Musicologists have tended to assume that Berg's ‘translation’ of Büchner'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 Büchner'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 Büchner'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, Büchner 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 Büchner 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 Büchner's plan, the music in the opera's nature scenes can be heard to generate the philosophy of potential that Büchner was searching for in the original fragments.

中文翻译：

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伯格的沃采克聆听自然的竞争方式

音乐学家倾向于认为伯格对布希纳戏剧的“翻译”是一件没有问题的事情，并且可以自由地着手揭示音乐是如何表达的这戏剧和这似乎戏剧和歌剧的意义是相同的。在这篇文章中，我听沃采克作为 Büchner 的原始片段和 Berg 的歌剧翻译之间的对话，承认它们之间的差异。特别是，我提出了一种在歌剧中聆听自然的另一种方式，这符合布希纳和伯格自己对生命创造力的评价，而不是像许多早期对歌剧的评价那样专注于唯心主义主体的政治力量。我首先认为，与沃伊采克, Büchner 开辟了一个探索空间，他在其中问他的听众：“如果自主的自我同一主体确实是虚幻的，那么社会进步可以通过什么机制发生？” 其次，我质疑伯格设法以中立的方式设置文本的假设，认为他在片段上强加了一套陌生的审美价值，并无意中破坏了布希纳设计用来激发观众思考意志和创造力的机制。在文章的最后两节，我认为，尽管伯格对布希纳的计划实施了暴力，但可以听到歌剧自然场景中的音乐产生了布希纳在原始片段中寻找的潜力哲学。