For Christian Gerhaher, singer of the title role, Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” is the “absolutely perfect opera”. You can read about this in the program book of the Vienna State Opera for the new production by Simon Stone. Even in Georg Büchner’s original, every single word was of “atomistic conciseness”, so Berg’s music made the language even more precise, it says. With Büchner there is not a word, with Berg not a tone too many. The effects this has on the interpretation of the role was already demonstrated by Gerhaher six and a half years ago in his role debut at the Zurich Opera. At that time, his Wozzeck walked a hopeless path to murder, accompanied by hard and blatant outbursts, in between always uninhibitedly lyrical, very tender and painful.
Thinking through and interpreting even the smallest nuance, Gerhaher now even reinforces in Vienna. One of Alban Berg’s great achievements is that with “Wozzeck” he wrote what is probably the first opera whose dialogues are played at spoken theater speed.
In other words, there is no longer this falling out of time that is typical of operas in its artificiality, resting for minutes on a feeling. Every statement, apart from the few built-in songs, has its truth and its statement in and for the moment in which it is made. And Gerhaher, never a singer who triumphs only for the sake of glamor, becomes a singing actor, who again and again takes almost every songfulness, but never the sound, from the words, of which he uses every single one with the utmost awareness.
He can burst out wildly opera-like without a trace when the need of his character requires it. But even more enchanting is his sing speaking, or spoken word. A tiny example: When Wozzeck says goodbye to his Marie in the scene in which she admires the earrings that the drum major gave her, his last word is “Adies”. With Gerhaher, this “adies” has a hundred dark shades of gray, is floating musing and dark foreboding at the same time. It has a wonderful subtlety, it tells a whole world.
Conductor Philippe Jordan unleashes a volume that is nothing other than an impertinence for the soloists
The only trouble is that Gerhaher and his singing colleagues meet the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera and their music director Philippe Jordan. Its idiosyncrasy begins with the fact that the ditch is very high. So you can admire Jordan’s elegant figure extensively, but you are also helplessly at the mercy of the sound of the orchestra. Of course, one could still shape it, but Jordan understands, which is not entirely illegitimate, Berg’s music as an appendix of the late Romantic era, which unfortunately now leads to him resting on a voluminous sound and completely ignoring the detailed conciseness of the music . Presumably he aims at the overwhelming effect of the many purely instrumental links that Berg built between the scenes. But even in the scenes themselves, Jordan unleashes a volume that is nothing other than an impertinence for the soloists. Jörg Schneider drowns in it as the lyrical captain, others like the fearsome Dmitry Belosselskiy as Doctor, the two tradesmen Peter Kellner and Stefan Astakhov, the agile Josh Lovell as Andres and the grandiosely sovereign Anja Kampe assert themselves with might and main against this conducting, as well as it does goes.
Viennese poverty realism: Wozzeck (Christian Gerhaher) among the homeless at the Vienna-Simmering subway station.
(Photo: Michael Pöhn/Vienna State Opera)
But the most annoying thing is that Jordan’s musical approach is diametrically opposed to the direction. Simon Stone, the hyperrealist among theater directors and, for some years now, also opera directors, wants to tell stories in the reality of life that the audience is familiar with. There is now a sausage stand here that offers Käsekrainer, well, that’s a familiar thing in Vienna. The dormitory of the barracks is the night camp for homeless people in the Simmering underground station, which is probably less familiar to visitors to the Vienna State Opera.
At the end there is femicide. The battered Wozzeck murders like in the “crime scene”
But unlike in his most recent theater works, Bob Cousins’ stage here is not a closed, detailed image of a reality; rather it is a collection of naturalistically designed references to aspects of the reality of life that surrounds us. These can be quite disparate and also get an increasingly surreal touch. The shaving scene that opens the opera takes place in a sparse hairdressing salon, and the captain is not the only customer. Then the stage turns, it will hardly stand still, and Stone invents the most meaningful scene of the evening. It’s the one in which nightmare-stricken Wozzeck and his friend Andres cut sticks. It’s always a big mystery, but not here. The two stand in a long queue in front of the employment office, which winds around a few corners, and every nightmare suddenly seems completely understandable in the face of a clearly real, financially hopeless situation here.
In general, Stone staged the opera based on the often repeated statement “we poor people”. It doesn’t look that poor at Marie’s home, but Wozzeck sneaks around like a parcel carrier without a job, sees Marie having sex in bed several times in a row – the drum major is a police officer, the state power enslaves the poor worm. So much is true, but the reality of the stage robs the story of any aura of something bigger. At the end there is a femicide in the wild, the smothered, insecure, battered Wozzeck murders like in the “crime scene”. As cruel as it is to look at, it makes Berg’s masterpiece so small.