San Francisco Classical Voice

The San Francisco Opera presented a impressive production of Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck" on Friday, highlighted by splendid singing, superlative orchestral playing, not however without meddling with what Berg wrote. Yet if the work has lost some of its thrilling qualities, no longer scaring , thrilling or shocking as it did, the 75 year-old Wozzeck is still on the cutting edge

A few audience members still walk out during the performance, apparently reacting to the expressionistic harshness of the music. The knotted counterpoint and spiky dissonances possibly offend their ears. This happens even though the San Francisco Opera production does everything it can to make the work "palatable." This production ignores many of the subtleties of the opera so painstakingly installed by the composer. Often it distorts the original, transforming it into an acceptable latter-day Strauss workhorse. Loud, loud, and louder. In case one misses the irony and the horror, the conductor, Michael Boder, lets the percussion cut loose in deafening, ostentatious sound.

At times, the orchestra drowns out the singers. When the two neighbor women, Marie and Margret, are shouting insults at one another (supposedly through open windows) as a marching band is heard down in the street: the singers needed to be amplified. It was a wasted effort; the conductor, ignoring the mezzo forte of the score, made them inaudible anyway. A touch of realistic nastiness between the two sluts is thrown away, while the band blares on.

Berg had other ideas in mind. In 1930 he wrote "The Preparation and Staging of Wozzeck," a manual to be distributed with the performing materials. He warned of the possible dangers of misinterpreting his markings. Though he sprinkled much of the music with tiny expressive crescendos, he worried that an orchestra would overdo them. Except for periodic dynamic explosions, Berg considered Wozzeck a piano, that is, an intimate opera. Surprisingly, Berg treated his massive group of instruments as chamber soloists, the way that Mahler did, sensitive to individual sounds, rarely cumulating in massive blasts of pure stentorian rhetoric.

Fortunately for this performance, singers and orchestra could not have been better. The level of preparation and accomplished performance would do any company proud. Hildegard Behrens, the Marie, has rarely sounded better, in full control of a very difficult and wide-ranging vocal line. Vocally, Alan Held was a good Wozzeck, accurate and well-defined. The real stars of the show were the villains of the piece, the captain (Dennis Petersen substituting for Kenneth Riegel in a marvelous characterization) and the doctor ( Michael Eder, making his debut in the United States). These grotesques were powerfully done.

The sets by Michael Levine, new here in 1990, emphasized the surreal aspects of the plot, and at times this worked exceedingly well. The covering curtain was a giant building of many windows, distorted in perspective. At the tragic ending of the opera, this building became visible in three dimensions, but now as a hollow edifice, symbolizing the emptiness and hopelessness of Wozzeck's existence .

The exterior scenes were suggested by a modernistic backdrop of jumbled tree branches, but these enormous abstractions were not what Berg expected. In his description of an ideal production, he insisted on realism, a genuine sun and moon, even the illusion of water in the pond where Wozzeck drowns. In his delusion Wozzeck speaks of a fire rising from earth to heaven; why not see a sunset as Berg intended? Stuck in a symbolic world of suggestive effects, the lighting gets obvious. Much of the dialogue concentrates on blood as a motive; it gets wearying to see the backdrop turn red every time.

The staging by Lotfi Monsouri was good, particularly in the few crowd scenes. One could find fault with the figure of Wozzeck, however. Because Alan Held is very tall, he must stoop in an attempt to persuade us that he is a victim, wandering around with his mouth half-open in perpetual horror. Life is tough for Wozzeck, but this stupefaction is not convincing.

Elsewhere there are several mis-readings of the composer's dramatic indications in the score. In the moment after her lullaby, Marie must be lost in thought, frozen in solitude. Berg creates this effect beautifully, with open fifths in the strings, a character caught in reflection. It's a subtle touch, but the production ignores it. Marie walks up and down, her contemplation gone. Wozzeck in this production doesn't drown but simply walks off into the darkness. Further, at the tragic end of the opera the pointed cruelty of the action vanishes. In the original, Marie's poor innocent child is directed to follow the other children as they rush off to see his mother's corpse. In this version he wanders round and round in circles on his makeshift horse. The intensity softens. Berg was so direct in his score; these emendations seem wasted.

The conductor doesn't help matters at the very end. In case one has missed the emptiness of this moment, he pushes things along. Denying the static meandering series of chords, which are held in a perpetual dissonance, he adds a crescendo and accelerando for unexpected excitement. This effect is not in the score; it creates an all-too-obvious emphasis, one the composer preferred to avoid.

It is interesting to speculate whether this contemporary classic can still give its monstrous charge of despair and hopelessness. Are most of us so jaded by years of atonal dissonances that the opera has lost its power to shock? When performed in such an overstated manner, it seems transformed into something more acceptable. "Wozzeck" has grown safe. If a producing company would leave it alone, stop trying to improve it, maybe the original, grinding sorrow could live again.

(Marvin Tartak, a pianist noted for contemporary music, teaches a course in Opera at City College of San Francisco. He has written program notes for the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, also has edited two volumes of Rossini for the Fondazione Rossini, and is soon to embark on a third.)

©1999 Marvin Tartak, all rights reserved