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Composer Berg's music was perplexing at first. It had all the dissonances to be expected of a pupil of modernistic Arnold Schönberg. There were no conventional harmonies, no set songs. Baritone Ivan Ivantzoff (Wozzeck) sometimes spoke, sometimes sang his lines. Soprano Anne Roselle (Marie, Wozzeck's mistress) had music so hideously difficult that it defied full, smooth tones. Robert Edmond Jones's simple, color-splashed sets had more general appeal: a ghoulish eye set in a screen for the doctor's examining office; the elongated shadow of a stack of guns for the soldier's barracks; a festoon of colored lights for a beer garden; a street in the town all angles and planes.
The two unisonal crescendoes which announced the murder announced also that Composer Berg had music worthy of the superb production. Wozzeck with his hands all blood staggering into a tavern where people were dancing to a tone-sick piano, Wozzeck going back for the knife, then wading into the water to wash him self, deeper, deeper until he drowned — for these scenes and for an earlier one, in which the conscience-ridden Marie reads passages on adultery from the New Testa ment, Composer Berg has written music which critics unanimously pronounce the most powerful in any opera for years. Like his leading character it is neither lofty nor noble but it effectively describes Wozzeck, like the Wozzeck in Georg Buchner's play (TIME, March 16), as any downtrodden wretch tortured beyond endurance. A per fect ending is the epilog in which Marie's little son hears the news from children in the street, goes on unconcernedly riding his hobby-horse.
* Present were Conductors Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Nikolai Sokoloff, Walter Damrosch, Artur Bodansky, Ernest Schelling, Composers Deems Taylor, George Gershwin, Arthur Shepherd, Aaron Copland, Violinist Efrem Zimbalist, Soprano Lucrezia Bori, General Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza of the Metropolitan Opera, French Ambassador Paul Claudel (librettist of Darius Milhaud's Christopher Columbus).