Author : Jos Hermans
All his life Alban Berg will be caught between his two great examples : Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Wagner. Schoenberg would renounce Wagner from the late 1920s onwards, so Berg would try to hide his love for Wagner from him. Whenever Schoenberg makes a visit he makes sure that no scores of Wagner or Strauss are lying around. There is a cartoon from 1909 showing Berg, sitting at the piano, playing through the score of Parsifal while a book by Schoenberg lies on the floor.
The score of Wozzeck, masterpiece of expressionism, oscillates between the purest chamber music and the explosive violence of high romanticism. That it abandons the familiar bond with tonality is a path prepared by Wagner with "Tristan und Isolde. Philippe Jordan sees the tonal principle of 'free atonality' as a phase of liberation and his Vienna Philharmonic are equally motivated to prove why Wozzeck has become the most influential work of 20th century operatic literature. Snippets of Britten's Peter Grimes and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth come wafting at you. For an hour and a half, the brass, the xylophones, the timpani, the double basses will compete for your attention, so much so that the orchestral highlight of the third act, the "Invention über eine Tonart" almost pales in comparison. It is a musical reading that highlights Berg's score in all its precious detail. Let that be the main asset of this production.
Anyone who saw Simon Stone's La Traviata will immediately understand that combining a rotating stage with video would also offer interesting possibilities for Wozzeck, a piece that, with its 15 relatively short scenes, requires rapid scene changes and suggests a book of images to illustrate the hallucinations of the title hero. Stone, however, does it this time without the use of video. Perhaps the budget of a Traviata is greater than that of a Wozzeck with only 5 performances.
Stone takes the play completely out of its military biotope. This is in contrast to William Kentridge who made the Great War the scenographic centerpiece of his tiresome reading for Salzburg. Post-traumatic stress is alien to Stone's Wozzeck. Like Christoph Loy (Frankfurt, 2016), he feels that Wozzeck is pushed into the victim role a little too easily. Self-pity does not find its way into Stone's acting direction. Like Loy, he is guided by Johann Christian Clarus, the doctor who examined the historical Wozzeck at the time and explained his disturbed perception as anxiety psychosis. Nor is the cultivated singer of lieder Christian Gerhaher the man to dismiss his character as a dunce. His Wozzeck is no ‘Hundsfott’. When he gives vent to his hallucinations in the second scene, you'd be forgiven for thinking that he takes on the allure of a conspiracy theorist.
"Wozzeck is undoubtedly a multiple victim. But - and this is important - the murder of Marie makes him a perpetrator, and this act cannot be inferred from his role as victim! For there are plenty of people in similar situations who nevertheless do not become violent," Stone believes. The Captain and the Doctor are toned down in their usual caricatured characterization. Stone lets us dwell for an hour and a half in the midst of the Viennese precariat that evolves from scene to scene in the hamster wheel of his revolving stage. The stage managers must have had their hands full loading and unloading sets and props, out of sight for us, the spectators.
There is not a single dull moment in this performance but does it convince? Not entirely. In a nutshell, Wozzeck is a poor outsider, exploited by his superiors, who gets overexcited and stabs the mother of his child to death. With Stone, the focus is almost exclusively on the jealousy that makes him a perpetrator.
Like a Figaro, he shaves the Captain in a barber shop only to join the long line of unemployed people in front of the ‘Arbeitsamt’. Marie meets her drum major, a cocky policeman, at a sausage stand. The doctor is one of those self-righteous experts we've come to know well over the past two years, gloating in his experimentation frenzy. Wozzeck doesn't get a syringe in his behind but a probe for an intestinal examination. It's hard to see how the Wozzecks can be the "Arme Leut" of the libretto when their three-room apartment is equipped with microwave, refrigerator, modern washing machine, king-size bed. The Captain and the Doctor have their philosophical talk about time on steppers in a gym. The inn scene is a colorful carnivalesque costume party with brightly colored animal costumes, popular among Flemish politicians. Wozzeck is the gray mouse. The musicians on stage are very well integrated. The sleeping soldiers mutate to homeless people, humming away their intoxication in subway station Simmering. The interludes are also stuffed with interesting visuals. For example, we see Wozzeck spooning out a can of beans in tomato sauce sitting next to a full pallet of canned goods. The strongest of these interludes is when we see Wozzeck as a spectator watching three of his wife's bed scenes that push him over the edge.
Only in the third act are the walls of this carousel torn down and do we switch to a wasteland, a nature island shrouded in eerie atmospheric light where disaster will take place among the metre-high bushes. Wozzeck dumps Marie's corpse into a sewer in which he himself will eventually end up. When the police hoist his corpse from the sewer up to 5 meters above the stage, the overwhelming orchestral epilogue rages through the auditorium like a requiem. A little further on his little son is playing with a fire engine. Just before the score fades out completely and the lights are dimmed for good, he puts his hands before his eyes in alarm. Wozzeck Junior realizes that he too will have to eat the beans.
Both vocally and scenically, Christian Gerhaher portrays a more convincing Wozzeck than in Zürich (2015). At the time, however, he was suffering from bronchitis. However, he cannot match his great example Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in terms of clarity of articulation. Anja Kampe is credible in her tornness. She puts more effort into expression than beauty of sound. Jörg Schneider sings a flawless Captain, the switching to head voice, the laughs and the rhythmic coughing fits he does excellently. Sean Panikkar as the drum major and Dmitry Belosselskiy as the doctor stand out for surprisingly good intelligibility in German.
Simon Stone's next stunt is Lucia di Lammermoor in New York (Cinema Kinepolis, May 21). When Stone ventures into bel canto in the company of the lovely Nadine Sierra even yours truly will be watching Donizetti.