Wozzeck

It has been awhile since I sat down and listened to this piece.
Based on a play by Georg Buchner, it is an intense story of a man and a woman, and oddly enough their child.

The man, Wozzeck, in my opinion is a victim of the typical story of jealousy. He has horrible nightmares and suspects his wife, Marie of being unfaithful.

Marie is devout in her religion and is in fact having feeling for another man... and everyone knows about it.  Wozzeck's rage takes over and is about to beat her. She then says, not even her father laid a hand on her, and that she would rather have a knife in her belly than a hand on her.

That is exactly what she gets later. Wozzeck murders her with a knife... his guilt consumes him as he is trying to wash the blood off and throw the knife away in the pond.  He drowns himself.

So what happens to the kid?  In this story, who is the hero? Some say it is the kid, because he witnessed all of this and did nothing.  He was never in any harm, physically.  

Or is this one of the first instances of the "ant-hero"

Amazingly enough, this whole opera is about the state of women in Europe at the time. How they suffered in many aspects of life, and in the end, the children were left motherless or fatherless.

Without discussing the harmonic and melodic complexity of the music, it should be noted that MUSIC has a social responsibility.  It isn't always meant to be beautiful, or to make you feel some variation of happy.  Sometimes it is political, or racially driven.  In this case, "sexually" driven, in the sense of male and female. 

So I come back to my point of who is the hero?
I say it is Wozzeck. Not because of the underdog effect, but because he gave into what we are as humans. We are jealous individuals, and fighting nature like that is ... well unnatural.  Yes, I agree that this is tragic... but I obviously see a correlation between this and Fight Club.

This sort of quasi- person you want to be but society has the thumb on you- kind of character
The anti- hero that the audience eventually wants to win.  But he never does. We look at entertainment as something to remove us from our own shitlives.. but we NEED that part to make the rest look great.

Works like Wozzeck force you to look and listen to how the human experience can be a dark and brutal bitch.  But it's ok... we need that to put the rest of our life into perspective

Because I'm getting old and crotchety

Received an email today.


Here was my response:


I feel like I am just a number with a dollar sign in front.  I don't feel like anyone in the graduate school cares enough about individuals education so much as they care about their own reputation.

There are high school kids taking AP courses and retaking the ACT and SAT to get higher grades so that schools will HELP pay for tuition. (not including the various fees)  Let's face it, its the United States Education System. When GRADUATE students come in, bright eyed and a little nervous to take the entrance exams to hopefully place out of remedial courses, our education and hard work still isn't good enough for you.  Therefore, we have to take the remedial courses before we can take our major classes, thus keeping us here longer and making us pay more and more each year.

As a DMA student, not only do I have to PAY for the recital credits I am required to do (12 credits total) I have to pay for accompanying and recording fees which can add up to $300 more.  I am paying more for my degree by the semester than most other majors are.  This is unfair and is indicative of the education system.

If you simply told us that you are a business, and not an institution that is meant to expand our knowledge, then perhaps I would be happier.  At least then I wouldn't feel like a victim of a ponzi scheme.

"The only thing that interferes with my learning, is my education" - Einstein 

Let's see how this goes.