Word: wozzeck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...otherwise revise even the most pedigreed plays and operas. Bizet's Carmen cut to four singers and 82 minutes to recapture the gritty spirit of Mérimée's novella? Peter Brook undertook the radical surgery three years ago in Paris. Berg's Wozzeck set in a 19th century insane asylum? That was Hans Neugebauer and Achim Freyer's novel perspective in a Cologne production revived last season. Maxim Gorky's Summer Folk implausibly wed to a selection of Gershwin songs and renamed Hang On to Me? Peter Sellars performed the ceremony...
What else lies in store? Berg's Wozzeck, perhaps. A demanding performer who turned down a request by Herbert von Karajan to sing Beckmesser because he disagreed with Karajan's concept, Prey is currently mulling a couple of offers to sing the foremost 20th century antihero. He plans to ignore the tradition of croaking and barking the role that has evolved since the challenging opera's premiere in 1925. "Berg wanted a beautiful voice," says Prey. "I want to sing every note as it is written...
...libretto, drawn from Jakob Michael Lenz's 1776 play, concerns the seduction and degradation of a middle-class girl, Marie, by a group of soldiers, among others. The opera's connections with Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu are obvious. Wozzeck too is about soldiers and their sordid love lives and has a heroine named Marie; like Die Soldaten, it is constructed in 15 self-contained, even aphoristic, scenes. Lulu-like Die Soldaten, a twelve-tone opera-similarly features a heroine who ends up a common prostitute. Zimmermann deliberately invoked the shade of his illustrious predecessor; the challenge...
...musical intervals, but still has room for such disparate elements as Gregorian chant, Bach chorales and, during a dance number, an anachronistic rock band. Each of the scenes in the opera's four acts is organized according to a musical genre: chaconne, toccata, ricercar-another explicit resemblance to Wozzeck...
...sings the famous Habanera while engaging in some erotic byplay with a cigar, thrusting it into Don José's mouth at the words "L'amour, I 'amour. " In its total bleakness this is Carmen seen by a man familiar with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, twin 20th century masterpieces of love, alienation and despair. The production also reflects Brook's distaste for conventional Bizet, which goes back to the time, 30 years ago, when he was production chief at London's Royal Opera House. "I looked with horror...