This study is an exploration of formal-aesthetic correspondences between presenta-tion strategies and techniques of transforming traditional literary and musical genre conventions in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. It takes as its bottom line William J. Entwistle’s distinction between re-creation and recreation (he used it in his appreciation of Don Quixote and so did Erich Auerbach) and his under-standing of art as an act of reproduction (re-creation) obliged to please (recreation). Seen from that perspective, both Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Berg’s opera “suffer” from ex-cess – overmuchness and surfeit with a tangible residue of melancholy. But it is because of these surpluses that these two works are regarded as masterpieces with continuing universal appeal.