Carmen and the Staging of Spain: Recasting Bizet's Opera in the Belle Epoque.

Musicologists have tended to assume that Berg's 'translation' of Buchner's play was an unproblematic affair and have felt free to set about uncovering how the music articulates the drama and the themes as if the meanings of play and opera were identical. In this article I listen to Wozzeck as a dialogue between Buchner's original fragment and Berg's operatic translation in a manner that acknowledges the differences between them. In particular I propose an alternative way of hearing nature in the opera that accords with Buchner's and Berg's own valorisation of the creative power of Life, rather than focusing on the political power of the idealist subject like many earlier appraisals of the opera. I first argue that, with Woyzeck, Buchner was opening up an exploratory space in which he asked his audience: 'If the autonomous self-identical subject is indeed illusory, what is the mechanism through which social progress can take place?' Second, I challenge the assumption that Berg managed to set the text in a neutral way, arguing that he imposed upon the fragments an alien set of aesthetic values and inadvertently dismantled the mechanism Buchner had designed to provoke audiences into thinking about volition and creativity. In the final two sections of the article, I argue that, despite the violence Berg did to Buchner's plan, the music in the opera's nature scenes can be heard to generate the philosophy of potential that Buchner was searching for in the original fragments.