Opera
Wozzeck (Festival Hall) Rodelinda; Cosi fan tutte (Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Norwich)
Overpowering eloquence
Michael Tanner
The concert performance of Wozzeck last Saturday at the Festival Hall, with Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting the Philharmonia and a first-rate line-up of singers, was so good that commentary hardly seems necessary. While he can often be dull and Kapellmeisterish in the classics, Dohnanyi comes to vigorous, passionate life with the Second Viennese School, and has long been the finest conductor of Berg's operas, even if he won't sanction the three-act version of Lulu.
He manages to elicit the whole range, from silky strings, spacey, alarming chords of menace, to tuttis of hideous power, while keeping a grasp on the structure which almost renders Berg's inordinately, neurot- ically close organisation of the work audi- ble. So consummate is his grip on the most `advanced' masterpiece of the operatic repertoire which large audiences will turn out for, that he makes it possible to receive its impact and then to reflect on the extent to which it is more than a smart big shock- er, to adapt Joseph Kerman's eternally quoted phrase about Tosca. Kerman him- self, in his helpful pages on Wozzeck in Opera as Drama, raises points which — as with most of his best questions — have never been answered.
Putting his doubts, about what is certain- ly a masterwork, rather differently from him: What is the function of the orchestra in relation to the drama in this opera? It seems, more than in most operas, that while the squalid, painful, sometimes black- ly hilarious set of loosely connected scenes goes on its painful way, the music enlarges the dramatic force beyond the plausible or tolerable, presenting Berg's great-hearted reactions to the misery he is depicting and is fascinated by. Wozzeck only hints at the worries that Lulu highlights. Where does the action end and the commentary begin? Sometimes, even while I was moved almost unendurably by this performance, I won- dered whether it was the suffering or Berg's overpowering eloquence, prompted by it, that was moving me.
As always, it was the tremendous orches- tral interlude before the final scene which raised the question to an extreme degree. This great threnody, even though its musi- cal materials come entirely from the accompaniment to the preceding drama, breaks free of it to display and make us share Berg's generosity of heart and spirit. Rather than focusing our feelings on what we have just witnessed, it gives them an autonomy which is exactly what, at that point, they shouldn't have. And yet, of course, one couldn't bear to be without it. It has integrated itself into a work which it does quite a lot to lessen the impact of, by claiming it all for itself.
As I've suggested, the dramatic perfor- mance — though without any acting at all, except for Graham Clark's brilliant Doctor (though does he sometimes think he's play- ing Mime?) — was almost uniformly superb. The curiously inchoate nature of Wozzeck himself was taken at its face value by Franz Hawlata, part oaf and merely one of us 'poor people', part amateur philoso- pher, brooding more relevantly than the Captain or the Doctor on the human con- dition. Marie was portrayed with all the intensity one has come to expect from Deb- orah Polaski, though one could almost see her straining at the leash to be on the stage. Wozzeck's other tormentor, the Doc- tor, was so beautifully sung by Eric Half- varson one wished one could hear him in something else too, soon. With such an array, the gimmick of having the fashion- able Bostridge singing the Idiot's two lines seemed quite superfluous. Playing the opera straight though, as here, is not so much desirable as essential, and the effect was evidently overwhelming. How superb it would be to have a conspectus of signifi- cant 20th-century operas from such forces.
The annual visit of Glyndebourne Tour- ing Opera to Norwich is a real treat, and this year, with heavily revised productions of Rodelinda and Cosi fan tutte, quite spe- cially so. The Cosi, which was nothing short of a calamity on its home ground, leadenly conducted and lazily produced, benefited in the first place from being, as an inserted note informed us, 'redirected by John Ramster'. That meant in effect that it was given a coherent production, only a few unfortunate touches remaining from Vick's original. It was still set in an unappealing rehearsal room, but the singers knew exact- ly what to do, and it was the right thing, nearly always. They came to life as individ- uals, suffering more than they enjoyed, and evidently, by the end, wishing as fiercely as Mozart makes us do in this opera that they weren't members of the human race. Louis Langree, whom I haven't heard previously, conducted an immaculate account, though even he can't persuade me that including every last number from the opera is a good idea, some of them being clearly sub-stan- dard, others retarding an already leisurely action. Speeds on the whole were brisk, but `Per pieta' was taken at the fashionable snail's pace. All told the evening was just as fine vocally as theatrically, with exception- ally able young singers.
Seeing the second performance, the evening after Rodelinda, was cruel but just to Handel. As soon as the opera proper began — I always find the overture Mozart's weakest — we were in a recognis- able world in which we could understand, share, laugh at and be pained by the people on stage. The contrast with Handel, won- derful as the score of Rodelinda is, is stun- ning in its completeness. What remains of the silent movie with soundtrack by Handel which was this production doesn't help his opera, but whatever the production is like, nothing can conceal the difference between the quicksilver nature of the life of feeling and the marmoreal quality of Handel's cre- ations. The photograph of a marble statue of a veiled woman in the programme book opposite the cast-list is all too accurate. Many solos in the opera are marvels of beauty, sometimes excruciatingly poignant, and the duet for Rodelinda and Bertarido at the end of Act II is music of melting power. The huge work passes quickly, too, even at tempi as moderate as many that Henry Bicket adopted. Yet if, as I believe will turn out to be the case, Rodelinda doesn't secure a firm foothold in the reper- toire as Cosi has (only fairly recently), that will indicate that audiences want less autis- tic creations on stage than Handel's on the whole tend to be. I would encourage anY music lover to see this excellent produc- tion, if only to register for themselves the gap between the genius required for musi- cal drama and the quite different one which Handel's operas manifest.
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