When he died in 1837, just as Woyzeck (later turned into an opera by modernist Allan Berg) was nearing completion, Georg Büchner was not yet twenty-four years old. It would be almost 60 years before the first of Büchner's plays Leonce and Lena was performed before a German audience--and almost 100 years before his plays were translated into English. His plays have have grown more important and more relevant with the passage of time. Today, he is considered a forerunner of both naturalism and expressionism.
