Met's New Wozzeck: Waltzing Into Misery; The Sound Inside Spoilers

William Kentridge's Wozzeck, photo @ Ken Howard

The actual Vienna might be celebrating the holidays with its traditional series of Christmas/New Years concerts that are filled with merry waltzes, but in rainy New York the Metropolitan Opera there's a very different, iconic Viennese work on display. Alban Berg's Wozzeck is the work perhaps the most closely associated with the Second Viennese school. It made for grim holiday fare but was a gripping night of opera.

Roll the tapes! Photo @ Ken Howard

The new production is by artist/director William Kentridge and Luc De Wit. It premiered in 2017 at Salzburg to great acclaim. It's like Kentridge's production of Berg's Lulu and The Nose in that it relies heavily on Kentridge's own visual art. Wozzeck (Peter Mattei) begins the opera by running a reel of film and throughout the opera the film projector displays drawings and films. Is the opera a hallucination by Wozzeck? A flashback? The difference is in the emotional directness of Kentridge's approach to Wozzeck. Kentridge's production of Lulu often felt like a slick modern art exhibit. His production of Wozzeck gets to the heart of the opera. The drawings and visual art never overtakes the human story.

The cabinet of horrors. photo @ Ken Howard

Berg's opera which premiered in 1925*  is updated to around WW1, but the story (based on Georg Büchner's 19th century play) is so universal and timeless it hardly matters. The unit set by Sabine Theunissen looks like a cluttered attic crawl space, with pieces of wood piled on top of each other and a sad cabinet or two in the corner. It is a representation both of Wozzeck's impoverished life and his disordered mind. Lighting director Urs Schönebaum makes the stage light up in unexpected places -- much like neurons randomly firing. Wozzeck, the Captain and Doctor appear suddenly throughout the opera. In one of the grimmest scenes the lights go up on Wozzeck and the Doctor doing their "experiments" in an open cabinet. There are no linear set exits and entrances which matches the episodic nature of the libretto and Wozzeck's decreased executive functioning. Greta Goiris's costumes are masterful -- they make everyone look creepy and unattractive. The direction is cluttered with realistic touches -- in the Act 2 tavern scene there is an onstage band that played as if it were actually a seamy nightclub.

The puppet son, photo @ Ken Howard

There's a couple decision by Kentridge that didn't work well.  The most damaging choice was make Wozzeck and Marie's son a puppet. He's a sinister looking thing with a gas mask, and throughout the opera there are projections of the son sometimes as a regular boy, other times falling over in the gas mask.

Anthony Minghella's production of Madama Butterfly famously used a Bunraku-style puppet to represent Trouble. I thought that decision worked well because Madama Butterfly is essentially a fantasy. No one would watch Butterfly and think "this is how Japanese people live." Wozzeck, on the other hand, is maybe the most realistic opera in the canon. Stories of domestic murder-suicides are in the news daily. When Wozzeck laments that he's too poor and beaten down to be "virtuous," those words could have been said 200 years ago or today. The decision to use a puppet adds a degree of artificiality to a production that otherwise embraces the realism of Berg's libretto. Plus Trouble is onstage briefly. Wozzeck’s son is onstage in many scenes of the opera as a reminder of how complicated Wozzeck and Marie’s lives are caring for a son with no money and no parental skills. The emotional impact of the ending is diluted -- it's not the same seeing a puppet singing "hip hop." The puppet doesn't take away from the overall quality of the production however. Just an artistic choice that didn't work as well as other artistic choices.

Another choice that didn't work was the blocking during the grim third act. Marie's murder, Wozzeck's death, the discovery of the body, were all directed in a very confusing way so the emotional climax of the opera wouldn't necessarily be obvious to those not already familiar with the opera.

Mattei as Wozzeck

The cast assembled was very different from the Salzburg livestream but just as effective. Peter Mattei in the title role is cast against type -- his smooth baritone and amiable stage persona have made him a popular Met fixture. In other words he's not an obvious Wozzeck. But he threw himself into the role. Mattei turned his tall body into a stage device -- he walked with the perpetual slump and stiff gait of schizophrenics. Mattei never snarled or barked. He struggled with some of the sprechgesang that came so naturally to, say Gerhard Siegel (the Captain). But the lovely voice singing that atonal music after awhile sounded almost ironic. It was as if Wozzeck was holding on to a vestige of a past when he was normal. This is his role debut -- I'm interested to see how he grows in the role. Right now there are many details that probably will be filled in.

van den Heever and Ventris, photo @ Ken Howard

Elza van den Heever's Marie (another role debut) was okay. She has a powerful voice with a ringing, secure upper register but she played Marie as rather cold and blasé. You didn't sense her fear and desperation. The prayer was emotionally flat. Maybe this was a directorial choice to play Marie as numb to life. More problematic was the fact that van den Heever's voice is not very colorful or expressive. It's a healthy soprano but this role requires more vocal acting that van den Heever provided. Also this is where the puppet comes in -- Marie's interactions with her son don't have as much power when the son is a puppet.

Here she is in the famous prayer:

Siegel and van Horn, photo @ Ken Howard

The best performances of the night came from the basket of deplorables -- Gerhard Siegel as the contemptuous Captain, Christian van Horn as the Dr. Mengele-type doctor, and Christopher Ventris as Drum Major. Siegel and van Horn were so delightfully hideous that one could understand Wozzeck's deteriorating mental state. If I had to spend all day with them I'd go nuts too. Siegel is so expressive -- his character tenor squealed with delight at putting down and insulting Wozzeck. van Horn was astonishing. As the Doctor he was a scenery-chewing sadist, relishing every directive to Wozzeck with glee. (His orders of no urination, eating only beans ironically recalls some of Goop's wackier "wellness" trends.) Ventris oozed sleaziness as Drum Major. His pursuit of Marie was brutish; his taunting of Wozzeck was just inhumane. His powerful tenor gave the character a bit of snake-oil shine. Andrew Staples (Andres) and Tamara Mumford (Margaret) were fine in their smaller roles. Mumford always seems wasted in her roles at the Met.

Wozzeck in the tavern, photo @ Ken Howard

Wozzeck's glory is in its orchestration. It alternates between completely atonal, dissonant, harsh music and moments of surreal beauty. Fragments of popular music and Viennese waltzes fly around in Act 2, Scene 4. Listen closely and you'll hear the famous waltz from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.  Yannick Nézet-Séguin led a tight, fast performance (opera was over and out in 1 hour 35 minutes) that brought out a lot of the delicate details of Berg's orchestration (I never heard the waltzes as clearly as I did tonight) but fell short in the hair-raising, blood-and-guts moments of the opera. The famous crashing chord after Marie's murder wasn't as powerful as I've heard it done. It was a rather Impressionistic reading of an Expressionistic score.

Maybe it was the fact that Wozzeck is a tough go for most of the bread-and-butter opera fans, or maybe this is the worst opera to market to holiday tourists, but the house was somewhat empty for a new production premiere. No matter -- the production runs through January 22 and is a must-see in a season that's already been very strong.

Then again I'm convinced that there will never be a bad Wozzeck performance -- the story is that powerful. When I got out of the theater I was looking for blood in the moon.

*There's a creepy postscript to Wozzeck's performance history. Erich Kleiber was the conductor of the performance premiere. Erich Kleiber relocated to Argentina during the Nazi era and rebuilt his career post-war but struggled. In 1956 he died. Official cause was heart attack but his son Carlos said that Kleiber senior was found bleeding in a bathtub. So much like Wozzeck!

Mary Louise Parker and Will Hochman

ETA: on January 4th I saw Adam Rapp's The Sound Inside with Mary Louise Parker and Will Hochman. The play closes on January 12 so SEE IT! Parker is exquisite as Bella, a Yale professor facing both a major case of writers' block and a health crisis.

Anyway if you have seen it I've come up with four possible scenarios about how real Christopher is (or isn't). Here are my four scenarios:

1. Christopher was never real, just a literary device that helped end Bella's writers block. This was hinted at by her writing in the notebook at the end about his death. The cancer was never real either -- it was a metaphor for how she felt dead as a writer, but this Christopher story gave her writing a new lease on life.

2. Christopher was real, and the story he wrote was actually his murder confession/suicide note and he killed himself after leaving her apartment. Reasons for thinking it was a suicide note: Chris "kills" Shane, which is literary foreshadowing. Murder confession? He leaves the book without authorship.

This is along with #1 my favorite theory. Bella touched his life by reading his book, and he gave her a new lease on life by not assisting her with the suicide. So they both helped each other.

3. Christopher left her apartment after not killing her because he realized she was deeply troubled and so she creates a new ending for him bc it's too hard to face the fact that he simply walks out of her life. I was thinking that from his perspective he's a freshman in college and some lady wants him to help her with assisted suicide. It might have been too much for him so he did the honorable thing and left her alive.

4. To take her word for everything. Christopher really did just drop off his novel, not kill her, and died in mysterious circumstances. Her cancer went into remission.

What do you guys think?