Woyzeck

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Music

The final adaptation includes music, both sung and instrumental, developed with my long-time musical theater writing collaborator, composer Brendan Padgett at Columbia University in New York City. The music takes its inspiration from impressionistic, classical works, such as Satie's Trois Gymnopedies, as well as classical-meets-jazz styles of musical theater, such as works by Marc Blizstein and Kurt Weil. In the style of Wagner, a contemporary of Büchner, each character has a recognizable leitmotif. The aim was not to create a traditional musical theater or opera version of Woyzeck. Instead, the aim was to use music to enhance the emotion of the piece and help communicate the story to the audience. The majority of the music is instrumental accompaniment to spoken scenes, with specific lines of text sung with the music to heighten their impact and encourage associations. Some sections of the piece are entirely sung-through.

Another element cut from the original play is the folk music. A major impetus to cut the folk music was that I have never heard it done well. There is of course Tom Waits' experimental rock music version and Alban Berg's atonal opera, so I do not mean to say that compelling musical versions of Woyzeck do not exist. I wanted to use music to draw the audience into the characters and make their stark, harsh personalities accessible. The music also helps to connect the audience to the abstract modern dance choreography. Instrumental reductions of the sung music is used in sound zones surrounding scenes that have no tangible interface or physical wienie to help draw audience members through the space. This method of enticing audience members to move through the space avoids creating any preferred pathways through the narrative. Musical theater is above all else a popular art form and remains today one of the most accessible. Alec Wilder writes in his book on the history of American popular song: "[Musical] theater songs are undoubtedly the finest examples of popular song writing" (451).

While some scholars find Woyzeck's inability to articulate a prime element of the play that must not be tainted, I feel that attitude, while conducive to literary criticism of the original script is not helpful for production. George Steiner is among this group of theorists regarding Woyzeck. Commenting on Alban Berg's opera Wozzek and the effect of making Woyzeck sing, Steiner writes: Woyzeck's powers of speech fall drastically short of the depth of his anguish. That is the crux of the play. [...] Alban Berg's operatic version of Woyzeck is superb, both as music and drama. But it distorts Büchner's principal device. The music makes Woyzeck eloquent; a cunning orchestration gives speech to his soul. In the play, that soul is nearly mute and it is the lameness of Woyzeck's words which conveys his suffering. (275-276) However, I must point out that Woyzeck is, after all, a play. One point of Büchner's intention upon which all scholars can surely agree is that his choice of form, a script of dialog, clearly signals he meant his work to be experienced as performance, not literature. A musical theater, rock, or pop melody, may well be the equivalent folk music of today.

While the world of Woyzeck is hard and unemotional and characters fail to communicate their feelings in dialog, talking past one another in short clipped phrases, the audience must not feel alienated to the point of losing access to the story. The music acts as a kind of emotional release for the characters which serves also to help invite the audience into the Woyzeck storyworld. It is a strange world, often not easily understood, despite its many similarities to our own. The melody of a musical theater song is however quite easily understood. As the audience experiments with narrative form the music should act as a thematic glue helping to hold the experience together.