Alban Berg’s opera ‘Wozzeck’ stars a humiliated soldier subjected to psychiatric experiments by a sadistic doctor. When he finds out that Marie, the woman with whom he had a child, is having an affair with the band’s Drum Major, his world collapses. “It is the story of a man who kills his wife, then drowns and the child is left without parents, so there is not much hope in the plot,” admits the artist William Kentridge, responsible for the staging of the icon of the 20th century opera that premieres this Sunday at the Liceo.
To think that Berg composed this masterpiece in 1922 is impressive. There are the issues that today we continue to read daily on the pages of ABC: the disasters of war, the drama of gender violence, our fragile mental health.
But it is even more worrying to keep in mind that the opera is based on the play that Georg Büchner left unfinished when he died… in 1837! The baritone who plays the protagonist, Matthias Goerne, notes that “you have the feeling that the piece was written expressly for the times in which we live.”
To explain that feeling of seeing ourselves in a current photograph that was taken of us almost two hundred years ago, Kentridge comments that “it is an opera about the violence that derives from despair, it is a very contemporary issue.” A theme, therefore, universal, which unfortunately never loses relevance.
The creator, in fact, draws attention to the detail that Buchner speaks of reddish skies, the earth opening up and experiments opening the skulls of patients. We would have to wait for the first and second world wars to see the images of bombs and corpses that the playwright had glimpsed. Between one and the other, Berg discovered Buchner and created this opera. On May 5, 1914, the composer attended the first performance of Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’, which had remained unpublished at his death. Impacted by the story, he worked for eight years in which he created a disturbing, purely expressionist musical universe, adding to the plot his own experience as a War Ministry worker during World War I.
It is precisely in that creative impulse of Berg and Büchner where Kentridge perceives a glimmer of hope. “Optimism is always in the fact of creating something, rather than in the story that is told,” he says. For the artist, it is necessary to “separate the plot, which leaves no room for hope, from the extraordinary optimism that Berg and Büchner’s act of creation contains, and even from the performers who bring it to the stage at the Lyceum.”
Musically, the score advances what will later be defined as the Second Viennese School, with Schönberg, Webern and Berg himself at the helm. The musical director of the production, Josep Pons, assures that “it continues to be the most difficult opera to direct in the entire repertoire.” Tonal, atonal and twelve-tone passages coexist in it. “And all this, within the framework of a classic form in three acts, with a beginning, middle and end,” adds Pons. In fact, Berg allows himself a game practically imperceptible to the listener, which is to dedicate each of the acts to a classical musical form: the suite, the sonata and the variation, respectively. A game of references and nods to tradition within the framework of the 20th century avant-garde that continues to fascinate scholars of the period even today.
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