brief moment of transcendent solace in amidst the suffering. But what are the words here? It is text that Berg had deliberately imported from the following scene: ‘Es war einmal ein armes Kind und hatt’ keinen Vater und keine Mutter, war Alles tot’ (‘Once upon a time, a poor child had no father and no mother, both were dead’). The air of unreality partly suggests the escape into fairy-tale land and the premonition of what is to come; however, the comforting calm indicates that Marie views this outcome as desirable, even if it meant her child would be alone.Footnote ⁸⁵ The music helps to exculpate Wozzeck – Marie longs for her own death as an escape from her misery, and Wozzeck gives it to her.

The controversial D minor interlude between the final two scenes can be seen as part of an overarching tonal harmonic framework operational throughout Act III that serves to redeem Wozzeck – allowing us to lament his passing as if he were one of historical progress's forgotten martyrs.Footnote ⁸⁶ As is well known, the opera has an A–B–A form, in which the loosely grouped scenes in Acts I and III surround the tightly organised, symphonic Act II.Footnote ⁸⁷ I would argue, however, that Act III – outwardly a diverse group five of inventions, each based on a different type of ostinato – is just as integrated as Act II, and that the manner of its integration is intimately linked to Berg's redemptive scheme.

Josef-Horst Lederer argues that the resolution of the B (and B₁, b, b¹) onto c at the end of the murder scene, Act III scene 2 (in fact a distorted C major) indicates Marie's release from her wretched life.Footnote ⁸⁸ This insight can be stretched to encompass the whole act. Allen Forte describes the D minor tonality of the interlude as ‘arbitrary’, only displaying a ‘tonal patina’, and attempts to show that it is better thought of as atonal and in terms of pitch class sets.Footnote ⁸⁹ But to my ears it seems to prove the opposite, that apparently atonal elements often have tonal function. The conglomeration of all twelve notes that occurs in Act III, bar 364 sounds like a dominant to the following D minor chord.Footnote ⁹⁰ Because of the tritone substitution from E♭ onto the dominant A in the bass and the voice leading in the upper parts, this passage, and the epilogue as a whole, feel like a tonic resolution with all the emotional associations that carries. And, just as the resolution of the b onto c between scenes 2 and 3 of Act III marked Marie's release, so the epilogue marks Wozzeck's. More than this, however, both are incorporated within a larger tonal matrix spanning the act. Across the act, distorted versions of the following tonalities can be heard:

1. Scene 1: G (The antecedent of the theme begins on g¹ and comes to rest on a superimposition of a D major chord and an E♭ major chord – thus sounding the dominant and relative major simultaneously.)

2. Scene 2: B (The note b is present throughout the scene (B₁ at the outset and then shifting register).)

3. Scene 3: C (The scene starts in a warped C major – using an augmented triad on c on an out-of-tune pub piano.)

4. Scene 4: B♭ → A (The B♭ occurs throughout as an important bass note, serving the function of an augmented 6th chord on the submediant in the following key of D minor. The whole scene is therefore a prolonged substitution for ii (or ii⁷) in a standard ii → V⁷ → i progression.)

5. Interlude: D (The D minor not only resolves the preceding A, but it is also an altered dominant for the G-centred tonality with which the act ends.)

6. Scene 5: G (The scene/opera comes to rest on the home chord, which is effectively a G major chord with added notes – all the acts begin and end with notes taken from this chord. The prominent g and d notes mean the act has returned to the g and d with which it started.)

Even if the whole act were in some theoretical sense ‘atonal’, most spectators of the opera, so used to tonal harmony, likely hear the act in terms of the tension and release of traditional tonality, even contorted and degraded as it is here.Footnote ⁹¹

At the very end of the opera, the music is brought to a close with the g-d perfect fifth in the strings and harps and an expressive swell and simultaneously left open with flat dynamics and no ritardando in the alternating figure in the winds. The non-ending and circularity implied by the winds suggest that the whole sorry cycle of suffering and death is going to continue with the child. But because the harmonic scheme that has led here incorporates this moment into the large-scale structure of the act, it means that it is felt as resignation – Adorno's ‘let it be’: the wheel of history turns endlessly; the suffering that humankind must endure is inevitable. Such an ending may provoke audiences to ruminate on suffering in their own societies, and what immediate steps they might take to alleviate it. Surely such a provocation was part of the purpose of Büchner's play. But Büchner's larger provocation to thought is absent; namely, it does not present the Urgesetz – the morphogenetic principle of becoming – as a problem.

Schizophonia

As we have seen, Büchner regarded the standard bifurcation of conscious experience into the controlling rational mind and the passive natural world as inadequate. However, he also rejected the self-identical, volitional subject affirmed by the romantics beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, more familiarly to German speakers, Johann Gottfried Herder as an alternative – what Charles Taylor calls the ‘expressivist’ paradigm of subjectivity. ‘Expression’ here refers to ‘a realising in external reality of something we feel or desire’, and ‘what is expressed is a subject, or some state of a subject’.Footnote ⁹² For Büchner, ‘the individual’, he wrote to his fiancée in 1834, is ‘just froth atop a wave’. Any apparently artistic, scientific, philosophical ‘greatness’ resulted from ‘mere coincidence’, and ‘the genius's sense of mastery’ was an illusion.Footnote ⁹³ And yet it is the question of individual autonomy that is most at stake in readings of Wozzeck that focus on pity. At one end of the spectrum, Joseph Kerman thinks that Wozzeck has no agency, no dramatic presence, and any compassion the opera rouses is the pity one feels towards a ‘baited animal’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Julian Johnson insists, by contrast, that ‘the focus of Berg's opera is unequivocally that of Wozzeck as an individual’ and finally that Wozzeck ‘[projects] such a deep lament for what [it] narrates … that the music … ends up redeeming the brutality of what takes place on stage’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The problem is that both Kerman and Johnson make their valuations from inside the very expressivist model that Büchner had rejected. This is hardly surprising when the discourse around Wozzeck has been shaped by Schoenberg and Adorno, two arch-expressivists.Footnote ⁹⁶ For each, the subject, as the source of volition and unique individuality, was simultaneously the vehicle of political resistance and the hope for a utopian future.Footnote ⁹⁷ Since the means available for self-expression had been limited by the evils of reification – materialism, rationalisation and commodification – the only possibility was a violent assertion of the free self by a radical negation of all forms of ‘thought’ in the artwork. For Schoenberg, the degree of discomfort experienced when listening to his music indexed the extent of the modern subject's alienation from nature. For Adorno, it marked the distance between the Hegelian (absolute) freedom that should by now exist and the oppression that materially obtains.Footnote ⁹⁸ Whether conceived in Adorno's terms as a ‘powerless’ and ‘lonely’ subject beneath the ‘anxious exterior’ or in Schoenberg's as an ‘inborn, instinctive’ soul, perfectly in touch with nature, ‘authentic’ music conveyed both the stultifying unfreedom imposed by modernity and the kernel of autonomy residing in the trapped subject that would serve as the basis of a projected utopia.Footnote ⁹⁹

Adorno's main complaint about Wozzeck is that its ‘finished structures’ act as ‘shock absorbers’, neutralising the anxiety that generates the sense of autonomy in Erwartung.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In Schoenberg's compositional practice, the locus of subjectivity turned out to be the singing voice: in Erwartung (1909/24), for example, voice and orchestra move as a unity throughout. However diplomatically he tries to phrase it, under Adorno's expressivist criteria Wozzeck is a failure. At bottom, what Kerman and Johnson – not to mention other commentators who engage with Wozzeck on a philosophical level – do is respectively agree or disagree with Adorno on his own expressivist terms. As we have seen, Büchner's Woyzeck is an invitation to imagine an alternative to the artificial split of the human into rational subject and physical object, an alternative that does not require the invention of a transcendent self-identical, volitional subject. What if Berg had not even been attempting to present an expressivist subject and instead taken up Büchner's invitation to imagine an immanent replacement for the ‘objectivist anthropology’ ridiculed in the play? This might make better sense of the distinct way Berg handled the orchestra and voice in the opera.

Consider Act I scene 2, in which Wozzeck is collecting kindling with Andres in the fields outside the town. The music counts as expressionist because the audience is perceiving from inside Wozzeck's head (i.e., experiencing his hallucinations), but what is heard is quite different from the seething unconscious torment in Erwartung. Instead, the musical depiction of the real-world phenomena Wozzeck observes is qualitatively no different from that of his internally generated hallucinations. Both emerge from the same eerie nature chords that open the scene, and both use equally convincing musical iconography – as opposed to the abstraction of Erwartung – to depict the content of the experience. The ethereal harmonics on divided strings that mimic the nebulous mists floating above the grass where the toadstools are springing up (bars 227–32) belong to the same sound-world as the low winds that depict a disembodied head as it rolls ever faster down the bank (bars 233–9).Footnote ¹⁰¹

In the lead-up to the most intense hallucination, the barrier between inner and outer is violated in a more extreme way (bars 257–69). Andres is now singing the famous hunting nursery rhyme ‘Zwischen Berg und tiefem, tiefem Tal’ in a vain attempt to calm Wozzeck down.Footnote ¹⁰² Wozzeck, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly agitated, and is finally overwhelmed by terror when the trembling ground beneath him appears to be completely hollow. A double musical articulation blends subjective and objective poles of perception. The vocal lines and orchestra set up two separate worlds for the two characters; Andres retains the 6/8 lilt of his hunting song, whereas Wozzeck cuts across this in 3/4.Footnote ¹⁰³ The orchestral elaborations of their parts further separate them. The spectator may easily reconcile this auditory separation with the separation of the two characters on stage. Their differentiated voices and matching orchestral accompaniments, like facial close-ups in cinema, articulate two distinct individuals. Simultaneously, however, the auditor hears Andres through the distorting prism of Wozzeck's perception. Not only is the melody itself alternately stretched and contracted, but the orchestral addition also gives the impression of a spectral sonic flare that intensifies towards the climax.

If, as is often assumed, Schoenberg achieved in Erwartung aurally what Kandinsky was attempting visually in painting, namely to allow the unconscious ‘spirit’ or subject to express itself directly on the canvas, then Berg's double musical articulation is better understood by comparison with Kandinsky's Blauer Reiter colleague Paul Klee.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Klee's aim was to generate a Zwischenwelt between what he perceived outside in the object and what he perceived in his subjective response.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Instead of a window onto the external world, his canvas was a ‘strange plane’ where lines did not behave according to ‘the laws of good form’ but instead according to the ‘power’ the world ‘exerts on the beholder's eye and body’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ What the spectator sees, then, is neither the subjective nor objective response to the stimuli – two artificial poles of consciousness – but the intensities on the (sensing) body that give rise to both.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In Erwartung, the voice-orchestra complex maintains a coherent self-identity as it lurches from one mood to another according to the internal dictates of the unnamed woman, which are undifferentiated from the artistic and spiritual dictates of the composer. In Wozzeck, by contrast, the sonic component of the experience turns the stage into a ‘strange plane’ where the objective phenomenon of Andres's singing and Wozzeck's subjective apprehension allow the auditor to hear the sonic intensities impinging on Wozzeck's sensorium.

In this double sonic articulation, which I call schizophonia, the point of perception splits, alerting the auditor that the (subjectless/objectless) open body in an environment is actually a localised region of order in a larger flow of material – a wave in an ocean, to stick with Büchner's metaphor.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The schizophonic music leads the spectator to intuit that Wozzeck is a passive observer of the contingency of the present: not only is his environment beyond his control, but even his own thoughts are estranged from him, unconnected to any sense of volitional ‘I’-ness that his voice might represent.

Schoenberg's music presents neurosis as the characteristic psychological pathology of the modern. Since, it is composed by blindly following the spirit, which in turn is in touch with nature, it also provides a potential cure: if the listener can learn to switch off logic, she can locate and tie together the fragmented musical surface and thereby re-establish her connection with nature as well as her own integrity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For Büchner, such a treatment can never work: however far inward one goes, the subject is always conditioned by existing social relations. Therefore any attempt to heal oneself or one's society based on an ‘I’ is bound to channel any creative potential into repetition of the existing order. In these terms, the metaphysical underpinning of Erwartung can be characterised as a philosophy of ‘impotential’. Büchner's Woyzeck is psychotic rather than neurotic. Schizophrenia (or an artistic presentation thereof) makes perceptible the usually imperceptible impersonal forces that precede subject formation and which are so potentially disruptive that they must be pathologised and contained before they can upset the social order.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While Woyzeck himself clearly does need treatment and is not benefiting from his psychosis, the aim of Büchner's art is nevertheless to encourage more psychotic behaviour in his audience. Schizophrenics such as J.C. Woyzeck could not provide the hoped-for revolutionary thought, but, rationed carefully, schizophrenia does offer the means for transgressive, unpredictable, creative thought to enter from below.

That, of course, is exactly why Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use another of Büchner's descriptions of schizophrenia, Lenz's stroll in the countryside, at the very opening of Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism. For Deleuze and Guattari, Lenz provides the archetypal example of art that goes beyond the normal romantic encounter with a terrifying and beautiful nature and instead makes perceptible the non-organic, impersonal process of Life itself. Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the schizophrenic's experience of the body: the body as pure intensity and pure sensation is felt underneath the perceptual hallucinations and the delirium of thought – Lenz is not a subject perceiving and thinking about external objects, but instead feels his body connected with them to such an extent that he is fully open to them and they to him, and he becomes them as they become him. The schizophrenic subject is just a residuum that sits on the periphery while the schizoid process of ‘machinic’ connection takes place. The specific passage of Lenz that Deleuze and Guattari single out is remarkably similar to the scene in Woyzeck/Wozzeck with Andres, even though Woyzeck's experience is characterised by terror and Lenz's by ecstasy.Footnote ¹¹¹ For Lenz, they write,

In this state of mind, the schizophrenic feels the surging power of the wave through the body, and the reader is able to see that what she usually takes to be her true self is indeed nothing but froth, the contingent result of the churning of an ocean of substance. While the subject is decentred, continually relocating and reproducing itself every time a different aspect of nature is encountered, the body plugs itself into and channels these zones of vitality or intensity, being affected by them and in turn affecting them.

In the opera, Wozzeck's subjectivity, as it finds expression in language, is sidelined, reduced to a mere witness. His experiences of nature, the spectral opening chords, the head rolling down the bank that turns into a hedgehog, Andre's song, the hollowness of the earth are all beneath, alongside, adjacent to the self – the perceiving self, or the linguistic self. The result is the breakdown of dichotomies: subject and object, inside and outside, self and non-self, man and nature, body and environment. The self-contained, organised, extensive body, with a particular mass, volume and location in space, and its particular forms and functions remains – just – but it gives way to an intensive body of vast untapped, unknowable potential (the ‘body without organs’) that opens out onto an ecology of other such bodies, ultimately a vast flow kept in motion by the synthetic forces of Life.Footnote ¹¹³ Schizophrenia makes this alternate point of view possible: production occurs as the body forms assemblages with other elements; subjectivity, as a shimmering after-effect, carried along for the ride, passes through zones of becoming. Thus the schizophonia in Act I scene 2 reveals the true source of creativity in nature: not the subject, the self, or the (ordinary) body (with organs), all of which capture and imprison life, but the non-organic virtual power of nature – nothing less than Büchner's Urgesetz.

In Act I scene 4 with the Doctor, in which Wozzeck recalls his experiences of nature, Berg's music no longer expels the subject to the margins, but instead articulates the process of subject formation. It thereby reveals how the subject, constituted through the formation of rational thought and ultimately resulting in linguistic utterance, is a secondary involution of the body, a by-product of the ‘nonorganic and intensive vitality that traverses the organism’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The score achieves this by forcing non-coincident temporalities together. While Wozzeck sputters incoherently, attempting to put into words what he witnessed in the field with Andres, the orchestra supplies atmospheric, timbral and harmonic echoes of the nature music from earlier. (The trombones in bars 532–4 recall those of bars 225–56; and the nature chords, first heard in bars 201ff., recur in bars 546–9.) Wozzeck is stymied by his own inability to express in language the content of his sensual experience.

According to the layout in Büchner's fragment, the Doctor is interjecting and hurrying Wozzeck along as he struggles to find the right words. Berg, however, superimposes the Doctor's lines onto Wozzeck's continuing speech, and uses several devices to separate both voices out into their own worlds – another variety of schizophonia. They both sit at opposite ends of the baritone range, with the Doctor at the bottom shadowed below by the tuba, and Wozzeck at the top accompanied above by a blurred elaboration of his line in winds and solo violin. Wozzeck has a free recitative style where the stresses fall at different places in the 6/8 bar, often on the third and sixth quavers. The Doctor cuts across this in more of a 3/4 rhythm. The most remarkable thing is that the Doctor's lines are much slower than Wozzeck's, particularly when he says ‘Was? Wenn die Natur?’ in order hurry Wozzeck up, even though when one imagines the conversation from the text alone, he would speak faster.

One of the key points about the expressivist subject, particularly in the German tradition begun by Herder, is that it must find its completion in language: the subject is not simply transcribing its feelings when speaking but actually becoming the subject in the process of speaking.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Nietzsche famously argued that Herder's expression of the subject in language was not a completion at all but rather all there was. According to Nietzsche, the self-identical subject owes its existence to the ‘seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it)’. The error is that language ‘construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency’, so that the ‘driving, willing, effecting’ that are the expression of ‘desire’ are attributed to a cause, the driving, willing, effecting ‘subject’. This fictional entity doubles the deed: ‘there is no “being” behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; “the doer” is invented as an afterthought, – the doing is everything’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The human being is only what it does; there is no free agent inside that may be held accountable for those actions.Footnote ¹¹⁸

In the moments where Wozzeck struggles to force bodily feeling into the narrow constraints of language so that he might enter the symbolic order, his linguistic ‘I’, the illusory subject, does not materialise. It is in the moments between the immediacy of experience and its expression in language, Giorgio Agamben argues, that our sense of ourselves emerges. Since speech necessarily happens after thought, language forces us apart from ourselves and renders us ‘impotent spectators of ourselves’. The instant between thought and word is ‘the time that we ourselves are … the only time we have’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ For Wozzeck, when the process of linguistic expression is arrested, this ordinarily fleeting sensation of subject formation is prolonged – as the slowing down of his own time indicates – making the audience aware of Wozzeck as a subject in a more acute manner than usual. His inability to take his place as a nominally free agent makes apparent that ‘he’ is nothing but impotent awareness trapped inside a chunk of the universe's physical matter.

It was not only the establishment that benefited from the fiction of agency, Nietzsche maintained; ‘oppressed, downtrodden, outraged’ people, people such as Wozzeck,‘[needed] to believe in a neutral independent “subject”’.Footnote ¹²⁰ This was because ‘the subject (or … the soul) … makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and the oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being such-and-such as a merit’.Footnote ¹²¹ Individuation gives a sense of value to those who are prevented by the strong from discharging their will.Footnote ¹²² It is this false valuation that Johnson has made in the lyrical moments of the opera. He argues that Berg ‘constructs subjectivity not simply as the victim of social conditions but as a force of resistance to them’ and that subjectivity is therefore ‘the strongest and most profound political gesture of Berg's operas’.Footnote ¹²³ However, the moments of lyricism do not demonstrate the ‘freedom and autonomy’ that Johnson claims, but rather what Nietzsche calls the ‘counterfeit and self-deception of impotence’, ‘as if the weakness of the weak – that is to say, their essence, their effects, their sole ineluctable, irremovable reality – were a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act’.Footnote ¹²⁴ In Wozzeck's lyricism – in his quasi-aria ‘Wir arme Leut!’, Johnson's example – the subject does not actively mount resistance to oppression but is a passive symptom of it.

Wozzeck's subjectivity as perception through time certainly suffers, a suffering most audience members cannot help pitying. But it is not Wozzeck's subjectivity, and hence the audience member's own trapped subjectivity, that supplies the force of resistance against their oppressive political conditions – the subject, the human, is a reaction characterised by weakness; it is what must be overcome. The real potential for resistance comes from the ordinarily imperceptible dissociated body of intensities rendered audible by the schizophonic presentation of Wozzeck's psychosis. It is this wellspring of life bubbling away beneath/below/alongside the pitiable subject that is the real key to social change.

Energy and Entropy

Since the guilt/innocence of J.C. Woyzeck rested, so to speak, on a knife edge, Büchner hoped that his case might shed some light on the nature of agency. If the volitional and hence juridically responsible subject is indeed a fiction, then what is guilt? The ‘primal law’ or ‘law of beauty’ that Büchner thought was exhibited by all living things ties him to the romantische Naturphilosophie of Goethe, Fichte and Schelling.Footnote ¹²⁵ In what can be broadly characterised as an ‘organicist’ mode, these thinkers argued that all matter, living or not, was an expression of one unified primal energy.Footnote ¹²⁶ Evolution, for Büchner, might not have been teleological in the sense that the forms of life that actually occurred were inevitable, but there was a guiding principle to its unfolding in which growth and decay both had their part to play. Guilt for Büchner, then, is the gulf between the beauty of the primordial law and the failure of human effort (or indeed nature in any guise) to ever fully realise it. In theological terms, it is equivalent to Augustine's original sin: humans can never meet the infinite demand placed on them by their perfect creator and so the stain of guilt is a permanent condition. Büchner thus subscribed to an aesthetic of guilt: the Law of Beauty can only be witnessed in the corruption of actual life, but if the artist can successfully capture the guilt in a situation, then the auditor can more readily perceive the ideal that has been corrupted.

However prominently Christian themes feature in Büchner's aesthetics, at the moment Woyzeck begins to emulate the Captain's moral and the Doctor's scientific intransigence with his own dogmatic interpretation of Christian law, he loses touch with the Life-enhancing forces of nature. Once he has accepted that Marie has committed ‘[eine] Sünde, so dick und so breit – es stinkt, dass man die Engelchen zum Himmel hinaus räuchern’ (‘a sin so thick and fat – it stinks enough to smoke the angels out of heaven’), infinite potential open encounters with Marie are reduced to one Life-negating course of action, to seek what appears to be divinely sanctioned retributive justice. And so J.C. Clarus was right: J.C. Woyzeck was at his most guilty at the precise moment he wielded the knife, just as Clarus himself was guilty when he delivered the report that condemned J.C. Woyzeck. Guilt becomes the limiting of infinite potential to one single decision within a pre-existing framework; it recruits active, productive forces to strengthen reactive negative forces.

As we saw, Berg's libretto and music serve to remove Woyzeck's and Marie's guilt. My purpose in this final section is to show that Berg's musical treatment of the murder reattaches inescapable guilt to Wozzeck, albeit in a different and unexpected way. In order to do this, it is first necessary to make a new interpretation of a familiar aspect of Berg's compositional style. There are various types of non-movement in the music of Wozzeck – cycles, palindromes and stasis – that have been the subject of much hermeneutic debate.Footnote ¹²⁷ Scholars have tended to see them as tokens of ‘fatalism’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Unlike in Lulu, genuine palindromes are thin on the ground in Wozzeck.Footnote ¹²⁹ When they do occur – as in the tiny one-word Variation 7 of Act I scene 4 – they signify despair: events happen and then they are immediately swallowed up again by the continuum. However, in the three scenes set outside the town in the countryside – scene 2 of Act II, and scenes 2 and 4 of Act III – Berg uses some form of musical stasis to represent the equilibrium of nature against which snippets of palindrome-like material unfold. While they do not exhibit a strict reversal of time-values and pitches, they do possess the aural quality of sound that doubles back on itself – something not always evident in genuine palindromes. It is in the negotiation between motion and non-motion in such passages that a less fatalistic strand of the opera resides.

The key to teasing out this subtle optimism is to reassess the source of the static–circular–reflective music. Commentators have identified as sources for Berg's fixation with this aesthetic Swedenborg's ideas as reflected through Balzac's Séraphîta (1834), the quasi-scientific number cycles in theosophy, Nietzsche's ‘Eternal Recurrence’, Bergson's questioning of the nature of objective time, and the numerous experimental psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century who were investigating the subjective experience of time.Footnote ¹³⁰ Others have suggested that a number of recent inventions had resulted in an openness to the reversibility of time: Edison's lightbulb (1879), through which night could be experienced as day, and the cinema, where it is possible to stop or reverse time at will.Footnote ¹³¹ The only scientific influence mooted is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905), which, however, concerns relative time and has nothing to do with cyclical time.Footnote ¹³²

The most concentrated scientific expression of the sort of circularity Berg was using in Wozzeck, I propose, can be found in Vienna University physicist Ludwig Boltzmann's equation for entropy: S = k log W (1871).Footnote ¹³³ The word ‘entropy’ (Entropie = Greek en + tropē, transformation) was deliberately coined to sound like ‘energy’ (Energie) and is the amount of useless energy in a system – the energy that is unavailable to do work and therefore a measure of the disorder of that system.Footnote ¹³⁴ Boltzmann's equation is a mathematical description of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the amount of entropy in a closed system increases over time; or, the amount of disorder increases over time; or, any system tends towards equilibrium. It was controversial for two reasons. First, it is stochastic at a time when physics was supposed to supply absolute descriptions. Second, and more importantly for our purposes, it has no variable for time. It does not actually describe the classical statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all; instead, it says that a higher entropy state is more likely to occur than a low entropy state and so, moving forward or backward in time, the amount of disorder will increase.Footnote ¹³⁵ Given a large enough system such as the universe and the stability of some high-order configurations, it is inevitable that local spots of order will arise. While, on a large scale, the universe is permanently and irretrievably heading towards a state of undifferentiated equilibrium, on multiple smaller scales order is continually arising out of chaos and then decaying back to a state of chaos again – a picture captured perfectly by Berg's symmetrical structures.Footnote ¹³⁶ So although the stasis-movement trope is used to articulate the psychological curve of the nature scenes in Wozzeck, it is also expressing what had by this time been elevated to a generally held metaphysical assumption about the universe; namely, that nature was not only beneficent and fecund, but also radically hostile to life.

Büchner's own view of nature grew out of a deep understanding of the physics of entropy. Entropy was not named as such until 1854, but had been understood since at least Leibiniz in the seventeenth century. Because it is enmeshed within the nature it seeks to understand, human embodied perception can only conceptualise notions such as time and energy through dialectic (and necessarily contradictory) frameworks – such as man–nature, subject–object, past–future.Footnote ¹³⁷ Thus the apparent ability to control nature by exploiting time and energy seems to be matched by the countervailing force of entropy, which continually impedes progress. The increasing entropy of a system appears to enact a restoration in which nature takes back the time (or energy or ‘action’) that has been appropriated; in other words, there is a debt, or guilt, that the universe demands is repaid.Footnote ¹³⁸ It appears to do so, that is, from the anthropocentric view of struggle with nature: the chronological symmetry of Boltzmann's equation makes explicit the fact that, as far as the universe is concerned, past, present and future are indistinguishable. Berg described the musical form of Act III scene 2, in which Wozzeck slits Marie's throat, as an ‘Invention on One Note’.Footnote ¹³⁹ The one note, the b, which forms one half of the dyadic key centre of the opera, b–f, is called on to do a lot of work here.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It captures the intersubjective terror between Wozzeck and Marie as well as the continual presence of the knife in Wozzeck's mind. In the interlude that follows the scene, an increasingly intense tutti-sustained b sonically translates the sensation of a knife boring through flesh. Most pertinently here, it presents the stillness or repose of the surrounding nature, particularly of the evening air, the surface of the pond, and the moonlight. Berg's use of stasis in all three scenes set in the countryside – this scene, as well as the scene collecting sticks with Andres and Act III scene 4 in which Wozzeck returns to the scene of the crime – draws on a long tradition of depicting nature in music as unchanging.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But there is, I am suggesting, a new quality here corresponding to entropy, brought about particularly by the manner Berg deploys his quasi-symmetric structures.

Hardly altering Franzos's text at all, Berg follows Büchner's psychologically astute pacing.Footnote ¹⁴² Moments of starkly intensifying dread alternate with stretches of repose tinged with pathos. Musically, the subtly graded suspense arises from distorting, stretching and relaxing the sonic fabric against the static pedal point b. Wozzeck having dragged her to a clearing by a lake, Marie senses something is very wrong and is eager to leave. We intuit her foreboding through the low, growling B₁ and B₂ notes in the trombone, bass clarinet and contrabassoon (bars 73–80). The scene is set with a distorted pastoral trope in high e♭ clarinet (bars 74), horns and flutes (bars 75–6), which resembles the main theme from the finale of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.

The tension then eases as Wozzeck appears to want to discuss the state of their relationship; the b, sustained in high tremolando strings, then drifts out of aural consciousness (bars 86–91). The heavenly upward sweep in the harps and celeste leading into this passage of repose prepares the listener to be transported into another world (bar 85). And the music that follows can be thought of as Wozzeck's reply to Marie's transcendent F minor variation in the previous scene (bars 33–9). This self-contained affective world unfurls from the b, attempting to move away from it but always feeling its pull as if connected by a rubber cord. After bidding the jittery Marie sit back down, Wozzeck laments the lack of affection between them. ‘Was Du für süße Lippen hast, Marie! Den Himmel gäb’ ich drum und die Seligkeit, wenn ich Dich noch oft so küssen dürft!’ (‘Your lips are so sweet, Marie! I'd give up eternal salvation if I could just carry on kissing you like this!’) The line is accompanied by a trio of solo violas that uncloak softly from the void, swell into a touching climax (bar 89 on ‘Himmel’) and then fade out again. In the lead-up to the climax, six solo wind instruments enter one by one and then drop out again in a similar fashion following it (bars 88–9). Each part (the wind parts double the three viola parts) either hovers around the b or moves back and forth between two b notes an octave apart. In an atonal context where appropriately scored tonal music sounds otherworldly, an almost-but-not-quite transcendent quality is achieved by almost-but-not-quite-tonal harmony. Most of the chords, especially in the first few bars, are tonal – major and diminished triads in particular proliferate – but their ordering ensures that no key is fully established. And, although the contrapuntal lines here do contain the occasional note b, there are no E, G, B major, e, g♯ or b minor chords in the whole passage – so that the pedal, although constantly sounding, never becomes ensconced in any particular tonality. The music never attains the otherworldliness heard in Marie's F minor variation that the celestial lead-in encourages the spectator to expect.

In the Pauline–Augustinian Christian tradition, God's grace – undeserved love – is required to pay the individual's debt so they may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Berg reserves single-key, triadic tonality – the antithesis of the horizontal and vertical symmetries of the nature music – for just such fleeting moments of unconditional love when expressed by his human characters: the C major chord in Act II scene 1 when Wozzeck drops off the money earned out of love for his family; Marie's love for her child expressed in the heartrending fifth variation of Act III scene 1. Both of these scenes highlight Marie's guilt. The near miss of the three violas in their attempt to achieve tonality marks Wozzeck's inability to muster up enough love to forgive her. She is irredeemable in his eyes. However, the identification of the b with nature means that nature itself refuses to redeem Marie. The negative force of entropy, a fundamental component of Life, means that she can never repay her debt.

This is reinforced by the second point of repose in the scene. First, the false calm is ended when Wozzeck declares ‘Aber ich darf nicht!’ (‘But I can't [carry on kissing you]!’) The ‘etwas hastig’ (‘somewhat hurried’) entry of the three horns (bar 91) turns the dread of the opening into terror, which is then intensified by the clarinet (bar 91), trumpet (bar 91), flute (bar 92) flutter-tonguing on the b (the flute b¹) and the xylophone's dissonant c¹ (bars 92–3) all emblematic of Marie's shivering. Wozzeck once again attempts to soothe Marie when she attributes her shaking to the evening dew: ‘Dich wird beim Morgentau nicht frieren’ (‘You won't freeze in the morning dew’). The moment of complete stillness that follows is not one of psychological calm, but the most terrifying in the whole opera. It follows Wozzeck's uttering ‘nix’ (‘nothing’), which has two meanings. Most obviously, it is simply a reply to Marie's question ‘Was sagst Du da?’ (‘What did you say?’) But Wozzeck is also saying to himself that Marie will not feel the cold tomorrow because she will not feel anything at all. The nothingness is marked ‘langes Schweigen’ in the score – this is not a pause in the music but actual silence. Wozzeck's ‘nothing’ means the absence of feeling, activity and thus of life. The way this nothingness is approached is important too: Wozzeck's ‘nix’ is on a B – now the only b, but he whispers the word, and it emerges out of the sound of the bass clarinet (the vocal line is marked ‘die Bkl. fortsetzend’, ‘continue the bass clarinet [b that has an empty tie over the bar line]’).Footnote ¹⁴³ The b is thus shown to be an aural stand-in for nothingness, tying it explicitly to the idea of not-life or entropy.

The seething intensity of the silence is dissipated through the murder. That Marie's life flashes before her ears in leitmotivic form is well known – it is like a telescoped version of Siegfried's funeral march. The build-up (bars 101–2), stabbing (bar 103) and death (bars 105–6) are driven forward by the pounding B in the timpani. The regularity of the drum sets up a point of reference against which the jumble of the action sounds all the more disturbing. As Marie sinks to her death and the tension quickly subsides, there is a curious disruption of the flow of time. Berg marks an accelerando followed by a ritardando through bars 105–6, but due to the motif in winds and trombones only lasting three semiquavers against the crotchet timpani blows, the tempo appears to be slowing down and speeding up at the same time. This sense of time simultaneously contracting and dilating is heightened by the syncopated ‘ach Marie!’ motif in the strings. In this third example of schizophonia, we hear time as perspectival, slipping away from Marie as it continues for Wozzeck or the spectator.

But the cruel indifference of nature that pervades the scene is given its most poignant musical expression when Marie dies. The interval of a fifth that offers a sort of resolution turns out to be false as it too dissolves back into the b, which continues to sound. Berg has written ‘quasi Tempo I’, perhaps acknowledging that nature remains in its primal state of chaos, wholly unchanged by what has just occurred. It is at this moment of non-resolution that Wozzeck's permanent guilt becomes most painfully clear. Because life is a highly complex and ordered state, the entropic forces of nature are radically inimical to it, continually trying to claw life back into the indeterminate nothingness from which it came. Wozzeck's living presence is shown – in those moments after Marie has expired – to be a temporary aberration, energy or time stolen from the void and constitutive of an existential debt that can never be repaid.

The scene identifies musical stasis, the standard way of signifying nature, with equilibrium, the undifferentiated mass of stuff in the universe, or nothingness/not-life. The idea of musical motion emerging and then returning to stasis can be equated with the chance emergence of order and its entropic tendency to return to the more stable state of disorder.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Physical laws only emerge statistically: events are not predictable at all, as the Newtonian physics of Büchner's day held, but, on the understanding of Boltzmann and subsequent twentieth-century science, can at any moment unfold in an infinite number of ways.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Berg might have removed Büchner's parody of Newtonian and higher-level biological determinism from the play, but he replaced it with the non-deterministic mechanism that enables the creative forces of life to exceed the restraints of classical mechanics; in other words, Berg has achieved musically the very philosophy that Büchner's twin satire was originally attempting to provoke.

* * *

I have traced how two contradictory mythologies of nature jostle against one another in Berg's Wozzeck. The first, inherited from German romanticism, is a transcendent realm, closed off from ordinary perception, in which all apparent differences disappear, and with them conflict and suffering. An artist who believes in this version of nature will want to create art that offers the individual glimpses of this fundamental unity, thus helping to reintegrate and hence heal their fragmented modern selves. Berg's choices about which scenes to cut, as well as where to make other textual cuts, interpolations and combinations, seem to have been guided by a belief in just this kind of beneficent nature, as evidenced by his epistolary references to ‘Life!’. Envisioning Wozzeck's crimes as the result of a corrupt social organisation that trapped him and the other characters in a cycle of poverty and despair, Berg wrote music that absolved Wozzeck of any guilt and elicited the audience's pity. The result is that the opera resonates strongly with Adorno's ‘philosophy of impotential’: although the audience is bound to feel deep compassion for the characters, they are also consoled that there is little that can be done to change the oppressive system that keeps them there.

The second version of nature in Wozzeck is closer to the one Büchner had in mind when writing Woyzeck. Rather than splitting nature into its unified essence, visible to humans only in religious or aesthetic moments, and its ordinary disjointed appearance, Büchner saw nature in purely immanent terms as comprising active forces (positive energy leading to life, creativity, the new) and reactive forces (negative entropy leading to decay, disease, death). Büchner's rejection of a transcendent nature went hand in hand with the rejection of the liberal humanist understanding of social and political progress: neither individual humans nor groups of humans are the source of the active forces that are manifest in society, but only conduits for them. The function of art for Büchner was not to reintegrate the fragmented subject, but rather to maximise the discharge of active forces in the present by demonstrating that belief in a subject only serves to strengthen the negative reactive forces.

In his adaptation of the play, Berg dismantled (perhaps by accident) Büchner's meticulously fashioned attack on the humanist split between subject and object, which ought to have provoked the audience to imagine the mechanism through which such active forces could be released. On the other hand, against the anodyne ‘let it be’ that has dominated reception of the opera, there is also an overlooked strand that manages to recuperate something of Büchner's original vision. It achieves this primarily through musical schizophonia. Schizophonia first renders audible the pre-personal character of the intensities responsible for producing what seems – from our limited human point of view – like an animate force, a ‘viva vivans’, or ‘natura naturans’, that has at various times been mistaken for the creativity of God, Nature, the individual subject, or capital. It further shows that immanent schizoid flows might provide escape routes from the contemporary condition, if only they could be harnessed in a restrained (i.e., not an insane) manner. Second, another kind of schizophonia retrieves something of the original balance in the play by placing into dialectic tension the creative and destructive forces that constitute nature. Wozzeck's schizophrenia is not something to be pitied, but rather something that makes sensible – audible in the opera – the source of creativity immanent in nature. The creative force is always ready to be harnessed by forging open-ended bodily connections with as many other bodies as possible, and by being prepared for unexpected, shocking results that exceed the linguistic concepts one has at one's disposal.

The result is never going to be a future utopia of the kind dreamt of by Wagner, Schoenberg and Adorno. Instead it is a way of life in the present that accepts the forces of decay as an inevitable part of life, and therefore seeks to maximise the operation of the active forces wherever possible. As Nietzsche explains, and Wozzeck makes manifest, such a goal is so difficult to achieve it might as well be utopian: ‘it is still a long road … to that superfluity of formative, curative, moulding and restorative forces … which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶