That the “Great War” was the source of Wozzeck’s emotional damage and eventual violence is made manifest. The short interior scenes are presented at the front of the stage with Vicki Mortimer’s appropriately dingy sets changed behind a long, grimy hospital curtain, which is whisked quickly open or closed by (mostly) unseen stagehands. McVicar’s stark new production is distinctive and visually striking, setting the action in Weimar Germany at the time of the opera’s premiere. Even with the mathematical inspiration of Berg’s modified serialism, there is nothing dry or studied and the music sounds utterly spontaneous and wholly compelling, the notes leaping from instrument to instrument like the fevered thoughts in Wozzeck’s disordered mind. That sense of the center not holding–socially and psychologically–is constant in Berg’s restless, remarkable score. With a powerful double company debut by Tomasz Konieczny and Angela Denoke and an intelligent, effective new production by David McVicar, Lyric’s Wozzeck presents a harrowing performance of Berg’s brilliant tragedy.ĭespite the composer’s denials, it’s difficult not to feel that the blood and devastation of World War I found their way into Berg’s adaptation of Georg Büchner’s unfinished 19th-century play about the ex-soldier-barber who is driven to homicide.
Wozzeck opened at Lyric Opera in a Sunday matinee, the company’s first production of Alben Berg’s groundbreaking opera in 22 years. In such an environment, the only possible fate for the disturbed ex-soldier Wozzeck and his fragile prostitute girlfriend Marie, is madness and death. The bleak landscape of Alban Berg’s 1925 opera is an absurd and godless, meaningless universe populated by obsessive neurotics, in which good people can only go insane or become victims. “It’s a bad world,” observes one character in Wozzeck, and it’s hard to disagree. Tomasz Konieczny and Angela Denoke in Berg’s “Wozzeck” at Lyric Opera.
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