Stupendous production of a true masterpiece
Although I can’t recall any truly bad performance of Wozzeck,
I don’t think I have ever experienced one as enthralling as this one – a highlight of this year’s Salzburg Festival. At its heart is an intensely felt vision of Alban Berg’s masterpiece, conceived by William Kentridge.
Here, the focus is the militarised zone of eastern France during the First World War. The stage is filled with a rookery shambles of a devastated shanty town, a warren out of which figures in sinister gas masks, the crippled, the wounded and the survivors emerge like rats from holes. Day cannot be distinguished from night, nor nightmare from reality.
Over this sprawling tableau are projected Kentridge’s characteristic charcoal drawings and a collage of maps, newspaper headlines, photographs and film clips, intermittently illuminated by the pulsing glow of an explosion. The imagery depicts officers goosestepping in pickelhaube helmets, blasted battlefields, mutilated corpses, plane crashes, Zeppelin raids: Berg must have seen such carnage on his active service, and the horror is embodied in music composed as bombs were falling over his head.
This is the chaos inside the head of Wozzeck, a squaddie straight out of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Browbeaten by life, traumatised by his superiors, paranoiacally haunted by ghosts and portents, he is tipped over the edge by the betrayal of his girl Marie and the vulnerability of their tiny son, here hauntingly presented as a hand-held puppet.
Matthias Görne’s performance is all the more dreadfully moving for its total lack of sentimentality – the man is a brute, but bigger brutes than he have strangled the humanity out of him. Likewise, Asmik Grigorian’s pathetic, desperate Marie, who knows that she shouldn’t cheat on Wozzeck but can’t resist the chance of a moment’s pleasure. Both singers are superb musicians, with deep understanding of Bergian vocal style.
Among a flawless supporting cast, Gerhard Siegel’s ludicrously pompous Captain stands out. All are challenged and inspired by the crystalline playing of the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted with ruthless surgical precision by Vladimir Jurowski.
This stupendous production should be imported to Covent Garden: it restores one’s faith in what a director’s imagination can give to opera.
In rep until Aug 27. Tickets: 0043 662 8045 361; salzburgfestival.at