Wozzeck, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 14 December 2025 (centenary performance)

Production images: Stephan Rabold

Wozzeck – Simon Keenlyside
Marie – Anja Kampe
Drum-major – Andreas Schager
Andres – Florian Hoffmann
Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Doctor – Stephen Milling
Marie’s child – Jacob Tougas Gigling
First apprentice – Friedrich Hamel
Second apprentice – Dionysios Avgerinos
Idiot – Stephan Rügamer
Soldier – Soongoo Lee

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

One hundred years ago to the day, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, the greatest opera of the twentieth century, received its first performance at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Erich Kleiber. The composer’s proud teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, sent him a telegram the day before wishing ‘every success for the premiere’ and expressing sadness he and his wife Gertrud could not be present. Inevitable far-Right protests notwithstanding, that premiere proved a great success and the work of course went on to transform the history of twentieth-century music in general and opera in particular. That the twentieth century would overflow with great operas owed more to its example than to that of any other single work, Schoenberg’s included. Earlier that same year, one of its greatest interpreters, whose centenary we have been celebrating all year, was born: Pierre Boulez. It therefore seems doubly fitting that the Staatsoper should offer an excellent revival of Andrea Breth’s production (reviewed first here, in 2011) for the climax and culmination of 2025. 

I hope that I might, on this special occasion, be forgiven a personal excursus. (Please skip the following paragraph if not!) Many years later, this opera changed my life. It was the first I saw in the theatre, as a schoolboy who had not yet heard a note of Berg or Webern, and very little (only tonal) of Schoenberg. Travelling to Sheffield for Opera North’s visit in 1993, the experience opened up more vistas even than a Mahler symphony. Opera had not formed part of my childhood. I had only just begun to explore it, entirely from recordings, as a consequence of having fallen head over heels in love with Mozart (as yet, operatically, only Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute); and had still more recently begun my Wagner voyage (Tristan and possibly Meistersinger, the Ring definitely still to come). I had heard and indeed seen nothing like it, in Deborah Warner’s first production, conducted by Paul Daniel. To say that it made a great impression would be an understatement. It grabbed me by the throat and never let me go: one of the very few works one can unhesitatingly place alongside those twin polestars of my operatic life that have never left me and indeed only shone brightrer (Mozart and Wagner). Perhaps if I had not attended that performance, invited by my music teacher, I might never have worked on opera at all; I might also never have grown to love the Second Viennese School as I do, and worked on Schoenberg (or Henze, Dallapiccola, Nono, Kurtág, and others, Boulez included). So to celebrate Wozzeck’s centenary could hardly have been an occasion fuller of meaning for me: whether music-historical or biographical. 

Captain (Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke) and Wozzeck (Simon Keenlyside)

Expectations are set up to be dashed; here they were not. I shall not dwell on memories, notoriously persistent yet notoriously unreliable, of Breth’s staging, which I have written about twice before in any case. (I shall not cheat and look, at least not until after posting.) It was in any case revived here by Caroline Staunton and deserves consideration in 2025 incarnation on its own merits. What I can say Staunton and her team of skilled singing actors brought to it – at the very least I took from it, though I think it was more than that – was a stronger sense than ever of these being real people, with real, human connections between one another. It was an internal as well as an external world that sprang forth before our eyes and ears—and that connection between the two seemed, if different under a new heir to Kleiber, as strong as ever too. 

Marie (Anja Kampe), Drum-major (Andreas Schager)

Breth’s aesthetic is realist up to a point, yet not only that—not unlike Berg and, I should argue Georg Büchner too. A sense of poverty – ‘Wir arme Leut’…’ – and wretchedness was present in enclosed sets, the room in which Wozzeck, Marie, and their child must exist as heartbreakingly abject as one could hope for: a sort of Berlin Alexanderplatz-plus (both Döblin and Fassbinder), if not in period then in something still deeper and recurring. Martin Zehetgruber’s set designs then in turn mirroring and even give the impression of helping to create Berg’s closed musical forms, which yet of course extend—both into other scenes and into the desolation of the ‘open’ lake scene (visually and perhaps also, in its D minor expansiveness, musically). These people, the poor ones anyway, are treated worse than animals and that has consequences, as we see in the joyless fornication of the tavern. And yet there is an interior life: not so banal as being mere projections of the protagonists’ torments, yet in different senses a refuge from and a creation of them. That the child in the final scene is on his own, the children’s choir singing (perhaps in his mind) from the pit does not lessen the realism but expands it with a chill still harsher than that felt by the Captain and Doctor by the lake. 

Marie, her child )Jacob Tougas Gigling), Wozzeck

Thielemann’s way with Berg’s score is strikingly different – again, with that caveat on memory – from that of Daniel Barenboim, who conducted the ever-excellent Staatskapelle Berlin on previous occasions. ‘Romantic’ is a word so stretched and overused as to verge on the meaningless, but if anything, confounding lazy expectations, it was Barenboim who proved the more so: certainly, I think, the more overtly Wagnerian. Thielemann’s approach did not neglect the longer line, but seemed more concerned with the inner characterisation and ‘life’ of those closed forms. The febrile growth and transformation of individual lines, perhaps founded ultimately more on counterpoint than harmony, could be traced in neo-Bachian fashion that was more of the time of Neue Sachlichkeit than of Berg’s youth. It is a matter of degree, of course, and neither neglected the ‘other’ side, but I recognised a tendency heard in certain lines of Thielemann’s summer Schweigsame Frau extended: intriguingly and, again a little surprisingly, closer to Boulez than Barenboim. 

Chorus, Drum-major, Wozzeck

The orchestra itself played superlatively from beginning to end, never sounding Straussian yet at the same time excelling in response to the sort of unpredictable yet ultimately coherent Strauss performances Thielemann has been giving for some time. Their stretching of time, virtuosic yet not for mere virtuosity’s sake, was unquestionably apparent here. What I believe was a swift reading overall ‘on the clock’ never felt rushed and indeed included moments of hallucinatory, post-Mahlerian near-stasis – those vistas again, both physical and metaphysical – in which shimmering colour and harmony alike brought magic to the musicodramatic moment and peered deep into the musical future. I hope we shall hear more Berg from Thielemann.

 

Margret (Anna Kissjudit), Wozzeck

In the title role, Simon Keenlyside brought not only a wealth of experience in this role, but something unique to this production. He sounded and even looked the Wozzeck for this moment, more broken than previously, though doubtless building on earlier performances. He seemed stunned, even stunted, by the horrors he endured, yet the flame of humanity never left him, in no small part due to his Lieder-singer’s way with the libretto—which here sounded just as intense as the score. Anja Kampe’s force-of-nature Marie perhaps lacked the last ounce of tenderness in the Bible scene, but there were unquestionable compensations elsewhere. Hers likewise was a human being brutalised yet, until the end, never defeated. Anna Kissjudit’s Margret made for a rich-toned, dramatically layered counterpart, whilst Florian Hoffmann’s Andres complemented and contrasted Wozzeck in somewhat different, yet no less important, ways. Staunton’s keen Personenregie was surely part and parcel of that, as it was in Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain, brilliantly quirky yet probably more deeply integrated into the greater company than I have previously heard. So too for Stephen Milling’s disconcerting Doctor, poised between malevolent mystery and mere quack, and Andreas Schager’s vain, frighteningly brutal Drum-major. Stephan Rügamer offered a haunting Fool. The chorus brought the rest of the world indelibly to life.

Here, then, was an opera entering its second century as harrowing, as disturbing, and as ineffably, lyrically magical, even Mozartian, as it began its first. We continue to take our leave from it, not because we have thought of nothing new since, but precisely because we have.

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Komische Oper, 13 December 2025

Schillertheater

Images: Iko Freese/drama-berlin.de

Leokadja Begbick – Ariana Lucas
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Ivan Turšić
Trinity Moses – Seth Carico
Jenny – Nadja Mchantaf
Jim Mahoney – Gerard Schneider
Jack O’Brien – Caspar Krieger
Bank-Account Bill – Hubert Zapiór
Alaskawolfjoe – Philipp Meierhöfer
Toby Higgins – Thoma Jaron-Wutz
Stage piano – Rui Rodrigues

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Katharina Fritsch
Set designs and lighting – Klaus Grünberg
Assistant set designer – Anne Kuhn
Costumes – Klaus Bruns
Dramaturgy – Maximilian Hagemeyer

Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin (director: Jean-Christophe Charron)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Alexander Joel (conductor)

How do you like your Brecht? Or your Weill? Or your Brecht-Weill? Banal questions, doubtless, though that is not to say that nothing can come from them, just as with ‘Aimez-vous Brahms’? There is, though, a particularly strong case to say that however one does, one should not receive what one wants, that to do so, to settle back into ritual, comfortable nostalgia is still more than usually to miss the point. That is certainly nothing so banal as merely ‘épater les bourgeois’, though if we are honest, that will rarely be the worst of things, albeit never enough. 

Berlin, of course, has (had) traditions of its own in this respect, not least from the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht and Helene Weigel: if not quite an anti-Bayreuth, then in something of a dialectical relationship to the Festival. They are not the only traditions; can often be misunderstood; and even where not, have no intrinsic right to be maintained; they will continue in any case to haunt performances, reception, and understanding. If the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, home to the Ensemble for all but the first five years of its existence, is even now most renowned for the 1928 premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, yet also for the 1931 triumph of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, there remains the shadow of the notorious Leipzig premiere of the latter the previous year, disrupted by Nazi thugs who would proceed to ban ‘degenerate’ Brecht and Weill all too soon thereafter. The BE continues to present a broadly Brechtian, if increasingly varied, approach to theatre; indeed, Barrie Kosky’s Threepenny Opera premiered there in 2021, the same pandemic year that his staging of Mahagonny was first given about a mile away at the Komische Oper. It is now revived, during that building’s closure for renovation a little further away, at the Schillertheater—home to a good few spectres of its own. Both theatrically and musically, we inevitably feel some of their haunting, whether that be the intention or no, just as the text of Brecht and Weill (and Elisabeth Hauptmann) invites in and/or fails to repel guests as different as Christ, Luther, Bach, Marx, and, yes, Wagner and Schoenberg—often in tandem with dialectical antagonists—as well as Brecht and Weill themselves in earlier guise. Moreover, if it would make no sense, long after Brecht, Weigel, and indeed Ruth Berghaus and Joachim Herz (director of the Komische Oper’s first, 1977 production), to insist on some outdated Neue Sachlichkeit opposition to Wagner, perhaps even to Wagnerism, such negative, ‘anti’ ghosts will never die completely, nor should they. The present, a different present even from 2021, naturally makes its presence, as it were, felt too—often uneasily, as it should be. 

I do not think it was only on account of my finding eyes and ears, though maybe it was, that performance and production seemed to come a little from the past, real and imagined, in the first half and most strongly to come together, suggesting something new that was yet also a little old, after the interval. Kosky’s production certainly seemed to have its roots most clearly in a Berliner Ensemble lying somewhere between its (mis-?)remembered past and its present earlier on: not in a bad way by any means, but situating itself in a broadly post-Brechtian dramaturgy, knowing cliché and all, that set parameters for our response, all the better for certain surprises – alienating, if you like – to register later on. It took us lightly yet surely, then, on a little walk through imagined Mahagonnys, imagined Berlins, imagined dramatic histories, rather as our three initial protagonists fleeing from their previous home, had taken their leave from their previous city to journey to find their new one. 

If it is clear from the outset who (and what) Widow Begbick is, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper are initially presented, though surely only presented, as Christian and Jew, their dialogue somehow tending a little towards Beckett, whilst remaining the same as it has always been. It had me recall Kosky’s Bayreuth Meistersinger exchanges between Sachs and Beckmesser, especially as realised in the acting of Michael Volle and Johannes Martin Kränzle, that staging for better or worse also preoccupied, rather more controversially, with the 1930s. And indeed, here Seth Carico and Ivan Turšić also worked very well together, their characters coming ever more sharply into focus as the work progressed, whilst maintaining a certain dialectical relationship that also of course encompassed Ariana Lucas, a properly larger-than-life Begbick, at the apex or nadir of its unholy trinity. 

Work and city founded and in (im-)proper working order, a fantastic, typically Kosky ‘show’ experienced following a hurricane both ominous, almost Romantically so, and yet also knowingly, modernistically constructed, the true Weimar Passion (even passion) can emerge—with irony, doubtless, yet also on occasion without. Kosky’s conception of ‘an anti-Tristan und Isolde’ here is interesting, because, inclinations, dramaturgy, performing practices notwithstanding, a little can seep in and arguably must, to be ‘anti-’ in the first place. Ask Nietzsche, Adorno, or Stravinsky. Walls close in and open up, but is it, can it be, any more than an illusion, a delusion, when they do it with mirrors? Descended from Bach’s multivalent chorus as well as the Greeks’, and with all the layers of meaning that might entail, the crowd and thus the city seem larger than they are, but they still, fractious sheep that they be, need to be convinced, corralled, and implicated as individuals. They sing – often surprisingly slowly, echoing the Bach of yesteryear – their chorales but they also act as the Jews of the turba choruses, called upon each in turn to participate in the death sentence visited on Jim Mahoney for his ultimate, unforgivable, Mahagonny-blasphemous crime: buying a round and being unable to pay for it. Stabbing him in turn chills, just as it should, the law – the Law? – acting as it should, in a world without God, let alone humanity.

Yet it is not, of course, without God, as the hurricane may or may not have warned us. He may have been watching all along—though the inhabitants have not been watching Him. The children of Mahagonny, lost in the wilderness, have – in striking parallel with Moses und Aron – fashioned their own idols, a fattened calf included, only to dismember it for pleasure, in anticipating of what they will do to Jimmy. In a moment that is somehow both touching and not, Jenny declines to participate, paving the way for God to deliver His judgement. An ape in a machine, a Cabaret-racialised alienation of the traditional deus ex machina, wheels itself around pathetically onstage, in contrast not only with the loudspeaker but also with the groups of ‘character’ and ‘city’ voices, now heard surrounding us in a spatialised Passion. Ours is a world, nowhere more so than in Berlin, fashioned and even staged by National Socialism and the Holocaust. God, morality, or socialism might be right, but is not might right really? So maybe there was no God after all. Jimmy thought it was Nature, after all, and perhaps it was—though that vision might ultimately be worse vision (this side of socialism, anyway). What if Mahagonny does exist, is not a made-up word, and cannot but endure? What if, to quote from a high priestess of neoliberalism, ‘there is no alternative’?

So far, so (mostly) Brecht, but what of Weill—and indeed Brecht-Weill? Kosky’s direction certainly assisted the creation of the latter, attentive musically and in turn granting the impression that ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ worlds helped construct one another, even – particularly? – when they might come into conflict. As an opera, Mahagonny presents its own opportunities and difficulties; one cannot simply perform it as if it were The Threepenny Opera or even the Mahagonny Songspiel, even if one wished to, though the kinship remains clear at every turn and can hardly be ignored. Alexander Joel and the Komische Oper orchestra brought a strong sense of that ‘Twenties’ sound to us: hard-edged, band-like, yet also more clearly than ever founded a good deal of the time in the world of Weill’s teacher, Busoni. Some tempi surprised, but not in a bad way: they had one relisten and appreciate why they were as they were. The sense of a monument on which musical as well as other history might be inscribed came through, not despite but through the immediacy of the songs. That went for the excellent chorus too: a mass of individuals when called for, yet equally an implacable single mass as required—dramatically and musically. 

There would be no more point in trying to imitate Lotte Lenya than there would be Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeburg (conductor on the celebrated first recording) or indeed Alexander Zemlinsky (who conducted both Leipzig and Berlin premieres). Nadja Mchantaf, an extraordinarily versatile artists whom I have seen here in roles ranging from Fiordiligi to Rusalka, brought her own, vividly lifelike Jenny to the stage: beautifully sung and very much her own woman. There was some, yet not too much, ‘genuine’ feeling between her and Gerard Schneider’s Jimmy—with whom, likewise, one sympathised enough at times, without the work lapsing into something else. Indeed, our Jim-in-Gethsemane paved the way skilfully and properly for both the judgement of the final scene and its disregard. As ever with the Komische Oper, there was a strong sense of a company performance, many of the roles being drawn from its own principals—as, of course, one might expect at Brecht’s own theatre. Ultimately, message and ‘experience’ were starkly more than the sum of their parts—as they must be in a world such as this.

Image: my own ( Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof)