Berg’s Wozzeck by Patricia Hall (review)

‘Many sketches by atonal composers—even Schoenberg and Webern—are disappointing in the lack of insight they give into compositional process’, writes Patricia Hall in the concluding chapter of her volume. ‘This is partially due to the very nature of atonality, which, as a more open musical system, often does not require the complex precompositional procedures of a difficult twelve-tone passage’ (p. 138). However, the complications involved in adapting Büchner’s Wozzeck (orWoyzeck) text for operatic treatment were so great that Berg was already making sketches and analyses in his copies of the printed editions, two of which are included in the catalogue of sketches for Wozzeck that forms the backbone of Professor Hall’s book. ‘These are often followed by five to six distinct compositional stages before Berg had achieved something resembling the finished passage’ (p. 139).

This study of Berg’s sketches for Wozzeck draws on further primary source material to flesh out the picture of the creation of the opera. ‘To give a truer picture of the slow and at times interrupted creation of this masterwork,’ says Hall, ‘one must consult Berg’s correspondence, diaries, calendars, notebooks, his personal library, preceding and following works’ (p. 5). Even so, it must be acknowledged that the book that would provide a truly comprehensive account of the composition of Wozzeck as seen through the sketches would need to be several times the length of the present one, which runs to little over 200 pages—considerably less than that if the appendix is not taken into account. This appendix, however, which accounts for almost a quarter of the volume, is the very feature that gives this study a value out of all proportion to its length, since it consists of a detailed catalogue of the sketches with a link to an accompanying database of full-colour scans of all of them. Unlike David Fanning’s inventory of the sketches, published more than twenty years ago (David Fanning, ‘Berg’s Sketches for Wozzeck: A Commentary and Inventory’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 112 (1986–7), 280–322), which, apart from the main collection in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, covered only the sketches in the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, Hall’s catalogue extends to all the known extant sketch sources in all institutions. It also lists, and provides links to, all the individual pages of the Particell, which, although not strictly a sketch, is an invaluable reference tool. Thus it is open to serious students to use Professor Hall’s text and descriptions as the starting point for further investigations of their own.

Each of the individual leaves or pages in the catalogue is assigned a catalogue number that links it to the database. In the course of the main text, the captions to facsimiles quote both manuscript numbers and catalogue numbers. ‘Blank pages and sketches other than those for Wozzeck are indicated in the catalogue, but not reproduced’, writes Hall (p. 142), but this is not entirely true. Figures 1.7, 1.8, and 1.10, which are facsimiles of sketches for the third of the Op. 6 Orchestral Pieces, and Figure 2.5, containing notes relating to Berg’s military duties, are in fact to be found in the database, though of course they have no catalogue number since they are not directly related to Wozzeck. On the other hand, Figures 2.1 and 2.2 have been given catalogue numbers in error and do not appear on the database.

The main body of the book combines biographical and sketch evidence to establish a chronology for the composition of the opera. After an initial chapter discussing how the sketches for the second of the Altenberg Lieder and the third of the Orchestral Pieces Op. 6 ‘reveal the compositional strategies by which Berg consciously overcame the complexities of orchestration and large-scale form’ (p. 8) and anticipate similar procedures in the Wozzeck sketches, there...