The “Wozzeck Affair”: Modernism and the Crisis of Audience in Prague

Abstract

The Czech premiere of Berg's Wozzeck in 1926 produced an unanticipated storm of controversy that changed the way the Prague music community viewed European modernism and their place in it. Amid mounting political and cultural tensions in the city, the third performance witnessed a planned demonstration of bourgeois subscribers that resulted in a ban of the opera. Critics responded to the work—and each other—with divisive rhetoric. The debate highlights not only the accelerating crisis between artists and audiences in the early twentieth century, but also the problem of incorporating moderate or antimodernist perspectives within the historiography of modernism.