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Dan Coren
Hearing Alban Berg's Wozzeck performed this week was an appalling experience.
To be sure, this Curtis production was superb. It was as well acted as it was sung; if you knew just a little German, the English supertitles, while a little too super for convenient reading, made every word of the German libretto easy to follow. The Perelman's acoustics, so unsatisfactory just a few weeks ago for the Brahms Requiem, were perfectly suited to this opera's intimate vocal and orchestral chaos. I'd never heard Wozzeck before, and I suppose I should be glad to have finally done so. But I have no desire ever to hear it again.
Please let the record show that I'm not a man of stodgy musical tastes. On this site I've waxed enthusiastic about some very recent music, written with enthusiasm about the music of Stockhausen and Boulez, and pronounced Anton Webern's Piano Variations, that paradigm of Viennese serialism, to be beautiful, iridescent music. Yet, here I am in my mid-60s, having devoted most of my life to the study of classical music, and I still haven't come to terms with the music of Alban Berg.
By comparison, consider Carmen
By contrast, I recently had the good fortune to be invited by one of my oldest friends to travel to another city and hear a private amateur concert version of Bizet's Carmen. Since then, I have spent much of my free time reacquainting myself with Bizet's miraculous score.
Has any other opera composer so successfully concealed extreme harmonic complexity and sophistication beneath the surface of such exquisite lyricism, all in the service of such a convincing libretto? Puccini, perhaps, on occasion. But it wasn't until this time around that I fully appreciated the depths of the last act of Carmen, where Bizet all but abandons the conventions of normal opera and writes pure Wagnerian music drama"“ but with characters whose motivations and actions are more suited to "Action News at 11" than Walhalla, and with a musical language that's at once as suave and as violent as Wagner's is ponderously overblown.
Two failed young soldiers, with one big difference
I mention all this because the plots of Carmen and Wozzeck are eerily similar: a failed young soldier, victimized by the macho bully who has stolen his woman, stabs that woman to death in a fit of jealous insanity. There was a particular moment in the second act where this connection hit me: Marie, Wozzeck's common-law wife and the mother of his child, cries out, "Better a knife in my belly than ever your hands on me again!""“ a line chillingly similar both in content and affect to Carmen's "Frappez-moi donc, ou laissez-moi passer!" shortly before José kills her.
Not surprisingly, I'm not the first to notice this connection. "Wozzeck could be Carmen as seen through the eyes of German Expressionism," the former New York Times music critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1985, "though both Bizet and the Expressionists would probably shudder at the comparison."
A leading man lost to psychosis
Let's not take this parallel too far, though. Carmen is a woman without any doubt about who she is; in the end, her inability to deny her self-image proves fatal. Wozzeck's Marie"“ or at least the Marie portrayed in this production"“ is devoid of ego, wracked with guilt, and lacks any ability to control her own destiny. Don José, though brilliantly drawn, is a familiar character: a normal guy driven mad by jealous sexual obsession. Wozzeck has been lost to psychosis before we meet him.
Any similarities between Wozzeck and Carmen, though, are lost in the depths of the gulf between Bizet's and Berg's musical languages, as you can see and hear for yourself: Here, courtesy of YouTube, is a film version of Carmen's and José's final confrontation; and here, again on YouTube, is the climactic scene of Wozzeck.
Calling Sam Peckinpah
If the measure of a great artwork is that you find yourself days later still contemplating it, talking about it, obsessing over it, then Wozzeck qualifies. Of course, by that standard, so do the bloody gunfights in a Sam Peckinpah movie. Wozzeck is a violent scene of carnage, and not just in the literal sense of its grisly plot: The shattered wreckage of tonality is a musical metaphor for the brutal traumatization that World War I wrought on European culture.
We are told we live in difficult times. Maybe so. But a work like Wozzeck and its musical language grows out of far more dire circumstances than we can conceive, let alone relate to.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read responses, click here.
To be sure, this Curtis production was superb. It was as well acted as it was sung; if you knew just a little German, the English supertitles, while a little too super for convenient reading, made every word of the German libretto easy to follow. The Perelman's acoustics, so unsatisfactory just a few weeks ago for the Brahms Requiem, were perfectly suited to this opera's intimate vocal and orchestral chaos. I'd never heard Wozzeck before, and I suppose I should be glad to have finally done so. But I have no desire ever to hear it again.
Please let the record show that I'm not a man of stodgy musical tastes. On this site I've waxed enthusiastic about some very recent music, written with enthusiasm about the music of Stockhausen and Boulez, and pronounced Anton Webern's Piano Variations, that paradigm of Viennese serialism, to be beautiful, iridescent music. Yet, here I am in my mid-60s, having devoted most of my life to the study of classical music, and I still haven't come to terms with the music of Alban Berg.
By comparison, consider Carmen
By contrast, I recently had the good fortune to be invited by one of my oldest friends to travel to another city and hear a private amateur concert version of Bizet's Carmen. Since then, I have spent much of my free time reacquainting myself with Bizet's miraculous score.
Has any other opera composer so successfully concealed extreme harmonic complexity and sophistication beneath the surface of such exquisite lyricism, all in the service of such a convincing libretto? Puccini, perhaps, on occasion. But it wasn't until this time around that I fully appreciated the depths of the last act of Carmen, where Bizet all but abandons the conventions of normal opera and writes pure Wagnerian music drama"“ but with characters whose motivations and actions are more suited to "Action News at 11" than Walhalla, and with a musical language that's at once as suave and as violent as Wagner's is ponderously overblown.
Two failed young soldiers, with one big difference
I mention all this because the plots of Carmen and Wozzeck are eerily similar: a failed young soldier, victimized by the macho bully who has stolen his woman, stabs that woman to death in a fit of jealous insanity. There was a particular moment in the second act where this connection hit me: Marie, Wozzeck's common-law wife and the mother of his child, cries out, "Better a knife in my belly than ever your hands on me again!""“ a line chillingly similar both in content and affect to Carmen's "Frappez-moi donc, ou laissez-moi passer!" shortly before José kills her.
Not surprisingly, I'm not the first to notice this connection. "Wozzeck could be Carmen as seen through the eyes of German Expressionism," the former New York Times music critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1985, "though both Bizet and the Expressionists would probably shudder at the comparison."
A leading man lost to psychosis
Let's not take this parallel too far, though. Carmen is a woman without any doubt about who she is; in the end, her inability to deny her self-image proves fatal. Wozzeck's Marie"“ or at least the Marie portrayed in this production"“ is devoid of ego, wracked with guilt, and lacks any ability to control her own destiny. Don José, though brilliantly drawn, is a familiar character: a normal guy driven mad by jealous sexual obsession. Wozzeck has been lost to psychosis before we meet him.
Any similarities between Wozzeck and Carmen, though, are lost in the depths of the gulf between Bizet's and Berg's musical languages, as you can see and hear for yourself: Here, courtesy of YouTube, is a film version of Carmen's and José's final confrontation; and here, again on YouTube, is the climactic scene of Wozzeck.
Calling Sam Peckinpah
If the measure of a great artwork is that you find yourself days later still contemplating it, talking about it, obsessing over it, then Wozzeck qualifies. Of course, by that standard, so do the bloody gunfights in a Sam Peckinpah movie. Wozzeck is a violent scene of carnage, and not just in the literal sense of its grisly plot: The shattered wreckage of tonality is a musical metaphor for the brutal traumatization that World War I wrought on European culture.
We are told we live in difficult times. Maybe so. But a work like Wozzeck and its musical language grows out of far more dire circumstances than we can conceive, let alone relate to.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read responses, click here.
What, When, Where
Wozzeck. Opera by Alban Berg; directed by Emma Griffin; Corrado Rovaris, conductor. Curtis Opera Theatre production March 13-18, 2009 at Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center. (215) 893-7902 or www.curtis.edu.
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