Alban Berg realized that he and his mentor Arnold Schonberg were in the process of revolutionizing music, and so, when he came to write “Wozzeck,” he clung steadfastly to the late 19th-century Romantic tradition still holding sway in the first quarter of the 20th, incorporating many devices from the most beloved operas. This organization creates grounding for the ear in an otherwise phantasmagoric musical world.

When the Metropolitan Opera presents “Wozzeck” by Alban Berg on Tuesday night, think about this: what do “Les Troyens,” “Otello,” “The Cunning Little Vixen,” “Tosca,” “Tristan und Isolde” and “Wozzeck” all have in common? Each has, as the commencement of its last act, a scene that: has as its content some combination of nostalgia, homesickness, or wistfulness, as well as the implication that things were better in the past; introduces unusual harmonies, modalities, embellishments, instrumentation, or scales; involves minor characters either as performers or subjects of the music; employs a simpler musical line than its surrounding material; precedes cataclysmic events involving the deaths of major characters, and involves altered and intensified states of consciousness.

“Wozzeck,” based on the Georg Buechner play “Woyzeck,” tells the story of a soldier driven mad by poverty and societal pressure. The opera premiered in 1925 in Berlin, and Berg was so concerned his music be intelligible that he embarked upon a lecture tour of the cities that would hear the new work. He also reorchestrated it for smaller ensembles for easier dissemination into the provinces. “Wozzeck” was premiered in America in 1931 under Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia.

In an effort to tame the beast of free “atonality” (music with no tonal center), Berg arranges the music of the opera using strict classical principles. Each of the three acts has five scenes of roughly the same duration, and each act is a different musical form – Act I being a series of five character sketches.

In the very first measures, the music cascades into a nightmare world as the inhumanly high voice of the captain tells us that we are not hearing the sounds of the world as it really is, but as Wozzeck’s paranoid, delusional mind perceives it. Scene 4 shows Wozzeck at the doctor’s office, so poor he has sold himself for medical experiments. In a chilling foreshadowing of the Nazis, the doctor allows Wozzeck to eat only peas, so he can observe the devastating physical and mental effects on his unfortunate patient.

Act II is a symphony in five movements. Scene 1 (Sonata movement) finds Wozzeck singing movingly to his girlfriend Marie about his lack of money. The second scene (Fantasy and Fugue) has the captain and the doctor taunting Wozzeck in the street about Marie’s unfaithfulness. Scene 3 (Largo for chamber orchestra) finds Wozzeck confronting Marie on her infidelity. He goes to strike her. She attacks him with the words “better a knife in my heart than a hand on me!”

Scene 4 (Scherzo) takes place at a beer garden. By this time, the music surrounding Wozzeck has reached a supernatural plateau of terror. People around him no longer speak, they wail, shriek, or emit other sounds not of this earth. A fool – the classic Russian dramatic device of the yurodivy – approaches. His voice is abnormally shrill (he is played by the same singer as portrays the captain), and he tells Wozzeck that he smells blood on him.

Scene 5 (Introduction and Rondo marziale) finds Wozzeck at the barracks. Inspired by Berg’s own nightmarish military service, all of the other men are asleep and their snoring is a chorus of ghostly moans and the cries of banshees (the opera is worth hearing for this effect alone). The Drum-Major enters and proceeds to torment Wozzeck and then assault him. Berg wrote that he conceived this scene along the lines of that of Rigoletto and the courtiers.

Act III (6 Inventions) is a masterpiece within a masterpiece. Scene 1 borrows from Verdi’s “Otello,” linking the opera to the romantic mainstream and serving as the prostitute Marie’s “Willow Song.” She sings to her child about the goodness of Jesus, bemoans her fate and, like Desdemona, has a premonition of her destiny. She is in her way as innocent as Shakespeare’s heroine – a fact brought stunningly to light in this Mark Lamos production – and will pay just as dearly.

Then we find Wozzeck and Marie by a pond. It is now Wozzeck who sounds like a creature from another realm. He talks to Marie but is really talking to himself. With music whose repetitive beat is quoted directly from “Otello,” Wozzeck stabs her repeatedly. He drops the knife and runs.

There follows an orchestral stroke of genius. Two huge crescendi, as long and drawn out as good intonation will allow, burst into silent-movie piano music played at a brisk pace. We are in a tavern where people move with the jerky rhythms of early cinema. Wozzeck dances with the prostitute Margret, and when she sees real blood on him what emanates from the chorus and orchestra is no longer music at all but rather the sounds heard by a maniac as he descends into the lowest circle of hell.

In Scene 4, Wozzeck returns to the pond desperately looking for the knife. He notices the moon and wails that it is made of blood. In a death scene that is the envy of any great singer, he wanders into the water and thinks that it is actually blood. The music and the water bubble over him.

The oft-excerpted orchestral interlude follows. This invention on a key (D minor) is a truly great piece which can stand alone in the concert hall. Besides its power, it serves to bring some diatonic order to the chaos that we have just experienced, but its musical resolutions are uniformly dark and grim. I have been listening to opera for more than 50 years now and was no stranger to the old Metropolitan house, where I was fortunate enough to hear Karl Boehm conduct “Wozzeck,” but never have I been as moved as when listening to Maestro Levine lead this music with his superb orchestra.

The last scene finds Marie’s child playing near a group of older children. One tells him that his mother is dead. He pretends to ride a horse as he sings “hop, hop.” The other children go to see the dead body. Marie’s child continues to ride his imaginary horse. After a moment he leaves the stage, and the music ends in a soft quavering pattern suggesting the first innocent snowflakes of a new, impending blizzard.

In the Buechner original, Marie chides Woyzeck with the words “what wasp stung you?” How ironic that Alban Berg died from the sting of a wasp on Christmas Eve 1935.

“Wozzeck” opens December 27 at the Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center, 212-362-6000).