Berg's Wozzeck

Although Berg decided immediately after seeing Bi??chner's play Woyzeck in May 1914 to set it to music, he did not complete his opera until 1922, with the Berlin premiere taking place in 1925. Berg's Wozzeck traces the composer's slow but determined progress. Using compositional sketches, diaries, notebooks and other archival material, author Patricia Hall reveals the challenges Berg faced--from his induction as a soldier in World War I, to the hyperinflation of the twenties. In addition to the precise chronology of the opera, the sketches show how Berg derived large-scale form from the Bi??chner text, and how his compositional style evolved during the nine years in which he composed the opera. A comprehensive visual database on the book's companion website of the extant sketches from seven archives in the United States, Germany and Austria allows the reader to examine, for the first time, Berg's sketches in high resolution color scans.

Patricia Hall is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include A View of Berg's 'Lulu' Through the Autograph Sources (1996, winner of the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award), and A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches (2004, co-edited with Friedemann Sallis). She is the editor and founder of the electronic journal Music and Politics.