It has always been a good idea whenever a composer has produced a successful opera (and often also whenever a composer has produced a flop) to extract music from the opera and rewrite, rebundle, and rearrange it into new packages. It is no simple task to mount a full-scale opera, so while the music is still hot the composer can make more money and earn more fame by giving it to the public in more user-friendly forms (in the case of a flop, it is like a direct-to-video movie release is today—a last-ditch effort to recoup some of the capital lost on the project). Orchestral suites from operas and ballets were a staple of the concerthall diet during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Arias arranged for voice and piano could be easily sung at home. And, of course, opera overtures and preludes are almost invariably better known than the theater works from which they come. We often think of the Second Viennese School composers (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) as idealistic artists interested in writing whatever music they wanted to without much regard for the commercial feasibility of that music, but this was not really the case. They, too, had bills to pay and they, too, wished their music to be admired and even loved by as wide an audience as possible. So we shouldn't be surprised to find that in 1923 Alban Berg sifted through his opera Wozzeck and found three salable extracts to publish separately in 1924 as Bruchstücke (3) aus dem Oper Wozzeck—who could know then how many times the opera would have the luxury of being fully mounted? Wozzeck was in 1923 neither a success nor a flop—it hadn't yet even been mounted, and wouldn't be until December 1925. Berg was desperate that somebody hear some part of the opera's music.

The Bruchstücke (3) are: 1. "Tchin bum! Soldaten" (Act I, Scenes 2 and 3), 2. "Und ist kein Betrug" (Act III, Scene 1), and 3. "Ringe! Ringe!" (Act III, Scenes 4 and 5). The Bruchstücke are scored for soprano and orchestra, just as the equivalent music in the opera is, and were first heard at the 54th annual Tonkünstlerfest [Composer Festival] in Frankfurt in 1924.

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