Wozzeck

, an opera by Alban Berg. based on the prophetic play by Georg Büchner

Science is not the only aspect of human creativity that seeks to be experimental and prescient. This ought to be an enduring aspiration of art, too. And opera — notwithstanding Dr Johnson's denigration of it as “an exotic and irrational entertainment” — has that capacity in full measure. Mostly, though, opera has neglected science and trivialized medicine. But there is one chilling exception, that twentieth-century masterpiece, Alban Berg's Wozzeck. It was based on Georg Büchner's prophetic play of 1835–37, a work that was the more telling because it was loosely based on real events.

Büchner, the son of a Darmstadt doctor, graduated in medicine in 1834 but was as dedicated to social and literary reform as to medicine: had he not died of typhus in 1837, while a young lecturer in comparative anatomy in Zürich, he may well have outstripped Goethe in literary achievement. His Wozzeck (or Woyzeck, in the manuscript of the play) is the model of the anti-hero we know so well in modern literature, the archetype of the hapless, poverty-stricken common man; in particular, he is exploited by medical science. There is, therefore, a timeliness in the new production, under the illuminating direction of Barrie Kosky, which has been at the Sydney Opera House — we have, again, a vantage point for reflection on the role of science and medicine in this century, our retrospect to complement Büchner's prospect.

“We poor people,” Wozzeck laments to his regimental captain. “If I had a hat, a watch and an eyeglass … I would be virtuous, too. Folk like us are always unfortunate in this world.” Unfortunate, indeed for Wozzeck, forced by the need to support his bastard child to participate in the town doctor's bizarre dietetic experiments, to be the victim of a parvenu scientist who likens Wozzeck to a lizard. The doctor is irritated that this benighted Everyman — a mere experimental subject — is not strictly adhering to his unvaried diet of beans and, worse, urinates in the street rather than into the doctor's collection flasks.

The doctor is hostile to the notion of an individual nature. “Mere superstition. Have I not proved that the diaphragm is subject to the Will? Individuality is sublimated into freedom.” Have there been repeated echoes (from scientists and doctors) of that philosophy in our century? The doctor, obsessed with his own importance — “Oh, my hypothesis! Oh, my fame!” — glibly redefines Wozzeck's yearning to express his humanity as a psychiatric disorder, “an excellent aberratio mentalis partialis, second species”, and later he reveals himself to be equally callous with his patients.

Here we have an allegory of what science would do to our world, not in a detached way, through weaponry and technology, but face to face with people — the betrayal of medical and scientific trust in the horrible experiments of the Nazi era; the complicity of doctors in torture and murder (and not only in Germany, as Neil Bolton's recent biography, The Good Listener — Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty [Weidenfeld & Nicolson], reminded us); the perfidy of medicine in the abuse of psychiatry for so many years in the Soviet Union. It is no exaggeration to say that they are all presaged in Büchner's play; he was describing inhumanity to come, abuse of hapless Everyman and Everywoman on an unprecedented scale.

The extra twist in Wozzeck — and Berg's colourful, controlled music makes it more telling — is that the doctor's parasitic indifference to the human values that ought to underpin science and medicine applies to the higher levels of his society no less than to the common soldiers and their women. The doctor almost gloats at the prospect when he warns his friend, the captain, “You might well have an apoplexia cerebri someday … I can assure you that it will be a most interesting case. If God wills it, your tongue will be partially paralysed and we'll be able to do immortal experiments.”

In such a society — in our society, which Büchner foresaw — every stratum exploits whatever lies beneath it. If art — opera most potently — seeks to “hold the mirror up to nature”, Wozzeck should compel all of us scientists to look deeply into that reflection of our true souls.