With Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck", the Staatstheater Braunschweig is presenting a musical masterpiece of modernism that has lost none of its impact and social relevance 100 years after its premiere.
In a jaded, exploitative society characterized by clear hierarchies, the soldier Wozzeck is a powerless outsider: living in the simplest and most precarious of circumstances, he is at the very bottom of the social structure. Someone like him has "only one corner of the world": His love for Marie and their illegitimate child. Suppressed by his captain and abused by a doctor for inhumane experiments, he is increasingly plagued by delusions. When Marie then begins an affair with the drum major, Wozzeck loses his last foothold. The hopelessness of his existence finally drives him to commit an act of violence.
At the premiere of his adaptation of Georg Büchner's fragment 100 years ago, on December 14, 1925, Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" was still met with incomprehension. Today, his multi-faceted score is considered a milestone of modernism. In it, he not only combines different styles and forms from the Baroque to late Romanticism and atonality, but also uses all the possibilities of the voice, from spoken words and rhythmic speech to arioso singing, creating a musically expressive drama of the soul that - like the central themes of the plot - has lost none of its intensity to this day.
Premiere October 12, 2025
Further performances: October 16 and 26, November 9, 21 and 29, 2025, January 17 and 25, 2026
