This past weekend KQED presented its first broadcast on an opera originally selected for this season’s The Met: Live in HD. That selection was the performance of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which took place this past January 11. The host for the broadcast was bass-baritone Eric Owens, who explained to the audience that the opera consisted of fifteen scenes performed without interruption. As a result, the usual “background” features were restricted to the very beginning and the very end of the program.
Wozzeck was Berg’s Opus 7, the first of the two operas he composed and the only one that he completed. His libretto was based on Woyzeck, a play that Georg Büchner had not completed at the time of his death. Indeed, while there was an underlying narrative of betrayal and murder, Büchner had not even ordered the scenes that he had written before he died. As a result the overall structure of the narrative owes as much to Berg as it does to Büchner.
About a month ago this site discussed Berg’s meticulous attention to structural detail that could be found in his “Kammerkonzert” (chamber concerto), which he scored for piano and violin soloists with an ensemble of thirteen different wind instruments. Berg competed the “Kammerkonzert” in 1925, which was also the year in which Wozzeck was first performed. (Berg had completed the opera score in 1922.) The opera is very much a structure of structures and reflections. Each of the three acts consists of five scenes. Berg described the first act as consisting of five “character pieces,” the five key individuals that drive the title character’s progress through the plot line. The second act is a symphony in five movements, each of which has a conventional structure: sonata form, invention and fugue on three themes, largo, scherzo, and rondo. The final act is a series of six inventions, one for each of the scenes, along with an orchestral interlude before the final scene.
Prior to the first performance of Wozzeck, Berg gave a lecture that explained these structural elements in meticulous detail. At the conclusion of his talk, he advised his audience to come back the next night to see the opera and forget about all the details he had just discussed. Nevertheless, in the wake of that lecture, Berg scholarship has teased out a wealth of further details, enough to fill a book; and, if fact, such a book was written by George Perle.
Nevertheless, Berg’s advice was as significant as it was valuable. At the foundation of all of those details is a chilling narrative of the dire consequences of abject poverty. Indeed, the most significant motif of the opera is sung by Wozzeck himself in the very first scene, setting the words “Wir arme Leut” (we poor folks). Given that Wozzeck is the Austrian equivalent of a “buck private,” forced to shave his Captain in order to earn a few more coins, he definitely knows whereof he speaks. In the second scene he is gathering sticks with fellow soldier Andres as another source of coins. These coins are brought to Marie, the unmarried mother of his child, in the third scene. The fourth scene presents another source of coins in which Wozzeck is effectively a “lab rat” for a doctor interested only in his own reputation as a brilliant scientist. While we do not see Wozzeck in the final scene, we see Marie seduced by the Drum Major that leads the regiment’s daily parade down the town’s main street. The five movements of the second act then follow Wozzeck’s growing awareness of Marie’s infidelity, concluding with his taking a beating from the Drum Major in his barracks. The final act then presents Wozzeck’s jealous murder of Marie, his own drowning in the lake that holds both Marie’s body and his knife, and a mercilessly stark life-goes-on epilogue in the final scene.
The Met assembled an impressive cast to deal with the wide diversity of characters through which this narrative unfolds. Baritone Peter Mattei sang the title role. During the first act we then encounter tenor Gerhard Siegel as the Captain, tenor Andrew Staples as Andres, soprano Elza van den Heever as Marie, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as the doctor, and tenor Christopher Ventris as the Drum Major. The staging by Gary Halvorson brought a keen understanding of the narrative to the realization of each of the fifteen scenes, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin presented the full richness of Berg’s score in the orchestra pit.
An example of Kentridge’s plethora of distractions from the substance of Berg’s Wozzeck (from the Wozzeck Live in HD Web page)
If this was all that was necessary to account for this production, it could have been taken as one of the most perceptive interpretations I had ever experienced. Unfortunately, just about every detail of Halvorson’s direction was mercilessly overwhelmed by a plethora of projections and other visual distractions created by William Kentridge. Readers may recall that I wrote about the Blu-ray and DVD recordings of the Metropolitan Opera production of Berg’s Lulu, for which Kentridge provided not only the visual design but also the stage direction. Indeed, my “first contact” with Kentridge took place here in San Francisco at the very first production in Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera. He provided the visuals for a performance of Franz Schubert’s D. 911 Winterreise (winter journey) sung by baritone Matthias Goerne. The conclusion of that spectacle left me wondering whether or not Schubert’s name should have been left on the program. My overall experience then is that anything not involved with the visuals that Kentridge creates is viewed by him as secondary, if not tertiary.
Nevertheless, Halvorson definitely deserves a generous number of points for trying to get beyond Kentridge’s self-importance. Almost every scene was enacted in a relatively limited amount of space. The good news was that, frequently, the camera would home in on that space and spare the viewer from the distractions of all of the projections that dwarfed that area in the overall view. Nevertheless, the overall sense was one of disturbing clutter. This may have been Kentridge’s attempt to account for the pathology of Wozzeck’s mind; but, as far as I am concerned, Berg did a much better job of character development with his music. In my own book for cardinal virtues and vices, anything that distracts attention from Berg’s music is a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
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