Curtis Opera's "Wozzeck' (2nd review)

Georg Buchner, the great, tragically short-lived German dramatist (1813-1837), wrote Woyzeck in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Alban Berg (himself a veteran of World War I) used it as the basis of his Expressionist opera while the embers of Great War still burned. Director Emma Griffin has now reimagined it for our own era of imperial wars, as uncounted Wozzecks, shattered in spirit if not in body, wander the American landscape. Plus ça change . . .

Buchner's Woyzeck was a man who'd seen too much, and whose world is on overload. We call that post-traumatic stress disorder, but the simpler term is horror. We don't know anything about the Wozzeck of Berg's opera except that he's a common soldier whose mistress, Marie, has a young son. He's a simple man with a blasted mind, and no more defenses than Lear on the heath. How he got that way we don't know, nor does it matter: only the horror itself does.

Wozzeck hallucinates, but his visions are less frightening than the everyday reality around him, which he experiences as a hell of mockery, isolation and pain. Because this condition renders him helpless, he's the butt of everyone's cruelty and insult: the captain whose shoes he polishes; the doctor who experiments on him; the drum major who steals his girl and grinds him into the dust for good measure.

Neither redemption nor mercy

Wozzeck, in short, is Everyman, but an Everyman quite different from the traditional medieval prototype of the common soul seeking redemption. There's no redemption to be had on the barren planet he inhabits, nor even mercy. Those around him are the damned, and he differs from them only in his awareness of the fact. The captain alone has any inkling of his own situation: He confesses that Wozzeck makes him uneasy, though he can't say why. Needless to say, that only leads him to abuse his orderly the more.

When Marie betrays Wozzeck, her guilty conscience leads her to read the story of Mary Magdalene in the Bible. But there's no redemption there, either. This isn't a godless world, but something worse: a God-abandoned one. The sun continues to shine down, mercilessly exposing its shame, and Wozzeck wonders why God doesn't put it out. The question is more terrifying than any answer could be.

Buchner seems to have understood that if Christ had received no answer on the cross, he would have been Woyzeck. Clothed in the medium of opera, however, and in the partly Expressionist, partly post-Romantic colors of Berg's great score, the question of who Wozzeck should be is more complex. He is, to be sure, a crucified innocent. But he can also be a Luciferian titan whose vision of an infernal world beyond the ordinary vanities and betrayals of day-to-day living requires the culminating act of violence—carried out with brutal realism in Griffin's staging— that defines him.

A brooding voice

Shuler Hensley (Curtis '93), best known for his work on the Broadway stage, gives Wozzeck a brooding and full-throated voice that moves from confusion and woe to menace; and Karen Jesse, who sang Marie in the performance I saw, was also outstanding. David Zinn's high-walled design made the most of the Perelman Theater's limited space, and Mark Barton's inspired lighting was critical.

The Curtis Orchestra, quite literally under conductor Corrado Rovaris, gave as good an account of the score as it could under its own constraints. Philadelphia still lacks a suitable venue for opera other than the Academy of Music. More's the pity, for, as this production indicates, the city continues to nurture some of the finest musical talent in the country.






To read another review by Dan Coren, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.