Opera review: A magnificently creepy Wozzeck at the Met

Wozzeck

Music by Alban Berg

Libretto by Berg (based on Georg Büchner’s play from 1837)

Conducted by Yannick Nézat-Séguin

Production by William Kentridge

Starring Petter Mattei and Elza van den Heever

Metropolitan Opera NYC

January 16, 2020

Seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s magnificent production of Wozzeck (1922) made me regret the premature deaths of two early twentieth century composers, Gustav Mahler (dead at 51 in 1911) and Alban Berg (dead at 50 in 1935). One generation apart, these two composers were best able to use the new changes in musical language to ideal expressive effect. The atonal revolution of that era attributed to Arnold Schoenberg is sometimes described as a revolution, but it was not. Ever since the orderly progressions of keys in early Haydn and Mozart, composers had been pushing against tidy, well- organized music theory. Mozart and Beethoven began blurring the tonal order in their late works, and the romantics like Liszt and Wagner pushed it forward rapidly into “romantic” harmony. By the time of Schoenberg’s “revolution”, Richard Strauss, Mahler and Zemlinsky were tugging at the very bounds of tonality. Schoenberg just took the last step in dumping tonality altogether. But this came at a cost. Atonality (especially Schoenberg’s replacement system of dodecaphonic music) was never an easy sell to the public, especially when it was put forward as a theoretic end in itself (exciting to revolutionary academicians more than to the public), rather than serving some larger expressive purpose. Said another way, why did this new harmonic theory generate better music? The genius of Mahler and Berg was that they figured out how to use the dissolution of tonality to create exciting, dynamic works that reflected the rapidly changing social structures of the early twentieth century, when aristocracy gave way to capitalism, communism and totalitarianism.

Wozzeck was composed during World War I, interrupted by Alban Berg’s traumatic service in the Austrian army. It was based on a visionary play by Georg Büchner from the 1830's. The plot deals with the hapless Wozzeck, a laborer who is degraded by the aristocracy, experimented upon for money by an amoral doctor, and cheated upon by his wife Marie, with whom he has had an illegitimate child. He finally kills both Marie and himself, with the child abandoned, seemingly oblivious to the tragedy around him--the opera ends with the child playing on his hobby-horse, singing “hop hop”, after hearing about his mother’s death. While the music is largely atonal, there are spans of soaring, recognizable melody, dance rhythms, and even conventional arias evoking older operas (e.g. a prayer scene for Marie before her death and a raucous drinking song in a tavern). The genius of the opera is the juxtaposition of the old and new, a tension between forms perfectly suited to the grimness of the subject, and of the postwar era in Germany. While the music’s structures is complex, this does not often directly communicate itself to the listener, who is instead caught up in drama. An example of Berg’s genius is the “Variation on a Note” that comes in the orchestra after Wozzeck strangles Marie. The entire orchestra twice performs a long single note (unison or octave) crescendo from ppp to fff, ending with a crashing minor chord each time, then proceeding immediately  to a tavern with an out-of-tune piano playing dance tunes. Wow. That’s drama just like Verdi or Wagner.

This production by South African director William Kentridge, who also directed the Met’s excellent Lulu took the logical step of setting the opera during World War I (the time of its composition), not in the 1830's. The stage is covered with rubble, as in a bombed-out city. There was extensive use of archival photography and film: legless soldiers, deformed faces, beggars from the streets, grotesque animations. Chillingly, Marie’s child was depicted by a macabre puppet wearing rags and a gas mask, manipulated by an ominous nurse (see picture below). The famous ending scene of the playing child was staged not as a child hopping on a hobby horse, but instead limping on a crutch. The huge Met stage was used to excellent effect, with towering projections of zeppelins, air raids, searchlights, and artillery shells. This opera is often staged as a claustrophobic, inward drama of Wozzeck’s decaying mind. Here the director chose the opposite portrayal of mental decay—more of a schizophrenic grandeur with huge hallucinations portrayed in vivid colors. This was all excellently in the service of the music, which veers between austere playing of 1-2 instruments and huge symphonic grandeur on the scope of Mahler and Richard Strauss, much as Wozzeck’s mind veers between obsession on his surroundings and weird visions of fire in the universe.

The musical and dramatic production was superb. Yannick Nézat-Séguin, the newly appointed Met music director, conducted a dramatic, lush performance that connected the score more to Mahler than to later serialist atonal composers. It made me see how Berg was the logical successor to Mahler, and a composer that, had he lived longer, might have prevented the break between composers and popular taste that dominated much of the twentieth century. Swedish baritone Peter Mattei was perfect in projecting Wozzeck’s haplessness and mysticism, and South African soprano Elza van den Heever both negotiated Marie’s difficult part well and expressed just the right mix of maternal tenderness and amoral disregard for her husband.

After seeing this superb Wozzeck, I cannot think of an opera better suited to its times, or whose music better encapsulates its era (perhaps The Marriage of Figaro and La Traviata are also candidates here). This production makes me regard Wozzeck as the best of the twentieth century operas, and the finest encapsulation, perhaps alongside Picasso’s Guernica, of the depredations of the twentieth century.