Betraying Berg
Michael Tanner
Wozzeck Royal Opera House
When Berg’s great tragic masterpiece Wozzeck opened at the Royal Opera in 2002 in Keith Warner’s production, I was more angry and depressed than I have ever been in an opera house. The utter betrayal of everything that Berg, who included in his score extremely detailed specifications as to how it should be staged, indicated, to convey the intense pain of his vision of degradation, made me feel that it should be possible to instigate criminal proceedings on behalf of works and composers subject to such gross abuse. Warner, I felt, treated Wozzeck just as everyone in the opera treats Wozzeck, but whereas Berg writes an overpowering elegy for him, there was nothing that the work could do except suffer at the hands of this butchery, in common with many masterworks of the operatic repertoire. Only a stern sense of critical duty, and a feeling that I may have missed something, since the production received such warm general praise, led me to go and see it in this its first revival. The production remains the same in most respects, certainly in its broad outlines, though there are a few changes, I think, and they struck me as being for the better. It is, nonetheless, deplorable for the most part, since it is built on a ‘concept’ which ensures alienation from the action.
Set in off-white panelling, the suggestion is of a laboratory, though on the left of the stage there is the small accommodation of Marie and her child. The child, played with astonishing aplomb by the eightor nineyear-old Remi Manzi, is on stage as we enter the auditorium, and throughout the entire action. He witnesses anal sex between his mother and the Drum Major; he fails to toddle off at the end to see his mother’s body, because he is already absorbed in looking at his father’s corpse in one of the four tanks that constitute the most prominent scenery — so those chilling children’s cries at the end, as they play hopscotch, and someone says to him, ‘You, your mother is dead,’ make no effect. There are no children on stage, no hopscotch; only amplified voices coming from various remote parts of the theatre, which quite fail to make the pathetic and sinister effect that they have always, in my experience, done.
It is hard to see, since Wozzeck is so archetypal a piece of Austro-German expressionism, why the sets (by Stefanos Lazaridis) and the action shouldn’t be congruent with the music. I suppose the answer is that that is how they have always been, so we are in danger of becoming complacent, etc., etc. But in respect of this opera that is just not true. Although it is over 80 years old, and its impact, if not muted by impertinence, is direct and shattering, it is still sold as a modern opera, with reduced ticket prices — the house was gratifyingly full on the first night.
It isn’t that Warner has purged it of brutality or squalor, but he has framed those elements in a way that fatally lessens their force. Instead of the oppressive atmosphere of the various rooms in which Wozzeck is subjected to his humiliations, alternating with the even more eerie scenes that take place outside, we are stuck with this large anti-claustrophobic space, admittedly with a few views or visions at the back, from time to time, and a large black object that periodically descends from the flies. But clearly we are mainly meant to concentrate on the glass tanks, one with toadstools, which suggests that we are watching some kind of experiment. Of course, Wozzeck is hideously and ludicrously the victim of the Doctor’s experiments, but that is just an element in the total ghastliness.
The musical side of things has improved, so much so that it is well worth going if you can get a seat with restricted or preferably wholly occluded view. Daniel Harding conducts a Straussian rather than a Wagnerian account of the score: the music is more onomatopoeic than expressive, and the grand final interlude, Berg’s instructions as to how we should respond, is angry rather than tormented and anguished. The timpani have a great time, the strings play with seductive sweetness, there isn’t a lot of depth, as there was in Wales a year ago under Jurowski; but it is thrilling.
Johan Reuter’s Wozzeck is magnificently sung, he is a good presence, but there is some lack of pain in his performance. Susan Bullock, world-famous Isolde, Brünnhilde and Salome, makes her Royal Opera debut under inauspicious circumstances, the direction prohibiting the usual lacerating effect of the Bible reading, but she is still an impressive artist. Graham Clark continues to be a ruined neurotic of a Captain, Kurt Rydl a gleefully sadistic Doctor. Given a different production, they and their colleagues could be almost an ideal team. As it is, their efforts are all but hamstrung by a figure who deserves a place in the opera rather than outside it as its director.
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