Wozzeck van Alban Berg is zo'n sterk stuk dat het nauwelijks kapot te krijgen is. De voorstelling in Opera Ballet Vlaanderen is dan ook absoluut de moeite om te zien, maar er ontbreekt toch een dosis dramatische kracht.
Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck means a milestone in the history of musical theater. The piece will be just a century old in December (creation conducted by Erich Kleiber at the Berliner Staatsoper), but still comes across as contemporary. The opera sketches in a number of compact scenes the story of the soldier Wozzeck, who is abused by his superiors – the captain and the doctor – and deceived by his beloved, Marie. He loses his mind, cannot control his jealousy and stabs Marie by the pond. During the dance in the tavern, the murder is discovered. Wozzeck flees and drowns. Marie and Wozzeck's child learns from his friends that his mother is dead.
Johan Simons has directed the stage play by Büchner on which Alban Berg based his opera several times before. The expectation was therefore that he would stage the madness and obsessiveness of Wozzeck with all its violence on stage. Alban Berg saw Georg Büchner's stage play Woyzeck in 1914 and was fascinated by this drama about a poor soldier who becomes the victim of the representatives of the social order and the soulless hierarchy. World War I interrupts Berg's composition plans. He spends three years in the Austrian army and finds himself in a situation where he identifies so closely with the protagonist of Büchner's drama that the composition becomes an inner necessity for him.
Hallucinatory set design, direction too weak
The set design suggests a disconcerting space with white walls and an eerie atmosphere. What Wozzeck experiences in that surreal world is harsh social reality. When Wozzeck shaves the Hauptmann in the first scene, he doesn't sit haughtily in a barber's chair, but in a banal plastic tub on the ground, making the humiliating nature of the scene come across more as caricature than sarcasm. His abuse for medical experiments by the doctor also doesn't really come to the fore. In fact, the production is missing gripping tension from scene to scene. There is no crescendo, no gradation toward the shocking finale. The drum major doesn't come across as an overwhelming figure to whom Marie cannot resist. The scene in the tavern in which Margret discovers the blood on Wozzeck's arm sinks into confusion. When Wozzeck sees the earrings that make him realize Marie is deceiving him and cause him to lose control, he shows hardly any of the mad short-circuit that makes him murder Marie. Missed opportunity after missed opportunity to turn an opera in which every detail indeed matters into a chilling biting piece of theater. Even the final scene is missing the apocalyptic quality of Wozzeck's nocturnal sinking into the pond under a visionary moon. And the "Hop hop" theme, which is after all the seasonal slogan of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, is a disappointing ending, in which Marie and Wozzeck's "Bub" is a deflated "Mädel", and the hobby horse lies lost somewhere behind in the set.
Sublime orchestral interpretation
What lifts the performance to a higher level is the execution of the orchestra with conductor Alejo Pérez. In every passage, in every detail, you can hear that this conductor not only knows the score that borders on late Romanticism and atonality through and through, but also loves it. The way he translates every tonality, every detail in the text into sound with his instruments is unique and admirable. In this way, he supports the oppressive content of the piece and the vocal parts of the singers. For they too deliver a fine performance with this far from simple score that frequently shifts to Sprechgesang. Robin Adams has a soft baritone that brings much color to details and is above all a "human" Wozzeck, who unfortunately lacks the impact as an actor to experience the madness in his character. Magdalena Anna Hofmann masters her part as Marie vocally. Too bad about the ridiculous doll she drags along as the child, but otherwise she makes a self-assured impression. Lotte Verstaen also delivered a fine performance as her friend Margret.
