Army private Wozzeck’s daily tasks include serving as valet, gofer and target of verbal abuse for his captain. Surprisingly, he responds to a round of the captain’s teasing with a biblical defense of his family – his common-law wife Marie and their young son. The captain patronizingly expresses his amazement, but Wozzeck shows no outward reaction to continuing humiliation by his superiors; mentally unstable, he hallucinates about the menace of a setting sun. To help support his family, he submits to bizarre medical experimentation by a doctor-friend of the captain’s. Marie, meanwhile, has been flirting with a dashing drum major, clearly signaling her availability to him.

Wozzeck gives Marie his wages, which makes her feel guilty about having accepted earrings from the drum major. The captain and the doctor taunt Wozzeck about Marie’s infidelity. When Wozzeck starts to strike Marie, she says she would rather have a knife in her breast than his hand upon her. Later he is further enraged when he spies Marie and the drum major passionately embracing in a lurid waltz. In the barracks, Wozzeck prays for deliverance from temptation. The drum major swaggers in, boasting of his conquest of Marie. Wozzeck tries to attack him but is soundly beaten.

Marie reads to her child from the Bible and prays for mercy. At dusk Wozzeck leads Marie along a forest path near a pond. The sight of the moon rising blood­-red terrifies and provokes Wozzeck. He stabs Marie; later, searching the pond for the bloody knife, he drowns. In front of Marie’s house, her son rides a hobbyhorse, innocently urging it forward. Other children, excited to have encountered a body in the forest, run in with news that the boy’s mother is dead. Uncomprehending, he continues to play on his hobbyhorse.