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| Images: © Wilfried Hösl |
Wozzeck – Christian Gerhaher
Drum Major – John Daszak
Andres – Kevin Conners
Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Doctor – Jens Larsen
First Apprentice – Peter Lobert
Second Apprentice – Boris Prýgl
Fool – Ulrich Reß
Marie – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Margret – Heike Grötzinger
Marie’s Child – Alban Mondon
Lad – Jochen Schäfer
Soldier – Markus Zeitler
Andreas Kriegenburg (director)
Harald B Thor (set designs)
Andrea Schraad (costumes)
Stefan Bolliger (lighting)
Zenta Haerter (choreography)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)
Bavarian State Opera Chorus
(chorus director: Stellario Fagone)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)
It would be an extraordinary, even an unimaginable Wozzeck that failed to move, to chill one to the bone. This was certainly no such Wozzeck; Marie’s reading from the Bible, Wozzeck’s demise, the final scene with their son and the other children: all brought that particular Wozzeck combination of tears and horror. At its heart, in every sense, lay Christian Gerhaher’s Wozzeck, Gun-Brit Barkmin’s Marie, and their child, touchingly sung by Alban Mondon.
I have heard some fine Wozzecks
over the years; Gerhaher must surely rank alongside the finest. He has been
selective in his opera roles; it would, however, be an over-simplification verging
on distortion to say that he is more at home in the concert hall. Wozzeck is,
of course, a very different role from his fabled Tannhäuser Wolfram and is surely the
sterner dramatic test, perhaps especially for someone with so heartbreakingly
beautiful a voice. Or so it might seem on first glance, but Gerhaher is an
artist at least as celebrated for intelligence and humanity. His way with
words, music, and gesture too simply had one believe that this was the
character he was playing. Verbal nuance without pedantry, attention to musical
line without a hint of self-regard, harrowing facial expression that demanded
our sympathy: yes, this was a compleat Wozzeck. Barkmin’s Marie, equally well
sung (and spoken), equally sympathetic, made for a fine complement indeed.
Through her artistry one felt her hopes as well as her devastation, her pride
as well as her capacity for love. Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain, John
Daszak’s Drum Major and Jens Larsen’s Doctor skilfully trod the line between
character and caricature, no mean feat in a production that often called upon
them to accentuate the grotesque. Kevin Conners as Andres and Heike Grötzinger
as Margret impressed too, carving out their own dramatic potentialities, even
as we knew them no more likely to succeed than the opera’s central couple. Cast
from depth, this was a fine Wozzeck
for singing-actors.
Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting
proved efficient most of the time, albeit with a few too many discrepancies
between sections of the orchestra as well as between orchestra and pit. To be
fair, there were also passages—often the interludes—in which all came together
to offer something considerably more than that. Haenchen’s reading was not for
the most part, however, one to offer any particular revelation. He clearly knew
‘how it went’, yet the post-Wagnerian orchestra as dramatic cauldron had its
juices emerge only fitfully.
Andreas Kriegenburg’s
production seemed conceptually a little unsure of what it was trying to
achieve. Straddling the divide between Expressionist grotesquerie—some arresting
images there—and social realism—with a curious twist of Brechtian image, not
dramaturgy—is a perfectly reasonable strategy. Communication of how the two
might intertwined proved more elusive. Updated to what seemed to be more or
less the time of composition, the production left no doubt of the gross
injustice and poverty pervading the world in which these events took place. I
could have done without all the splashing round in the lake below. Kriegenburg
often scored, however, in particular dramatic touches: above all, the acts of
Wozzeck’s son, keen to learn from his ill-fated father: watching, listening. and
in some cases, acting, as when this evidently wounded child broke his mother’s
heart by painting the accusation ‘Huren’ (‘whore’) on her wall. All was lost,
then: a moment of devastation. Already we knew what fate, or rather society,
had in store not only for Wozzeck and Marie, but for their child too. ‘Wir arme
leut’…
