Wozzeck

The tragic drama of an oppressed person from society’s lower classes: Wozzeck, a hardworking but penniless soldier, is increasingly losing control of his life and his mind. He is seized by increasingly violent psychotic episodes, until in a delusion, he stabs and kills his girlfriend Marie.

Wozzeck’s surroundings bear some of the blame for this: because he has a relationship out of wedlock and an illegitimate child, he is humiliated by his superior, abused by a doctor for medical experiments, and finally cheated on by Marie with the higher-ranking drum major. All this triggers the spiral of his delusions.

A real-life, early 19th-century criminal case, which for the first time in legal history raised the issue of an absence of criminal responsibility due to mental illness, inspired Georg Büchner to write his play. Left behind as a fragment in 1837 when Büchner, a revolutionary-minded writer, died prematurely, it was not staged until 1913.

Alban Berg found the subject of his atonal opera, the first ever of its kind, when he saw a performance of the play. He succeeded in creating a stirring, expressionistic score, which is precisely constructed on the one hand and on the other, unleashes an elementary force. Since its premiere at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in 1925, Wozzeck has been considered a milestone of modernity. Andrea Breth’s gripping production – a razor-sharp experiment to study the mechanics of evil, can now be seen for the first time on Unter den Linden.