Product Description
On 5 May 1914, Alban Berg attended the first production of an unfinished play by the German playwright Georg Büchner. With many short scenes, abrupt and sometimes brutal language, its stark, if not haunting, realism, depicted the everyday lives of the soldiers and people of a rural, German town. Berg was moved so much by the performance that he felt compelled to write music based upon it, despite still working on his Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6. So, between 1914 and 1922, adapting the libretto himself, he selected 15 fragments from the collection of 27 unordered scenes left by Büchner to form an opera of three acts with five scenes each. The result, one of the most important operas of the 20th century: Wozzeck.
It tells the story of Wozzeck, a tormented fusilier, and his common-law wife, Marie. Wozzeck is seeing troubling hallucinations, which he shares with Marie. She, cross by his lack of interest in their son, laments about their poverty. A military band passes by her window and she takes notice of the Drum Major, who salutes to her. Later, she accepts his advances, that leaves her riddled with guilt. When Wozzeck finds out, he confronts her. She does not deny the liaisons and threatens her. However, the Drum Major finds out and beats Wozzeck, humiliating him. Wozzeck and Marie take a walk by a pond in a forest when Wozzeck grabs her and stabs her, declaring that if he cannot have her, then no one can. A blood-red moon then rises above the horizon. Others notice the blood, so Wozzeck flees back to the pond to find the knife. However, his hallucinations means he believes the moon is telling the world about his crimes and he drowns in the pond.
A suite of pieces, Three Fragments from Wozzeck, was produced and premiered successfully, creating anticipation for the complete work. Premiering on 14 December 1925 with the Berlin Staatsoper, conducted by an anxious Erich Kleiber (promotion of any new music from the Second Viennese School of Music, spearheaded by Arnold Schoenberg, faced fierce opposition and he was concerned he may lose his job), it received rave reviews and ran for ten performances. The opera was soon taken on by other companies and orcherstras, arriving in the United States only 6 years later, conducted by Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Opera Company.
The writing of Wozzeck was disrupted by World War I, although Bergs time in the Austrian army, no doubt, helped him to ground the opera with a greater sense of reality, something he would have struggled with otherwise given his upper-middle class upbringing. His ability to mix the abstraction of his ideas, the appropriate handling of the subject matter, the complexity of his music, all whilst keeping aspects of the music familiar to anyone who lacked musical training helped make it a success. And the military march is an example of this.
This arrangement is for the UK-style brass band, with alternative parts for horns in F and bass-clef lower brass. A recording of the original composition can be found here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFaHnxvvB-c.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.