Wozzeck

Wozzeck – a good man, who just wants to live his life. But the world around him strikes him down. It preys on his thoughts and triggers horrible anxieties in his soul. He struggles for words to explain himself, until his own utterance falls apart. Not even the woman he loves can understand him and becomes more and more alienated from him. Driven by the struggle to exist and unspeakable fear, pursued by the violence of his perverse fellow humans who feast on his terror, this Wozzeck hustles through life like a hunted animal until he can no longer endure the pressure and destroys his beloved and himself.

In the year of its creation, 1836, Georg Büchner’s drama, already pointed the way to the modern era with its terse, analytically sharp and ironic language. Some 80 years after it had come to be, on the eve of the First World War. Alban Berg discovered the fragment, which was all that remained of the play. Struck by the quintessential catastrophe of the “Wozzeck affair”, he created a score unique in the annals of 20th century music theatre to lament the loss of fallen mankind and a world on the brink of decay.

Stage director Andreas Kriegenburg tells of how life can turn into a horrifying nightmare from which there is no awakening, and in which the dreamer himself finally becomes a monster.

In German.