Opera
Wozzeck (Royal Opera House)
Berg betrayed
Michael Tanner
The Royal Opera's new production of Berg's Wozzeck — these are the first performances there since 1984 — is no good at all. There is nothing inadvertent about it, it gives every sign of having been very carefully rehearsed, both musically and dramatically, so that the comprehensive betrayal of the essence of Berg's more-or-less masterpiece is the result of a combination of perversity, stupidity and conceit. The fault lies primarily in Keith Warner's production, but Antonio Pappario continues, as in the strikingly successful Ariadne auf Naxos which opened the season, to show himself as a loyal member of a co-ordinated team.
To check my impression of dismal disappointment in the theatre (I was at the third performance) I listened to the broadcast, and the music alone had a somewhat more favourable impact, but what was more interesting was to hear Keith Warner talking about the work and his approach to it, both before and, briefly, at the conclusion of the relay. What he said was more eloquent testimony than his most ferocious opponent could have wished to his full possession of the attributes I noted above. (I might add that Radio Three's current mode of operatic presentation, whereby the narration of the plot is sandwiched between large dollops of producer's gloss and, perhaps even worse, a kind of digest of the opera-to-come's musical content is offered, is something to be avoided: in this case, we got not only the stunning unison B which the orchestra plays after the murder of Marie, but also slices of the climactic interlude just before the brief final scene — useless to anyone unfamiliar with the opera, infuriating for anyone who knows it.)
What Warner said indicated that he regards it as his job to write a commentary on the work and then to see how he can incorporate it into what the audience witnesses, by any amount of distortion and manipulation, though he hasn't yet got round to changing the text, one wonders why not. When the librettist-composer is as thorough as Berg in his indications of what the action, both on the small and the large scale, is to be, it seems impertinent to ignore every last direction, but that is what Warner unapologetically does — not, I think, in order to reveal latent conflicts in dramatic construction, but just to clarify what is already as lucid as anything in the history of drama.
I don't mean to say that Wozzeck doesn't leave one with any questions. Is Wozzeck simply an ordinary downtrodden man driven beyond endurance, or is he paranoiac and himself in part responsible for the disasters that overtake him? Is Marie a shallow slut, or is her infatuation with the Drum Major an understandable attempt to bring a little enjoyment into what has become a drab and even frightening life? And so on. Yet to the extent that reflecting on the drama leads us to ask such questions, what a production should do is to set the action before us so vividly that they are sharpened.
What Warner, in his blitheness, has done, is to interpret the absolutely obvious and leave the obscure unattended to. So, taking note that Marie refers to 'our little corner of the world', he indeed allots her and her lover and child the front left-hand corner of the stage, as their living quarters; while the main part of the stage suggests a hospital or laboratory. In the pre-relay exposition Warner commented on how, as a patient in a hospital, one feels like a specimen available for experiment. A familiar point, so familiar that to build the whole production round it is insulting. Wozzeck is subject to the lunatic experiments of the Doctor, the jibes and mad speculations of the Captain, and the adultery of his mistress. But to show him actually in a lab, with large glass tanks, in one of which he drowns and remains pickled, as it were, shows such infantile literal-mindedness that it prevents any response to the drama by offering an analysis of it instead of a presentation.
Wozzeck, for all the famous fussiness of its musical construction, is a work which normally makes a savagely immediate impact. Whatever thoughts one may have afterwards, the raw intensity of the harrowing progression of the plot means that by the time one gets to Berg's huge orchestral lament for his pitiable central figure one offers no resistance.
The work is as obviously as possible a central contribution to Central European Expressionism, and the idiom of its staging is as determined as that of its music. As soon as one starts noticing odd features of the production because they are odd, first of all there is incongruity and then no context within which even that could be dis
cerned. So at Covent Garden we had Marie's child sitting at a table well before the opera began, and throughout. At the end, instead of following his friends off to see his mother's body, he walked slowly to centre stage and then turned and gave us all a long, meaningful stare. Just before, the children's voices calling him had come, amplified, from all sides of the auditorium, Meanwhile his father had spent the last few minutes wholly submerged in another of those tanks.
The musical performance was immaculate, the orchestra as usual on wonderful form. None of it seared, though. Pappano is so sympathetic an accompanist that mostly the orchestra is far too quiet; though with a singer whose voice is as softgrained as Matthias Goerne's there are admittedly problems. The grotesque roles make the most impact, with a demented Graham Clark and lugubrious Eric Halfvarson a vintage Captain and Doctor, begging for admittance to a decent production. Katarina Dalayman sings Marie well, probably could be moving in the part. But I can't bring myself to think through the performers in much detail, when anything they did was doomed by the context. I had thought Wozzeck was one of the great indestructibles, but once more a modern producer has taught me how wrong it is to think anything proof against his determination.
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