fri 29/03/2024

Wozzeck, Royal Festival Hall | reviews, news & interviews

Wozzeck, Royal Festival Hall

Wozzeck, Royal Festival Hall

You don't have to be mad to work here...

I have a certain resistance to the Second Viennese School (a pretentious title in itself) of Schoenberg and his pupils Webern and Berg. Not that I'm averse to a spot of avant-gardening. I have sat through the squeakiest of squeaky-gate music with the best of them. But, apart from anything else, there's something chilling with their bullying rhetoric about purification and decadence.

Here’s Schoenberg at the beginning of the First World War laying into Bizet, Stravinsky and Ravel: “Now comes the reckoning! Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.” So forgive me if I habitually tend to side with the kitschmongers and the French and Stravinsky.

Berg, for years Schoenberg’s pupil, factotum and practically valet, was approving, saying after the massacre at Dinant in 1914 that it was “very shameful to be merely an onlooker at these great events”.  As Alex Ross, the New Yorker critic, put it, “The notion of total war mirrored to an uncomfortable degree the apocalyptic mind-set of recent Austro-German art."

While one sympathises with the need to discomfort the Viennese bourgeois, then and now, Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre manifesto (proof-read by Berg)  is full of the kind of rhetoric of the need for purity, that tonality had fallen prey to “inbreeding and incest”, attacking “vagrant” chords, which were “effeminate” and “hermaphroditic” and other highly dubious, weirdly racial pseudoscience which was to later underpin fascism. The musical influence of the school was, let’s face it, mainly baleful as well.

But (there is always a but) Berg’s Wozzeck seems to be a brilliant exception, one of the few works of the School that has been accepted into the canon and has been regularly performed since the premiere in 1925, and can be seen as either the last Romantic Opera and the first modernist one. Berg kept his work on Wozzeck quiet to Schoenberg – telling him at the time he was working on the more important matter of his master’s biography. When it premiered, Schoenberg wrote to his pupil that while “there are some things I don’t find good… on the whole it is very impressive and there’s no doubt I can be proud of such a student”. I think that classes as faint praise.

Its success is partly, no doubt, because it ignores all that lunatic rhetoric and is one of the least pure pieces of music there is. Berg was clearly torn between his love of tonality and even kitsch and his love of mathematical complexity in an expressionist work that is something like the musical equivalent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (and what a kitsch artefact that has become).

To ram home the fact that the piece in an expressionist work, last night at the Royal Festival Hall we were treated to video works on screen by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, with swirling colours and the figures on stage going in and out of focus. I half expected a sign to go up: “You don’t have to be mad to work here – but it helps."

Actually, Simon Keenlyside was an excellent, fragile Everyman Wozzeck put upon by the Nazi-ish doctor who experiments on him, the Drum Major who seduces his wife and the World in general, while his wife Marie, sung by Katarina Dalayman, managed to pull off a sympathetic, undivaish (with many divas, the sense of their own fabulousness would undermine the part) performance as the poverty-stricken sensual wife whose head is turned by the Drum Major. Her rich, beautiful tones suggested not just a victim but an active participant in the doomed dance which unfolded.  Jan-Hendrik played the evil Doctor with a charming swagger, while Anthony Dean Griffey was a lusty, alienated figure in the Weill/Brecht mould whose compulsive desire could have him asking to be shown to the next whisky bar. Oh, don't ask why.

Berg's tale of the abused and disturbed soldier was presented in a semi-staged production by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen as the last of a series on the hothouse of Vienna from 1900-35 entitled "City Of Dreams" (the title could also be City Of Nightmares).

Salonen and the Philharmonia effected agile changes of gear between the neurotic and the sane, between, for example, the 12-tone theme of the inhuman Doctor and the almost sweet lullaby Marie sings to her child or the distorted folk tunes in the bar, where Wozzeck retreats after killing his wife in a fit of mad jealousy (although the piano should have been even more out of tune). The lighting on stage gave the impression we were in a plush secessionist Viennese café, being treated to a doomed tale in the presence of Freud, who would have pointed out that tonality keeps creeping up, however repressed, like the unconscious.

The Philharmonia could have done it with a touch more attack and clarity (as the Berlin Philharmonic seems to manage – but hey, they live in the capital of cabaret and decadence so maybe it comes more naturally). But the alienation, madness and human frailty of Wozzeck's anti-hero, and the overpowering sense of the insanity of the wider society (which had just been on a killing spree in the war killing millions as Berg begun it) was admirably realised. The Philharmonia voices were particularly effective in their unearthly intensity.  It may be a dog’s breakfast of a piece, but it works anyhow. After Wozzeck, the only time such dissonance reached a mainstream audience was in Hollywood horror films, by which time it really had degenerated to kitsch.

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Comments

The Doctor was in fact sung by Peter Hoare and the Drum-Major by Hubert Francis. And six paragraphs before we actually get to the review???

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