Berg’s Wozzeck at the Met – sensational, mind-bending, ground-breaking
The production of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, playing at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, is sensational, mind-bending, ground-breaking. As ground-breaking as Berg’s confrontational atonal style was when it burst into an unsuspecting, post-romantic world in Berlin 1925. A Berlin still reeling from the aftermath of the First World War, trying to cope with citizens back from trench horrors.
Why ground-breaking? Because producer, William Kentridge, a South African Johannesburg based artist, has delivered a production that not only sizzles with life and new insights. He takes the medium of opera to a completely new level. “It’s Opera, but not as we know it, Jim”.
Think about it. He was the guy who last year produced the Met’s The Nose, Dmitri Shostakovich’s first opera. Anyone who can make a graphically presented nose the star of the show has some magic up his sleeve. It didn’t really have a singing role.
Kentridge is a serious man, probably the most proficient artist in the medium of charcoal drawing alive today. It is almost no exaggeration to say that he has assumed the mantle of Albrecht Dürer, the 16th century German painter and printmaker.
Dürer’s complex, dramatic woodcut prints depicting chivalry, demons, fantastical beasts and tortured personalities, all in mind-boggling detail considering they had to be painstakingly etched on wood to carry the ink – and back to front – were the wonders of the age. If invited to “Come up and see my etchings”, by Dürer, only a dullard would have declined.
In a sense, Kentridge stands on Dürer’s shoulders, as he has added filmic structure to the medium, making shapes, words and charcoal images bound and leap with added meaning, often at bewildering speed. It reminds of that iconic film, shot from below a glass canvas, of Jackson Pollock drip-painting.
Two brush types are used – “good” brushes, new ones with a firm point for bold strokes and “bad” brushes, old familiars with worn, splayed bristles that provide impressionistic detail. At a stroke, a panoply of branches can be added to a well-defined tree trunk. Seeing Kentridge in action, the deft thrusts seem almost miraculous.
He is keen to explain that his art is founded on the depiction of peripheral thoughts and associations, without which an event or the motives of an actor cannot be fully understood. That insight is what he now brings to the stage.
Normally, I would sceptically reject this as pretentious bollocks, but in this Wozzeck, every character took on a deeper meaning, because of the turbulent setting. Events were placed in a more comprehensible context. The impact of the action was honed to stiletto point. An already powerful opera became a devastating experience. I was whizmagoricalised.
This is an inadequate attempt to describe what I was looking at, but here goes. The background, constantly flickering like a silent movie across the whole rear stage, was a rapidly changing tableau, composed of a vast array of simultaneously projected images – mostly black and white, but with an occasional blood red slash – depicting war scenes, news headlines, charcoal figures, artefacts, maps and more. They pulsed, merged, flared, faded, sometimes shrank, or expanded to swallow the whole screen.
This is a medium Kentridge has perfected over a career spanning forty years. He disarmingly admits he was a late starter as an artist, having first failed as an actor and conventional filmmaker; “I was so bad as an actor, I was reduced to an artist … And I made the best of it”. A lecture he delivered, “Peripheral Thinking” available on The Yale University YouTube channel, gets to the heart of the matter.
Worth watching. Here’s a link.
I approached with caution. Backdrop scenery in opera is, well, scenery, providing a static context in which singers wander about doing their stuff. Even the famously monumental moving lever set of the Met’s latest Wagner Ring Cycle changed shape only between scenes. Was Kentridge trying to steal the show from the protagonists?
Friends, with a deeper knowledge of opera than I, had complained that the whole affair was too “busy” and distracting. At first, I was inclined to agree, but quickly the Kentridge circus revealed its intended purpose, an ever-changing thematic backdrop, in tune with the onstage action. Familiarisation meant the distraction grew less. As he himself might say, “peripheral”.
Opera matters to me because it is a medium that combines all art forms – music, visual arts, dance, theatre, often overwhelming all the senses. To these, Kentridge has added a new, powerful force – sharpened psychological insight.
An example of how it works: Wozzeck is a soldier damaged by the experience of war. When he sings of this, the backdrop fades into dancing maps of trenches, advances, retreats, shell-holes, barbed war, triumphalist newspaper headlines. All the futile paraphernalia of the First World War which has helped to break him. The producer has turned on a brain scan.
Let’s face it. Wozzeck is hard work. Don’t plan on humming the tunes en-route home on the Subway. It may be an important endeavour to read the mind of a put-upon German soldier post-First World War, but it can’t really be played for laughs. Come to think of it, it is important. Unspotted and unchecked, these soldiers – pushy corporals especially – could up and start a second world war.
I shall take the detail of the plot as read. Cavil time. There are some essential elements any producer needs to get across. First, is Wozzeck’s (sung by Swedish baritone Peter Mattei) subordinated position. He is a hard worker, trying to provide for his common law wife, Marie, South African soprano Elza van den Heever and their illegitimate child.
To do this he becomes a modern “gig” worker – barber, shaving his Hauptman (Captain), sung by seasoned German tenor, Gerhard Siegel; medical guinea pig, donating urine for the military doctor, sung by American bass-baritone Christian Van Horn – who I saw play a mesmerising Faust at the Met last season – a bonkers new-age experimenter – “Ve vill overcome death, Wozzeck”.
Why Kentridge chose to translate Wozzeck’s shaving ritual into showing movies to his Hauptman was beyond me. The shaving is an iconic, submissive, demeaning chore. Showing movies isn’t. Except, that it explained all the action unfolding on the scenery. If that was the reason it was a clunky fix that failed.
My other gripe is that Wozzeck’s fourth job is collecting thatching reeds from the riverbeds, where he eventually dies, slipping into the quagmire trying to recover the knife used to kill the unfaithful Marie. It is a foreboding passage in the opera, a flash forward to the bitter ending. Instead, Wozzeck and a comrade in arms seemed to be collecting old chairs to take to a jumble sale. I didn’t get it. These are minor quibbles only, but they niggled.
In front of Kentridge’s projection we were treated to a set designed by Sabine Theunissen, a Belgian set designer with a record of successful co-operation with Kentridge. She is setting a Kentridge show at London’s Royal Academy in autumn 2021. One for the diary.
On first sight is seemed the set had unexpectedly collapsed before curtain-up. I was glad I was sitting in row E, because close examination revealed vast reservoirs of meaning and clever allusions. It did look at first glance like a massive IKEA project which had been supplied minus the screws. Instead, it was a complex, clever construct.
Action moved from one part of the set to another, marked by a change in lighting and variations in Kentridge’s dancing backdrop. No clunky scene changes, so attention was riveted. Passages across the set were on gangway planks recalling First World War trench duckboards. War was never far away. The Doctor operated his surgery from an isolated armoire. His experiments were not really fit for the world. The child was represented by a puppet, which looked well, apocalyptic, with goggling eyes. It took centre stage as Wozzeck’s hand slipped under the mud and was more moving, because of the mute acceptance of fate. Left alone, mother murdered, father drowned.
Maestro of the maelstrom was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s Music Director, now half-way through a second successful season. He seems to have attracted an annoying coterie of hallooing yob supporters in the stalls. His appearance occasioned an unfamiliar chorus of whoops and hollers. I hope the puerile adulation fades away, as I fear it may have little to do with his conducting ability.
His interpretation of Berg was searing, his slashes of orchestral colour as vivid as those on Kentridge’s set. Berg’s atonal music melts into beautiful, conventional tonal passages at key moments of the plot, mostly when the characters are in self revelatory mode. Nézet-Séguin managed these transitions effortlessly and sensitively.
This co-production with the Salzburg Festival, the Canadian Opera Company and Opera Australia will have a long life. I encourage anyone who thinks Wozzeck too depressing by half, Berg’s music too challenging by two thirds and – all things considered – would prefer a night out at the local slaughterhouse, to give the opera a second chance. That’s what I used to think. Kentridge’s production has made me think again.