Causa Wozzeck 1926.

A great deal has already been written about the Prague premiere of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck at the Czech National Theatre in 1926. Organised disturbances at the third night of the opera on the 16th of November meant that the performance could not be finished and led to an official ban on further performances. The scandal provoked counter-protests by writers, artists and musicians in Prague, and the unfinished performance became a warning example in later debate on restrictions of freedom of artistic expression. The whole episode is very well documented in the literature, but hither-to attention has centred mainly on the immediate events surrounding the premiere in November, and these are treated as a kind of unique and unprecedented explosion resisting easy explanations. The affair around Wozzek was not, however, the first theatrical storm to involve street disturbances and demonstrations. Prague's public life, divided by permanent nationalist tension and dissension into separate Czech and German camps that were nonetheless closely related through individual relationships between artists, was a fertile seedbed for conflict that could all too easily erupt over opera and theatre.

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I.

For Czech society, towards the end of the 19th century theatre, particularly opera had become one of the chief symbols of modern national revival and embodied the Czech aspirations to lift Czech culture out of long-term decline and onto the same level as its large European neighbours. The National Theatre had taken thirty years to build, and was financed partly from public collections among the Czech population and partly by the central authorities. It was opened in the autumn of 1881, almost immediately destroyed in a fire but then rebuilt within two years. For the quarter of a million Czechs living in Prague it was not just an object of national pride, but also a prime instrument in the political struggle to obtain a better position for Czechs within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

German theatre enjoyed a different status. It had an unbroken history in Prague dating from the 17th century, and use of German made it a permanent part of the European-wide network of German theatres. Many more foreigners were involved in it than domestic artists, and the domestic public was also small; it played for the mere 40.000 German inhabitants of Prague. The official German stage in Bohemia was the Estates Theatre (from 1783), while since 1888 what was known as the New German Theatre (today the State Opera), built by private money, had also been running. When after 1880 the German deputies in the parliament requested a subsidy for the new building, the issue became part of a bitter political battle in which the obstructive tactics of the Czech deputies, supported by the Czech public, twice prevented the grant of state support for the building of the German theatre. All this took place against the background of impassioned and none too fastidious press campaigns that kept up the level of nationalist fervour on both sides. On the other hand, however, the two theatres, Czech and German, were capable of a high degree of co-operation and their directors were on friendly professional terms.

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In the last decade of the 19th century, nationalist street conflicts escalated in the struggle over Czech-German constitutional rights and culminated in 1897 when martial law was imposed in Prague. Both Czech and German anti-semites became active and publicly visible. Events surrounding theatre acquired aspects of social tension when in January 1901 the orchestra of the National Theatre went on strike and in October 1907 the orchestra of the German theatre followed suit. The German orchestra strike was even backed by the All-Austrian (i.e. including Czech-German) Society, founded in 1905, but the collaborative approach of the musicians in this affair was the exception in the general atmosphere of nationalist tension. Most of the Czech newspapers continued to slander the Prague German stage and print articles wondering whether a proper Czech ought to go to German performances at all. The German opera was criticised for not playing Czech works, although this of course was partly based on agreement for the division of repertoire made between the two directors. For their part most of the German papers ignored Czech cultural life and had no qualms about printing comments on the superiority of German to Slav culture.

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The First World War opened up a large space for propaganda in which nationalistic passions were turned against other nations as well. After the announcement of a state of war between Austria and Italy, the campaign against Italian opera spread from Germany to German Prague. "Do we need Italian opera?" asked the music critic of the German paper Bohemia on the 23rd of May 1915. He reminded his readers of the patriotic aspects of the work of Richard Wagner and proposed that the "worthless and artistically antiquated" Italian works be expunged from repertoire, although a few operas by Verdi and Rossini might be allowed to stay.

At the end of the 1st World War, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and proclamation of an independent Czechoslovak Republic, Czech-German conflicts were then to take very acute and visible forms directly related to theatre, as well as other issues. On the 28th of October 1918 a number of German theatres built in the 19th century by towns and their German theatrical companies, for example in Liberec, Olomouc and Brno (see the article by T. Pavova), were confiscated and handed over to Czech companies, or at least hence-forth had to share buildings with Czech companies. Even before the end of the war, representatives of Czech theatre and opera, and politicians, had been expressing scepticism about the prospects for Prague German theatrical life in the future Czechoslovak state. Some Czech artists went considerably further than the Czechoslovak government, which did not in fact wish to curtail the cultural development of the German population in the new state. Radical anti-German speeches by artists and deliberate provocation on the part of the press led to mass response that the police were unable to control.

The theatre-related event with the greatest political implications was the forcible Czech takeover of the Estates Theatre, carried out on the 16th of November 1920 by a group of Czech actors and legionaries supported by several parliamentary deputies. The Estates Theatre was incorporated into the National Theatre and the authorities de facto accepted the violent approach that had been adopted. The actual takeover had been preceded by a campaign lasting more than a year in the Czech newspapers and the pressure of Czech deputies in parliament. The immediate trigger for the action was the Czech-German conflict in Cheb the day before. On the 16th of November unidentified organisers called an anti-German demonstration on Wenceslas Square; egged on by sloganeering, the crowd then set off for the Estates Theatre and eight actors and legionaries occupied it. Violent street elements joined the original core of the demonstration and several hundred people ransacked the editorial offices of the German newspapers, Bohemia and Prager Tagblatt. The very next day, the 17th of November, a synagogue in Prague's Vinohrady district was attacked. The nationalist pogrom took place under the slogan "theatre of the Czech nation".

Most leading figures in the cultural and political world, like most of the press, finally distanced themselves from the extreme consequences of this event, but the police hardly intervened at all. A court too confirmed the validity of the transfer of the theatre into Czech hands, especially since during the court hearing street hoodlums threatened to destroy the theatre building if it was "returned to the Germans", and the government ultimately found unofficial ways of compensating the German directors for the damages they had suffered. It was in this context of recurrent explosions of nationalist tension that preparations were made to present a difficult modern opera by a German composer in the Czech National Theatre.

II.

The work of Georg Buchner (1813-1837), an author discovered at the turn of the 19th/20th century, was well known in Prague after the 1st World War. In 1921 he had even been the subject of a doctoral thesis by Gerhard Schulz at the Prague German University. The Prague German theatre undoubtedly noticed the premier of Buchner's drama Dantons Tod in 1910 in Hamburg, the premiere of the romantic comedy Leonce und Lena in 1911 in Vienna, and the performance of the fragment of Wozzek in Munich in November 1913, followed by its Vienna premiere on the 5th of May 1914 in the small Residenzbuhne. In 1916 Hans Demetz, a young man scarcely twenty-years-old, was appointed repertory director at the German theatre company in Prague. He devoted a special repertoire series to Expressionist drama (Kammerspiele), including, on the 4th of October 1920, a production of Buchner's Wozzek in the Estates Theatre. At almost the same time the Czech Revolucni scena (Revolutionary Theatre Company), one of many short-lived post-war companies, presented its own production of Wozzek. In 1921 the Prague City Theatre at Kralovske Vinohrady, an ambitious Czech company that competed with the National Theatre company, staged Buchner's Danton's Death. In 1923 the play was also produced at the Prague German Theatre, which included the comedy Leonce und Lena in the same year.

As far as Berg's opera was concerned, on the 19th of April 1925 three scenes (Drei Bruchstucke), which the composer had extracted from his work for separate treatment, were presented in concert form in Prague. They were performed by the orchestra of the German theatre under its conductor Alexander Zemlinsky, who gave a second performance of the pieces on the 20th of May at the Prague festival of the ISCM. Zemlinsky was a friend of Berg's and was undoubtedly the moving force behind the choice. It is reasonable to ask why he did not try to put on the whole of Berg's opera. The answer is fairly obviously that he no longer had enough energy for such a demanding project. He was in his fifteenth season of work in Prague, was tired of the unending fight to preserve the existence of the theatre, no longer had his former authority with the company and was planning his departure to Berlin. It would be no surprise if it were ever established that he himself negotiated on the Prague production of Wozzek with the head of the opera of the Czech National Theatre Otakar Ostrcil, with whom he was on friendly terms. Zemlinsky was well aware of the high standard of the Czech opera company, and could well have seen it as a better guarantee for the quality of the production at that particularly juncture.

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In any case, the main architects of the world premiere of Wozzek, which took place in Berlin on the 14th of December 1925, were well acquainted with the Czech music scene. The conductor Erich Kleiber had studied at the Prague Conservatory, in the years 1909-1912 had been conductor at the Prague German theatre, and came back on occasion as guest conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. Together with Zemlinsky, the director Franz Ludwig Horth had staged Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen with the German opera in Prague in 1923 and 1924 and had certainly exploited the chance to visit the National Theatre. It is well-known that Otakar Ostrcil had some reservations about Kleiber's Berlin production, but he could definitely have drawn on the experience of the Berlin conductor and director through personal contact.

On a first acquaintance with the piano reduction of Wozzek in 1924, Ostrcil was by no means taken with the work, and he probably changed his mind only after the performance of the fragments of the opera. He had already decided to stage it in the autumn of 1925, and attended a reprise performance in Berlin. He was well aware that the premiere had aroused mixed responses and dramatically contradictory reviews. He must have anticipated that reactions would be similar in Prague.

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Problems arose immediately during the first rehearsals, when the orchestra of the National Theatre refused to play the difficult parts, demanded that the opera be withdrawn from repertoire and adopted a policy of passive resistance. The members of the orchestra failed to keep quiet about their views even outside the theatre and so encouraged a negative public climate of opinion. At first the soloists were equally unenthusiastic, fearing that the parts would damage their voices, and it was only as rehearsals progressed and the hard work bore fruit that they became less suspicious. Even before the premiere, a brochure from the Universal Edition publishing house reprinting the positive and negative reviews of the Berlin premiere was in circulation in Prague, and the sensation-hungry Czech press started a negative campaign. Alban Berg turned up in Prague before the 7th of November so that he could be present for the final preparations, and on the 11th of November the curtain rose on the premiere.

According to the first reports in Czech and German newspapers, the Prague production, attended by a Czech and German audience, went much as could have been expected. The performances were of a high standard and the composer was satisfied. Enthusiastic applause alternating with angry whistles and other expressions of distaste sounded from the auditorium and during the interval the audience loudly exchanged opinions on the pavement. The overall response to the evening was favourable, however, and a substantial part of the audience realised that they were encountering an extraordinary work of music. By pure chance a sad event occurred that was later abundantly exploited by the press--during the performance, offstage, a high official of the city authorities suddenly died of heart failure at the age of sixty-six.

The second performance took place without incident, but rumours were already going round that "something" was being organised for the third performance on the 16th of November, which was the first performance for subscribers. On the fateful day there was no sign of trouble until the second act, and the entrance of the choir of sleeping soldiers. At that moment the signal for the beginning of the demonstration was given from one of the boxes and catcalls, whistling, trumpeting, hooting, sirens and general noise came from various points in the auditorium and lasted for more than half an hour. According to eye-witness reports there were no more than twenty to thirty hoodlums. The orchestra stopped playing, most of the audience tried to get the noise to stop by loudly applauding over it, the curtain was several times brought down and raised again, and no one knew if the production would continue until finally the theatre was gradually evacuated. Bunches of theatre goers stayed on the pavement long into the night in fierce discussion. The next day the Land Administrative Committee, which had jurisdiction over the National Theatre, met and decided to ban further performances into order "to prevent the abuse of the National Theatre for the purposes of political demonstrations".

In the days that followed many articles were published in the Czech papers condemning the hooliganism in the theatre, and there were protests against the ban on further performances of the opera, with artistic clubs and associations issuing proclamations, brochures and petitions. From every quarter of the cultural community voices were raised in support of the chief of the National Theatre Otakar Ostrcil; a year later, 1927, he was awarded a Czechoslovak state prize for the production of Wozzek on the recommendation of a committee of artists. The production was not, however, revived at the National Theatre.

III.

Three basic questions immediately arise when we look at these events: Who initiated and carried out the whole action, against whom was it directed, and what was supposed to be the result? The vandalism was definitely not provoked from inside artistic circles, even though many Czech composers did not approve of Berg's music. Expert opinions on the opera differed in Prague just as they did in Berlin. Some reviewers were enthusiastic, while others expressed major doubts, and disliked both Berg's unusual composition techniques and the brutality of the subject matter. There was nothing peculiar about these reactions. It was also to be expected that the Prague German cultural community would have more understanding for the opera than the Czechs. This was not only because of the nationality of the composer; the Prague German public had simply had more contact with bleak and unconventional modern opera and drama and was therefore more inclined to accept them. Of course, the German theatre audiences had a strong conservative middle-of-the-road element too, and such people reacted with outrage to new work. For example in May 1920 the public was sharply divided at the premiere of Hasenclever's drama Die Menschen, while at the end of February 1925 the directorate preferred to withdraw Ernst Toller's comedy Der enfesselte Wotan from repertory, because its caricature of Prussian rightwing attitudes provoked too much controversy. There had also been noisy objections from some members of the German public at the Prague premieres of other contemporary German operas, such as Hundemith's trilogy Morder, Hoffnung der Frauen, Sancta Susanna and Das Nusch-Nuschi in March 1923, or the world premiere of Schonberg's monodrama Erwartung in June 1924. Even the average German audience, however, had a certain experience of new trends in theatre and opera and it would have been hard to exploit its reactions to provoke a public scandal.

Yet a public scandal is what occurred in the Czech theatre. To understand what happened we have to bear in mind that as the official Czech theatre the National Theatre "belonged to the nation" and this exceptional status tended to tie its hands as far as repertoire was concerned. It was supposed to maintain honour for historical traditions; to avoid experiments, orientate itself primarily to mainstream taste and provide plenty of space for Czech authors and composers. Its fulfilment of these duties was overseen by the Czech political parties and most of the Czech press. Contemporary opera was something with which the Czech public of the National Theatre was clearly less well acquainted than the German, even though Otakar Ostrcil, chief of the opera from 1920, had included an above average number of contemporary works in his repertoire. The protests written by subscribers to the National Theatre to his bosses after the premiere of Wozzek, the dissatisfied letters of respected and well-known citizens, mirrored the horizons that the National Theatre had been providing for its audiences. "We demand our money back for this piece, for it was a bore and not entertainment," wrote one offended theatre-goer, and it is easy enough to see his point of view..

It was on these voices of the middle-of-the-road and poorly informed public of the National Theatre that the initiators of the scandal relied. Immediately after the premiere the Czech right-wing daily Narodni listy published a piece under the title "In the Service of Foreigners", in which it accused the National Theatre of letting works by contemporary Czech composers wait for performance, while undertaking "costly experiments with foreign rubbish". The extreme right-wing Czech newspapers were writing about the "decadent opera of a German Jew", using just the same vocabulary that the German National Socialist Party would be using ten years later against "entartete Kunst". It was pure chance that the attack on Wozzek happened six years to the precise day after the fanaticised crowd had taken over the German Estates Theatre, but it was no accident that the target was a German work and that the arguments used were extreme nationalist ones. The events in the theatre were inspired by the first Czech fascists, who exploited Prague's "Gilded Youth" to carry out their plans. Behind the banning of further performances of the opera were highly placed politicians in the Theatre Commission of the Land Administrative Committee, who saw in the scandal a possible way to achieve changes of personnel in the National Theatre and to increase their political influence on its directors. When the fascistic voices in the press went to such offensive lengths that they provoked a wave of counter protests, most of the politicians retreated. Nor was this similarity with events after the 16th of November 1920 pure chance either.

The affair lasted for several months, but actually brought little in the way of change to the life of the National Theatre. While many who had provoked the scandal had hoped for the removal of Otakar Ostrcil, attempts to unseat him failed, and the repertoire remained essentially unchanged. A production of Berg's opera Wozzek was staged (almost without attracting any notice) in 1932 by the German Opera in Brno, and then in 1935 Buchner's original spoken drama was put on by the Prague German company, this time attracting a great deal of attention in the Czech press. At this time Prague was experiencing a major influx of emigrants fleeing from Nazi Germany. They were not welcomed by those who had whistled ten years before in the auditorium of the National Theatre, but those Germans and Czechs who back then had protested against the banning of Wozzek un the National Theatre, were ready to give them a helping hand.