Met Opera: James Levine Conducts Wozzeck

The opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg is certainly not part of the familiar repertoire.  In both content and musical style, it's about as far as one can get from such favorites as La Bohème.  There are no pretty arias here, only bleak despair.  It's surprising then that there have been two productions within a few weeks of one another here in New York City.  The first was at Carnegie Hall when the Vienna Philharmonic performed it on February 28 under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst (replacing Daniele Gatti) as part of the Vienna: City of Dreams Festival; the second was a revival of the Met Opera production and was conducted by James Levine.  An unexpected link between the two productions was baritone Matthias Goerne who played the title role in the Carnegie Hall production and then agreed to reprise the part on short notice at the Met when Thomas Hampson was taken ill on the evening of the season's first performance.

I became interested in this opera last May when attending a performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.  At that time, Simon Rattle conducted a brilliant rendition of the concert suite excerpts featuring the singing of soprano Barbara Hannigan.  In the review I wrote in my blog, I said then:

"For me, the highlight of the concert was Berg's suite taken from his opera Wozzeck, his masterpiece of naturalism that ends with the despairing cry Wir arme Leut! ("We poor people!").  Too little credit has been given to Berg for his brilliance in composing operas, Wozzeck and Lulu both, that while atonal in structure were also among the most accessible of those written in the last century."

There are no doubt those who would question my use of the term "accessible."  Though the opera achieved a surprising degree of popularity during Berg's lifetime, the critics were not always kind to it.  One online article quotes a Deutsche Zeitung review of opening night in December 1925 as follows:

"As I was leaving the State Opera, I had the sensation of having been not in a public theater but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls—plain madmen…For all these mass attacks and instrumental assaults have nothing to do with European music and musical evolution."

It was largely due to the enthusiasm of James Levine that Wozzeck has remained the Met's repertory, and I was anxious to hear his interpretation of this music best known for its full use of atonality and sprechgesang.  In preparation, I had already heard earlier this month two other works by Berg - the Adagio from the Kammerkonzert performed by the ACJW Ensemble and the Lyric Suite performed by the Juilliard Quartet.

I had already known that the libretto was based closely on a play written by Georg Büchner before his death in 1837 but not performed until 1913 when Berg saw the first production in Vienna.  I had not realized, though, until I'd seen the program notes that the play in turn had been based on a real life 1821 incident in which an unbalanced soldier named Woyzeck had murdered his mistress in a fit of jealousy.  A medical report was prepared regarding Woyzeck's sanity; the report quoted the soldier's own words and these phrases were eventually incorporated into the drama.  During the war years, Berg came to see affinities between the situation of Wozzeck and that which he endured himself while in military service.  He wrote to his wife: 

"I have been spending these war years just as dependent on people I hate, in chains, sick, captive, resigned, in fact, humiliated."

Wozzeck's view of downtrodden humanity is utterly nihilistic.  There is no hope for these lost souls.  Wozzeck himself is not so much crazed as ground down by a life of relentless poverty until he can no longer control his actions.  It was partly for this reason, as well as Berg's Jewish ancestry, that the opera was later condemned by the Nazis as degenerate.  The spare 1997 Mark Lamos production is in perfect keeping with the work's dark Expressionist spirit as are the sets by Robert Israel that are all sharp angles and painted black.  The entire ensemble, including Thomas Hampson as Wozzeck and Deborah Voigt as Marie, gave great performances as they worked together with conductor James Levine to to create a near perfect realization of Berg's vision.