Word: wozzeck
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Manhattan's Victorian, red-and-gilt Metropolitan Opera House was transformed one night last week into a nightmarish, shriekingly demented world of sight and sound. The occasion: the Met's long overdue production of Wozzeck, by the late, famed atonalist, Alban Berg. It was one of the great nights in Met history...
Based on a series of dramatic fragments by German Playwright Georg Büchner (1813-37), Wozzeck created a sensation when first performed in Berlin in 1925, was almost immediately recognized by European critics as one of the century's operatic masterpieces. But the fear that American audiences were not ready for Wozzeck's cerebral, atonal music long discouraged the Met from attempting...
Dark Corridors. The opera's hero, Franz Wozzeck (Baritone Hermann Uhde), is a cloddish German soldier who recoils with protoplasmic twitches and tremors from the shock currents of life. Haunted by nameless terrors, persecuted by everybody around him, he stumbles down the dark corridors of his world like a crippled blind man, lacking even the tragic dignity that a suggestion of malevolent fate might give his life. He is ridiculed by his captain (Tenor Paul Franke), who seems to stand for all the bluster of petty militarism. He is used as a guinea pig by a doctor (Bass Karl...
...sometimes bellows in brassy rages, sometimes shrieks in lines of shrill angularity, sometimes surprises with passages of softly breathing lyricism. The stark horror of the murder is conveyed in a howling, brassy crescendo in the orchestra that gives way abruptly to the tinselly tinkle of a café piano; Wozzeck's morbid fears are unforgettably etched in a single, slithering pianissimo in the strings; the cowardice that lurks beneath the captain's bluster becomes apparent in his occasional lapses into shrill, falsetto shrieking...
Blood-Red Moon. The Met's production of Wozzeck does full justice to its dramatic power. The sets by Germany's Caspar Neher are starkly effective: a phosphorescently glowing landscape dominated by a blood-red moon and lumpish, Van Gogh-like stumps of trees; a solidly bourgeois German hill town, contrasting with the madness unfolding before it. Hero of the evening: Conductor Karl Boehm, who, after an unprecedented 24 rehearsals, led his huge orchestra through Berg's convoluted score with masterful clarity and passion...