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Conductor
Antonio
Pappano
Director
Keith Warner
Captain
Graham Clark
Wozzeck
Matthias Goerne
Andres
Alasdair Elliott
Marie
Katarina Dalayman
Margret
Claire Powell
Doctor
Eric Halfvarson
Drum Major
Kim Begley
Child
Jacob
Moriarty
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Royal
Opera House
15
- 31 October 2002 |
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Anyone who thinks
that 20th Century music took a turn
for the worse after Schoenberg ushered
in the twelve-tone revolution should
rush to hear Alban Berg's Wozzeck, if
possible in the Royal Opera House's
superb production, conducted by its
fizzling new music director, Antonio
Pappano.
In all
of twentieth century art, there can
be no more powerful evocation of the
grandeur and horrors of modernity than
Berg's score expresses in a mere hundred
minutes.
On the
one hand, the horror: the cold and indifferent
universe emptied of gods and inherent
purposes; the confused loneliness of
the individual; the fragility, under
social and economic pressures, of our
values and closest relationships. On
the other hand, the magnificent freedom;
the numberless opportunities for the
individual to create something out of
him- or herself; the revitalisation
of ethical values that, over the centuries,
had become habitual and emptied of vitality.
Matthias
Goerne in the title role perfectly captures
these insoluble complexities. As a great
Lieder singer familiar to British
audiences from his marvellous Schubert
cycles with Alfred Brendel he
is excellently cast. He brings all the
tormenting tenderness, the nerve-wracking
vulnerability, the by turns lyrical
and defiant voice needed for Schubert's
Wanderer, and indeed for the Lieder
art-form as a whole, to the figure of
Wozzeck, the hapless husband and downtrodden
misfit, who sacrifices his individuality
and ultimately his life in an attempt
to save his family from starvation and
humiliation.
This
sacrifice is extraordinary by any standards:
Wozzeck offers himself up to medical
science as a guinea pig for risky experiments,
and in doing so almost completely surrenders
his self-respect and indeed his Self.
'Almost', because he never loses sight
of why he is doing this: his overriding
love for his woman and their child,
and his desire to give their lives dignity
and possibility. His chief tormentors
are the Captain, brilliantly sung and
acted by Graham Clarke, and the Doctor,
to whose coldly menacing character Eric
Halfvarson's resonant bass is ideally
suited.
It all
goes wrong, however, when Wozzeck's
common-law wife, Marie, craving the
virile security which he manifestly
cannot give her, takes up with a blustering
drum-major, who contemptuously uses
her to satisfy his crude lusts, then
mocks the hapless Wozzeck for his inadequacies
as man and breadwinner. This is one
humiliation too far for Wozzeck, who,
already emotionally gutted by poverty
and the cruel experiments performed
on him, finally cracks, killing Marie
and drowning himself (the latter spectacularly
achieved by Goerne submerging himself
in a bloodied water tank for a full
seven minutes). The tragedy is that
in an attempt to gain power over their
lives, they both become powerless beyond
endurance.
Katharina
Dalayman's voice is at once full and
piercing, rounded and focussed to a
pin point. This is just what the part
of Marie demands: to be either lyrical
or tragic would not work, and Dalayman
manages to alternate and even blend
the two timbres with extraordinary skill.
Their
little boy, touchingly played by Jacob
Moriarty, remained on-stage throughout,
a silent and almost-knowing witness
to the unfolding disaster. Like his
parents, he is an unheroic hero: not
triumphant in the classical mould, but
incontestably noble in his stubborn
pursuit of integrity and goodness, despite
all the pressures to abandon them.
Keith
Warner's imaginative production enabled
the singers to flourish in their roles
as any good production should
- and was excellently complemented by
Stefanos Lazaridis's set, with its burnt-out
model town, jars of human organs, and
other exhibits of the macabre and the
impersonal.
Pappano's
conducting sustained a seamless, sensitive
intensity that never strayed into bombast
or bravado: tasteful, precise, marvelously
evocative of texture and tonality. You
can feel the Royal Opera's standards
soaring under his determined and disciplined
leadership. Londoners already have a
lot to thank him for.
Simon
May |
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