"Billy Budd" was followed in January 1952 by the first stage production in this country of Berg's "Wozzeck", conducted by Kleiber. Before rehearsals started every player had been given an English libretto to read, to help us understand the work more thoroughly. This was his normal practice for all new works when he was Musical Director at the Berlin Staatsoper. We had nineteen rehearsals in all with separate sectional ones for strings, brass and woodwind. He tool infinite pains with us; Berg's notation does not make it easy for the players at time but with Kleiber everything became crystal-clear, as usual. At the final rehearsal he told us that he was pleased, we were not to worry. "Just think you are playing a Haydn symphony." He cancelled the second of the two general rehearsals, confident that it was not necessary and might even be harmful. There were fourteen scene changes, sometimes with barely enough music to cover them. In the third act the scene change takes place during two terrifying crescendo on one top note (B natural) which should last for a total of fifteen seconds. During this time all the furniture for a tavern scene, including a special out-of-tune piano, had to be put in position. Kleiber said he would hold the note for a maximum of twenty seconds, then he would have to go on. On the first night, sitting under the stage, I could hear all hell break loose over my head. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen ... then, with three seconds to go, suddenly all was quiet. It would only have needed the piano lid falling on a stage hand's fingers to wreck the whole thing. The second act of "Wozzeck" ends curiously with four silent bars, two of them with pauses marked over them, the last two in tempo as the curtain falls. Kleiber used to beat these solemnly and told us at rehearsal that, in Berlin, one critic had suggested that Dr. Kleiber did not know the score as he was still conducting when everything was over. << less