wozzeck

[+ WilliamM]

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Kentridge’s “Wozzeck” paints an industrialized nightmare in Met premiere

Sat Dec 28, 2019 at 5:26 pm

 

By George Grella

 

Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck is a misfit in the canonic repertoire. It is one of the finest opera scores made but is so particular to a style from a specific era—Expressionism—and so downbeat, that it both contravenes the grand opera tradition of the major houses and exists at a distance from the kind of sympathetic personal experience one can safely find in Verdi, Mozart, and the like.

 

Productions, more than the work itself, are responsible for the latter. The weirdness of Expressionism and the main character, a simple-minded soldier driven to insanity and murder, are hard to connect to contemporary audiences, and stagings often come off as taking place behind glass, observed but not felt. The frustration is that Wozzeck has an explosive device at its center, sitting in plain sight.

 

William Kentridge’s new production, which opened Friday at the Metropolitan Opera, has lit the fuse and burst open any artifice or phoniness.

This staging, with the great baritone Peter Mattei in the lead role, presents the ugliness that Berg saw during his WWI experience and translated through his score. Wozzeck is not the usual kind of pleasure; it is beautifully made but not beautiful—honest and sincere about ugly and upsetting things, it shows people in extremis without making their anguish into something musically glorious.

 

Supported by the Met, the Salzburg Festival, the Canadian Opera Company, and Opera Australia, this Wozzeck creates a world that is unstable and chaotic. The program notes specify that Kentridge (who brought new productions of Berg’s Lulu and Shostakovich’s The Nose to the Met) decided to set it in pre-WWI Germany. There is in that milieu an atmosphere of a society coming to its end, of atavistic impulses and decadent meaninglessness coming through the characters. Berg wrote this into the music, and tenor Gerhard Siegel, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, and tenor Christopher Ventris as the Captain, Doctor, and Drum Major respectively brought it to life in their full-bodied performances.

 

But the staging is tied specifically to WWI itself. There are images of maimed soldiers, barbed wire, gas masks, and in Act III a battle map projected over the stage that shows Ypres, site of some of the worst of the war’s industrialized butchery. The set looks like it’s made out of wreckage, and rather than cutting sticks, Wozzeck and Andres (tenor Andrew Staples in his Met debut) venture out into no-man’s land to recover chairs, which litter the stage.

There is the sense that both the world will be destroyed and that, through the debris, it already is destroyed. There was a foreboding feeling from the Captain’s first “Langsam!” Siegel’s piping, unusually graceful singing was one of the expressively destabilizing factors—he had a Colonel Blimpish pomposity and a glassy-eyed madness as he sang about his terror of eternity and the world’s spinning.

Mattei was performing against type in this role. His typical easy command of the stage and the intelligence and pure beauty of his singing at first made it hard to accept him as the simple-minded soldier. Mattei is one of the most self-aware opera artists, and Wozzeck is helpless exactly because he has no self-awareness. But the Act I scene with the Doctor—sung by Van Horn with almost bouncing malevolent vitality—set in a claustrophobic shack, worked brilliantly, Mattei’s sincerity playing off the Doctor’s unhinged pseudo-rationalism.

Wozzeck was a sane man turned crazy by madmen, the madmen were all his social superiors, everything flowing downhill from them. Along with the chairs, a second key detail that Kentridge changed was that Wozzeck isn’t shaving the Captain at the start, instead he rolls a movie projector on stage and starts showing the producer’s trademark animation (projected on a small screen on stage, while large projections encompassed the entire stage). Wozzeck’s movies were the chaos of memories from the war, and one saw the character as shell-shocked, emptied out by those experiences.

Soprano Elsa van den Heever was Marie. Her shining voice was a lovely contrast to those of all the men, especially the accumulated falsetto passages that Berg gave them. She was as empty as Wozzeck, but in a different way—while forces pushed down on the soldier, they pulled Marie into their embrace. That meant Ventris’ peacocking, strutting and sinister Drum Major, and in a larger sense the world of gaudy, hollow uniforms.

In another small but radical departure from the score, Kentridge replaced Wozzeck and Marie’s son with a puppet, one that in no way could be mistaken for a human child even without the puppeteers handling it in full view. At the finale, their son and the children who discover Marie’s body sing from offstage. This change didn’t work—one felt nothing from the puppet, nor from the absence of the human performers. And it made it impossible to feel the crucial bit of human love that Wozzeck and Marie had for the boy.

Still, the overall power of the production was such that the climactic murder was still devastating. Here is where much credit belonged to conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra. Their playing was colorful and sinuous, the conductor handling voluptuous phrasing and changes in tempo, shaping Berg’s great forms to dramatic ends. The performance grew darker and deeper with each passing measure and reached a plateau of tension in the beer garden scene in Act II, which had the grip of a nightmare. Surrounded by a crowd of people with bandages covering their facial wounds, Wozzeck was lost, confused and desperate.

From that point the denouement was intense. Although this was only the 70th performance ever at the Met, this orchestra is expert in Wozzeck, honed in the score by James Levine.Their playing covered the gamut from delicacy to serrated brutality, while all the singing was utterly clear.

At the end, with nothing but death on stage, the projection showed no-man’s land being shelled, the screen eventually covered completely by images of explosions. The last word was not the score’s “hip hop” but the destruction the world brought on itself.

Wozzeck runs through January 22. met

[sydneyboy]

This was a co production with Opera Australia, the Salzburg Festival and other companies. I saw it in Sydney mid year with an excellent largely local cast. It made a shattering impact and I could not imagine a better case for the Opera. I might add my opera companion is an artist and she is a great fan of William Kentridge which added a welcome additional edge to the evening. Strongly recommend.

[+ WilliamM]

I have written earlier about looking forward to seeing Anna Netrebko at the Met on New Years 'Eve. But I can't stay in NY for Wozzeck

[sydneyboy]

I am in London in July when Ms Netrebko is singing Tosca. As a Supporting Member I have high hopes of obtaining a seat when bookings open in mid February.

[sydneyboy]

This was a co production with Opera Australia, the Salzburg Festival and other companies. I saw it in Sydney mid year with an excellent largely local cast. It made a shattering impact and I could not imagine a better case for the Opera. I might add my opera companion is an artist and she is a great fan of William Kentridge which added a welcome additional edge to the evening. Strongly recommend.

I further note on the Sydney performance. I was just reading the Sydney Morning Herald’s music critic, Peter McCallum’s highlights of the year. Across all classical music performances in 2019, opera, orchestral, chamber music and vocal he rated the William Kentridge Wozzeck number 1. He described it as genius and a triumph of music married to design and described the performance of local baritone Michael Honeyman as brilliant. New Yorkers don’t miss this production.

[bostonman]

I'm sad that due to my schedule, I won't be able to see the HD (or the Wednesday encore) - this was one of the HD's I was really looking forward to. I know I'll be able to see it eventually on TV, etc, but it won't be the same as the "big screen" (and I know I won't have the opportunity to get to NYC either). Wozzeck has been a favorite of mine since my dad introduced me to it when I was a budding opera fan in my teens, and I really want to see what Kentridge has done.

 

The broadcast of the opening performance last week sounded great!

[+ WilliamM]

I am seeing I "Wozzeck" within the next ten days, even if I have to cancel something else.

 

As close to must see as the up coming Jonas Kaufman "Tristan and Isolde" concert at Carnegie Hall in April with the Boston Sympathy

[sydneyboy]

I am seeing I "Wozzeck" within the next ten days, even if I have to cancel something else.

 

As close to must see as the up coming Jonas Kaufman "Tristan and Isolde" concert at Carnegie Hall in April with the Boston Sympathy

Please report back with your own view of this Wozzeck. Is Kaufman Tristan the full Opera in concert or only certain acts?

[bostonman]

Please report back with your own view of this Wozzeck. Is Kaufman Tristan the full Opera in concert or only certain acts?

 

The Tristan concert will be just Act III.

[Kevin Slater]

The Tristan concert will be just Act III.

 

Still one act to many.

 

Kevin Slater

[+ WilliamM]

Please report back with your own view of this Wozzeck. Is Kaufman Tristan the full Opera in concert or only certain acts?

 

Very sorry, I should have been clearer. I really enjoy your Sydney posts. Actually, I remember seeing "Lulu" in the Sydney Opera House around 1994.

[sydneyboy]

Thank you William. When Herr Kaufmann was in Sydney last year for the stupendous Andrea Chenier he made it clear in media interviews he intended to sing Tristan. He is obviously building it block by block.

Edited January 2, 2020 by sydneyboy

[+ WilliamM]

Thank you William. When Herr Kaufmann was in Sydney last year for the stupendous Andrea Chenier he made it clear in media interviews he intended to sing Tristan. He is obviously building it block by block.

 

I saw other operas in Sydney on subsequent visits. But remember the musicals more. For example, "The Boy From Oz" several times in 1998 at Christmas. That was also the year of the disaster in the Sydney to Hobart boat race.

[+ WilliamM]

Musical Events

January 13, 2020 Issue

Operatic Shows of Force

At the Met, a new production of “Wozzeck” stays relentlessly focussed on war, and a young soprano brings prodigious power to “The Queen of Spades.”

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/alex-ross

By Alex Ross

January 6, 2020

 

The New Yorker

 

 

 

Your judgment of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” which runs through January 22nd, may depend on how you classify it. The director is the South African artist William Kentridge, who is steeped in the Central European Expressionist milieu from which Berg’s ferocious anti-military opera emerged. If the staging is considered as an entry in Kentridge’s multimedia œuvre, it delivers a potent distillation of signature motifs: brusque drawings and prints of wounded faces and ravaged landscapes; stop-action animation of spasmodically jerking figures; photographic collages and cinematic montages. If, however, you measure the work against the emotional breadth of Berg’s opera, you may find it wanting. On opening night, I admired the virtuosity of the director’s technique but wished that he had paid more heed to the desperate inner lives of the characters.

 

Kentridge has transplanted “Wozzeck” from the early-nineteenth-century setting of Berg’s libretto to the period of the First World War. This makes good sense, since Berg served in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1915 to 1918 and began composing the opera during the conflict. Berg fashioned the libretto directly from Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, “Woyzeck,” an unblinking portrayal of an ordinary soldier’s degradation by military discipline and medical experiment. Berg wrote of Wozzeck, “There is a bit of me in this character, since I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, have been in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact humiliated.”

 

Büchner’s text, fragmentary in form and corrosive in tone, is famously prophetic of twentieth-century concerns. Berg could hardly have found anything more modern among the playwrights of his own period; the young Bertolt Brecht was one of many under Büchner’s spell. Yet Berg brings to bear his own preoccupations—in particular, a nostalgia for a shattered fin-de-siècle world. Although the music of “Wozzeck” is ostensibly atonal, glimmers of Wagner, Puccini, Mahler, and Strauss shine through the work’s dark façade. The most piercing lyricism is reserved for Wozzeck’s common-law wife, Marie, who falls victim to his madness. Her monologue at the beginning of Act III, in which she reads from the Bible and ponders her child’s bleak future, is obviously modelled on Desdemona’s “Ave Maria” scene in Verdi’s “Otello.” It is this half-buried Romantic dimension that goes missing in Kentridge’s production.

 

Although the Great War looms over every moment of the staging, it never becomes clear whether we are experiencing Wozzeck’s nightmarish premonitions of the conflict or his shell-shocked recollections of it. Characters often wear gas masks, hobble on crutches, and have bandages on their heads. Maps of troop movements in Flanders are projected onto a large screen behind the stage. The sets, designed by Sabine Theunissen, deploy sculptural accumulations of junk to render the locales where Wozzeck experiences successive humiliations: a captain’s quarters, a doctor’s laboratory, a tavern garden, a soldiers’ barracks. Greta Goiris, the costume designer, applies fantastical touches to drab uniforms and workaday wear. A blood-red gown for Marie stands out against a mostly black-and-white color scheme.

Kentridge is at his best when crowds fill the stage, matching the teeming density of his visual aesthetic. His most bravura gesture comes in Act III, as Wozzeck staggers away from the pond where he has murdered Marie and into a bar full of drunkenly dancing figures. Berg prepares the change of scene with two enormous orchestral crescendos on the single note B, the second louder than the first. Kentridge made the inspired decision to have dancers enter during the second crescendo, both on the stage and on the screen at the back. They appear to be emanating from the concentrated beam of sound. Much less successful is Kentridge’s illustration of the overpowering final interlude, which follows Wozzeck’s death, by drowning. The triple-forte climax of the passage was marked by a groaningly obvious sequence of explosions on the screen.

The unremitting focus on war iconography blotted out the opera’s main narrative thrust: the deterioration of Wozzeck’s mind in the grip of military routine. Crucially, in Büchner’s scenario, the soldier is not at war but serving in a town regiment; violence explodes from the machinery of the system. The baritone Peter Mattei, who took the lead role, is one of the finest singing actors in opera, but in this staging he had little opportunity to trace the character’s arc toward madness; too often he seemed like an extra in a larger tableau. Elza van den Heever, as Marie, was similarly sidelined by the pervasive imagery of masculine aggression. Psychology has never been Kentridge’s strong suit as a director—it was also a blind spot in his previous Met productions, of Shostakovich’s “The Nose” and of Berg’s “Lulu”—but here the characterizations are weaker than ever.

It’s instructive to compare this brilliant but somehow hollow affair with “The Head and the Load,” Kentridge’s monumental theatrical tribute to African soldiers who served in the Great War. It played at the Park Avenue Armory at the end of 2018; I saw it in Amsterdam last May. Many of the same visual tropes were employed in that production, yet its episodic, pageantlike structure proved a better counterweight to Kentridge’s thematic obsessions. In “Wozzeck,” his agenda is too often at cross-purposes with that of Berg, for whom psychology was everything.

The one singer who held his own amid the swirl of images was the tenor Gerhard Siegel, who delivered the part of the Captain with cartoonish flair and precisely biting diction. He was, perhaps not incidentally, the cast’s only native German speaker. Mattei and van den Heever both sang superbly, but the blunt force of Büchner’s language didn’t always register. I had similar reservations about the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He showed unerring command of Berg’s devilishly difficult score, but he dispatched it too cleanly and efficiently. His pristine account of the final interlude failed to convey its melancholy collapse into the Mahlerian past. In all, this was a “Wozzeck” lacking in both horror and humanity.

[bostonman]

Kentridge has transplanted “Wozzeck” from the early-nineteenth-century setting of Berg’s libretto to the period of the First World War.

 

I see an odd trend here, with the new Rosenkavalier also set during the same time period, and a bit too heavy on war symbolism for my taste. (The ending is AWFUL.) Maybe eventually everything the Met does will be set during WWI?

[+ WilliamM]

I see an odd trend here, with the new Rosenkavalier also set during the same time period, and a bit too heavy on war symbolism for my taste. (The ending is AWFUL.) Maybe eventually everything the Met does will be set during WWI?

 

The new film 1917 is about The First World War.

 

Hitler is still an obsession with film and TV many decades after his death

 

How many books and films are there about Vietnam?

 

 

Back to World War One. Over one hundred years later Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is essential to understanding the period just before the First World War. Most people have at least some vague idea of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his assassination in Sarajevo and the beginning of the Great War, the most written about subject ever.

Edited January 8, 2020 by WilliamM

[+ g56whiz]

And now back to the OP’s topic. I attended the Live In HD performance on Saturday. The music and acting were thrilling. The production was stunning as well. But hectic nature of that stunning production with multiple images piling one upon another in an endless succession stole the focus away from the performance. I quickly OD’d on the complexity. I felt like I’d been forced wo watch a 2 MTV music video on speed. Why should Kentridge’s constant video barrage, fascinating though it was, blot out attention on a magnificent, gut wrenching performance by the principals? And the orchestra!! All the complexities of Berg’s score were tamed by Seguin’s tight conducting.

 

For me the problem with Kentridge’s concept of Wozzeck was made crystal clear at the end. How is it that a puppet can replace the poignancy of a live child circling a darkened bare stage on his hobby horse singing “Hippity hop” when we know he’s an orphan?

[bostonman]

And now back to the OP’s topic. I attended the Live In HD performance on Saturday. The music and acting were thrilling. The production was stunning as well. But hectic nature of that stunning production with multiple images piling one upon another in an endless succession stole the focus away from the performance. I quickly OD’d on the complexity. I felt like I’d been forced wo watch a 2 MTV music video on speed. Why should Kentridge’s constant video barrage, fascinating though it was, blot out attention on a magnificent, gut wrenching performance by the principals? And the orchestra!! All the complexities of Berg’s score were tamed by Seguin’s tight conducting.

 

For me the problem with Kentridge’s concept of Wozzeck was made crystal clear at the end. How is it that a puppet can replace the poignancy of a live child circling a darkened bare stage on his hobby horse singing “Hippity hop” when we know he’s an orphan?

 

I was unable to see this - but you've underlined the 2 major criticisms I've been hearing - the overbusy nature of the production, and the puppet.

 

In terms of the puppet, though I've always been a defender of the same concept in the Met's current Madama Butterfly, there it fits nicely into the production with an Asian theatrical technique. I'd still prefer a live actor, but I can understand the stylized approach. But I don't think I'll feel the same way about the child in Wozzeck, where I don't see how the puppetry ties into the concept of the piece at all.

 

In terms of the production itself, it sounds like there are two shows going on - one by the singers, the other being the set itself. I'm hearing similar things about the new production of West Side Story - that the visuals distract too much from what the actors are doing. I wish directors would trust their casts to do the work instead.

[+ WilliamM]

And now back to the OP’s topic. I attended the Live In HD performance on Saturday. The music and acting were thrilling. The production was stunning as well. But hectic nature of that stunning production with multiple images piling one upon another in an endless succession stole the focus away from the performance. I quickly OD’d on the complexity. I felt like I’d been forced wo watch a 2 MTV music video on speed. Why should Kentridge’s constant video barrage, fascinating though it was, blot out attention on a magnificent, gut wrenching performance by the principals? And the orchestra!! All the complexities of Berg’s score were tamed by Seguin’s tight conducting.

 

For me the problem with Kentridge’s concept of Wozzeck was made crystal clear at the end. How is it that a puppet can replace the poignancy of a live child circling a darkened bare stage on his hobby horse singing “Hippity hop” when we know he’s an orphan?

t

 

Sounds like what's going on in major league baseball today with firing of many of the Houston Astros leaders.

 

I was planning to see a rebroadcast in a few days, but could travel 90 miles to see it on stage in New York. What do you recommend? Thanks for such an interesting post

[+ g56whiz]

t

 

Sounds like what's going on in major league baseball today with firing of many of the Houston Astros leaders.

 

I was planning to see a rebroadcast in a few days, but could travel 90 miles to see it on stage in New York. What do you recommend? Thanks for such an interesting post

It’s rather ironic. I suspect I’d have appreciated the overall performance more with a weaker cast. Mattei and van der Heever are spectacular (as is the rest of the cast) and while the camera work more often focuses on the unit set as a whole, there are enough close ups to convey the intensity of their acting. At the rebroadcast you can always close your eyes when Kentridge’s production becomes overwhelming. Although experiencing it with 4,000 other captives could be interesting.

 

One other thing about the broadcast: Because Wozzeck is presented without intermission, they postponed those microphone down your throat interviews until the end. Eric Owens was the host. Of the three leads, Mattei, van der Heever and Seguin, Seguin ended up next to Owens where you could readily see that he’s half his height and about a third of his volume.

[+ g56whiz]

I was unable to see this - but you've underlined the 2 major criticisms I've been hearing - the overbusy nature of the production, and the puppet.

 

In terms of the puppet, though I've always been a defender of the same concept in the Met's current Madama Butterfly, there it fits nicely into the production with an Asian theatrical technique. I'd still prefer a live actor, but I can understand the stylized approach. But I don't think I'll feel the same way about the child in Wozzeck, where I don't see how the puppetry ties into the concept of the piece at all.

 

In terms of the production itself, it sounds like there are two shows going on - one by the singers, the other being the set itself. I'm hearing similar things about the new production of West Side Story - that the visuals distract too much from what the actors are doing. I wish directors would trust their casts to do the work instead.

 

I’m not a big Puccini fan and Butterfly is my least favorite. I sorta like puppets: it’s the human interaction with puppets I don’t get. I just can’t suspend my disbelief that much. But I agree: Taymore’s use of the puppet in Butterfly was brilliant and much better than a kid in a sailor suit doing nothing.

[bostonman]

Because Wozzeck is presented without intermission

 

I like that, by the way. Berg wrote it as 3 separate acts (5 scenes each), but I really like it as one act. It keeps the tension in the drama.

[bostonman]

I’m not a big Puccini fan and Butterfly is my least favorite. I sorta like puppets: it’s the human interaction with puppets I don’t get. I just can’t suspend my disbelief that much. But I agree: Taymore’s use of the puppet in Butterfly was brilliant and much better than a kid in a sailor suit doing nothing.

 

Agreed. Except it wasn't Taymor (she did the current Magic Flute) - the Butterfly production was Anthony Minghella.

[+ WilliamM]

I’m not a big Puccini fan and Butterfly is my least favorite. I sorta like puppets: it’s the human interaction with puppets I don’t get. I just can’t suspend my disbelief that much. But I agree: Taymore’s use of the puppet in Butterfly was brilliant and much better than a kid in a sailor suit doing nothing.

 

I may be a bit more forgiving about Wozzeck than you. Clearly seeing in New York is the better choice though.

 

Although it would prefer not to see next Sunday afternoon, I think.

[+ g56whiz]

Agreed. Except it wasn't Taymor (she did the current Magic Flute) - the Butterfly production was Anthony Minghella.

Thank you. I sit corrected (and abased).