Autograph musical quotation from Wozzeck. Signed in full
Two measures (numbers 112-113) in bass clef from Act II of the composer's opera Wozzeck, with text sung by Wozzeck ("Nichts als Arbeit unter der Sonne") from near the beginning of Act II, scene 1. Dated "30.3.30" (30 March 1930) and identified ("Wozzeck II/1") in Berg's hand. Notated in brown ink on a single stave. With inscription signed in full by Austrian operatic baritone Hans Duhan (1890-1971) dated Wien, März 1931 to verso. On an album leaf 155 x 233 mm.
Slightly browned and foxed, a bit heavier at margins, left edge very slightly ragged.
Wozzeck, an opera in three acts to a libretto by the composer after Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, was first performed in Berlin at the Staatsoper on 14 December 1925.
"Wozzeck is a work of immense structural complexity in which musical devices and dramatic constructs are tightly integrated. Its composition marked the culmination of the first phase of Berg’s development. ... In its use of atonality, whole-tone writing and other devices alongside passages of Mahlerian diatonicism, as well as in the vocal writing (which moves between speech, parlando, Sprechgesang and arioso), Wozzeck represents the most substantial achievement of Schoenberg and his followers in their pre-serial years." Andrew Clements in Grove Music Online
"Along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern in the years before and immediately after World War I, [Berg] moved away from tonality to write free atonal and then 12-note music. At once a modernist and a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist, he produced one of the richest bodies of music in the 20th century, and in opera, especially, he had few equals." Douglas Jarman in Grove Music Online.
Item #39490
Price: $7,500.00 other currencies