OPERA: Thought it was a hedgehog
Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Royal Opera House, 15th October 2002
Conductor: Antonio Pappano; Director: Keith Warner;
Cast including Mathias Goerne (Wozzeck), Katarina Dalayman (Marie), Kim Begley (Drum Major), Graham Clark (Captain), Eric Halfvarson (Doctor).
Berg’s wonderful opera is a complete closed system. The doomed Wozzeck, we all know, moves inevitably to catastrophe and death, but what is often ignored is that everyone else, including his tormentors the Doctor, the Captain and the Drum-Major, is on tramlines as well. The intensely worked score is an encyclopaedia of musical forms, which drives and wraps the concise libretto and all its personnel alike to crisis and then onwards, after the profound orchestral epilogue, to a new cycle. What Wozzeck the opera needs, then, is a conductor with architectural confidence, an orchestra that can deliver clarity and precision, a team of brave and committed singers, and a production that is content to express the wealth which is latently in the score and the libretto, rather than to add its own unnecessary layers of interpretation.
At Covent Garden, in the first production of the opera there in nearly twenty years, the audience gets excellent or reasonable service in all these departments except the latter. The production is in fact infuriatingly bad, the most irritating conceitedness the Opera House has given us since its last unlamented Ring. We are offered a set (Stefanos Lazaridis is the guilty party) which resembles a second-rate Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition being shown in a condemned public lavatory. Business with burning model aeroplanes, people falling over, bondage and wandering art-installations simply interfere with and dilute — and almost destroy — the relentless momentum which Berg offers for the taking to the sensitive dramaturge. With Wozzeck himself ending up as a Damian Hirst exhibit, it was all my wife could do to stop me booing when the director, Keith Warner, appeared onstage at the curtain calls.
When Wozzeck is fantasising to his friend Andres in Scene II, (in a forest here represented by a glass case containing plastic toadstools à la Jeff Koons — thank God, I suppose, that we didn’t have garden gnomes to go with them), he tells him that ‘a head rolls around here in the evenings, one day a bloke picked it up, thought it was a hedgehog — three days and three nights later, he was laid out in his coffin’. (I translate freely). Heaven forfend that such a fate should await Mr. Warner and his colleagues, but they have made the same mistake: Wozzeck the opera is a thinking, intricate mechanism, not a cute little plaything. The distractions with which they have loaded it are intermittently irritating and almost fatal to the work’s cumulative impact.
Having got all that off my chest I can proceed to the better ñ or anyway not-so-bad-news.
This is Pappano’s second outing as Musical Director at Covent Garden, and conducting Wozzeck at this early stage of his intendancy is a bold move. Having heard him on many occasions over recent years at La Monnaie in Brussels, I was just slightly disappointed by his reading. The clarity and the overall shape were fine (although not always supported, alas, by precision from the orchestra), but overall the music came over more strongly in the frenetic passages than the reflective — the most successful scene of all perhaps was in the tavern after the murder of Marie, with an excellently fluid on-stage band, and sterling chorus-work in the hunting-song (not to mention first-class contributions from the Apprentices and the Idiot). We can hope — in fact I think we can expect — that confidence will grow over future performances, with more defined variety of pace. I recommend by the way shutting your eyes during the final orchestral interlude, which is deeply felt and conveyed, to avoid being distracted by wondering how Goerne is breathing submerged in his water tank.
I was also more broadly uneasy about Mathias Goerne in the title role. He is on record as saying, ‘I like to look to the operas from the 20th century where the most important part is in the main character, and that's partly why Wozzeck interests me; he is so individual, so defined a character’. I find it difficult to sympathise with this viewpoint. Isn’t it the message of Büchner in his original play, and reinforced by Berg’s treatment, that Wozzeck, when we first meet him, has already had much of his individuality eroded, and has the remainder almost clinically removed by the end of it? Wozzeck’s pathos is that he is reactive; he is powerless to assert his own wishes and desires against those of the Doctor, the Captain, the Drum-Major, Marie. We respond to his collapse, not to his individuality. Thus in the play and the opera, Wozzeck the man is not so much a main character but a punchbag, an incarnation of the archetypal victim of the malevolence of the society he inhabits. This view predicates ensemble playing by the characters, rather than a main character whose fate or actions influence the others. Indeed most of them are hardly aware he exists, so engrossed are they by their own manic obsessions, a fact underlined by the production.
Perhaps this opposition of intentions accounts for the rather subdued effect of Goerne’s performance as a whole. The quality and range of the voice are fine for the part, but I was just yearning for a bit more passion in Wir arme Leut' or Wozzeck’s terrifying insight ‘Man is an abyss: I get dizzy looking in’. Maybe Goerne needs to develop a rougher edge for the part to make it truly his. Dalayman’s Marie was also accurate but lacking a finesse of warmth and emotion; or perhaps it was just that she kept her spectacles on that made her seem a bit clinical. The comedy roles all went down well, but they are virtually fireproof if attacked with vigour. I especially enjoyed Halfvarson’s Doctor, (who looked eerily like the BBC’s former legal correspondent, Joshua Rozenberg).
I can’t help feeling that in a less tricksy production, the confidence of singers, orchestra and conductor might have really gelled and we could all have had a more powerful experience. Even though the last scene of all was brutally mishandled by the director, I was still gutted by emotional surge as Wozzeck’s child sets forth into his thankless world — all credit, by the way, to 8-year old Jacob Moriarty who is on stage throughout (and who I think is the son of my children’s former music-teacher). This after all is what all we wealthy culture-vultures are forking out £50 a seat for — the essence of misery and disillusion.
Allen Buchler, October 17, 2002 12:45 PM