Wozzeck

In 1821, the unemployed wigmaker Johann Christian Woyzeck stabs his sweetheart to death in Leipzig. The trial against him drags on for years until, after his sanity has been examined twice, all appeals for clemency are rejected and Woyzeck is sentenced to death. Alban Berg saw Georg Büchner's dramatization of this case at the Vienna Kammerspiele in 1914. In the face of the outbreak of the World War I, the signs of human denaturation, which Berg addresses in his opera without turning them into blatant social criticism, became more evident.