Twentieth-Century Opera: Beyond Tonality

The Problem of the New

Every era produces artists who find the existing forms inadequate to what they need to express. For early-20th-century composers, the problem was tonal harmony — the system that had organized Western music for three centuries felt, to many of them, exhausted. What should opera do in the atonal world?

Different composers gave different answers.

Berg's Answer

Alban Berg wrote two operas — Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (1935, completed 1979) — that used the twelve-tone system inherited from Schoenberg in the service of overwhelming dramatic power. Wozzeck in particular achieves something paradoxical: a formal musical structure so rigorous that it becomes invisible, leaving only the raw psychological drama.

Britten's Answer

Benjamin Britten never abandoned