(Leader, Jean Rennie)
Conductor, Walter Susskind
Joan Alexander (soprano)
From St. Andrew's Hall, Glasgow
Part 1
Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, which is to be broadcast from Covent Garden next Friday, tells the tragic, story of a simple, half-crazed soldier who murders his unmarried wife and afterwards commits suicide. The three concert extracts are concerned mainly with the woman, Marie, and her child by Wozzeck. In the first, she stands at her window watching the soldiers march by; afterwards she sings the child to sleep with a lullaby. In the second, she is sitting in her room at night reading the Bible story of the woman taken in adultery, and is stricken with remorse at her own unfaithfulness to Wozzeck. The third extract begins with Wozzeck's death by drowning and leads to the final scene of the opera: the children at play, hearing that Marie has been murdered, run off to see what has happened, leaving Marie's son playing by himself, and unaware of the tragedy that has overtaken him. (Deryck Cooke)