THE BURDEN OF HISTORY. “WOZZECK” IN BERLIN

When Daniel Barenboim went up the stage last night (9 October 2013) with his entire orchestra to take the curtain call, he look embarrassed. Any honest man would have been in his predicament: the orchestra let him down, or he let the orchestra down, or both he and the orchestra let the public down. The orchestra just could not play it. At certain points,… especially when the score demanded a kind of chamber music, the musicians were on the verge of collapsing; the leaders of the string sections were out of tune themselves. The orchestra did not literally wake up until Act 3, scene 1! But the singers were extremely good, especially Roman Trekel as Wozzeck and Waltraute Meier as Marie. In actual fact it was the singers who saved the day.

Let us not forget the fact that “Wozzeck” had it world premiere in Berlin on 14 December 1925, performed by this very same Staatsoper under Erich Kleiber (great father of a great son, Carlos Kleiber). The present Staatsoper under Daniel Barenboim premiered this latest production in 2011, and received very positive reviews. The performance last night could not live up to the 1925 production, nor the 2011 premiere. No wonder Barenboim did not look happy. And this is what I mean by THE BURDEN OF HISTORY. He must have been a happy man these past few weeks, with so many successes at the Musikfest (Music Festival) in September, and I myself joined in the celebration of his piano four hands with Martha Argerich. (Please see my review in Thai.) The day before yesterday he was playing in an anti-Putin concert organized by Gidon Kremer. Did he have time to reread the score of “Wozzeck”? As for the orchestra, the convention demands that a different opera must be given each night, so you can’t have 3 performances of “Wozzeck” in a row. This is a silly convention. Tonight the orchestra has to play in Verdi’s “The Masked Ball”. But at least it had already played two performances of “Wozzeck” on October 4 and 6 after the l o n g summer vacation. Those two performances must have been terrible. Am I to revert to the old Mahler saying – from which I have already dissociated myself – “There are no bad orchestras, only bad conductors”? I must confess I am getting confused. The fact remains that you just can’t play a fiendishly difficult score like this without re- re- rehearsals.

After one hearing, I am in no position to say that I could grasp its fine points. But this is certainly a work of art that its creator finely wrought. Every nuance, every turn of phrase, every pause means something. I had difficulty in following the Leitmotifs. But I think I can get the message as to what Alban Berg was trying to achieve. The is a tragedy, not of any small man, but of ” the small man”. Wozzeck is the Ur-small man, and his fate is not that of any individual: he represents his clan, his kind, in other words, human kind. Those of us who come from literature (and we are more used to the spelling “Woyzeck”, which is a different deciphering of Georg Buechner handwriting of this unfinished drama) will certainly be surprised by Alban Berg’s concept of the play as a grandiose tragedy, rivaling the Greeks or Shakespeare. The orchestration is of Wagnerian dimensions, though the Second Viennese School did come up with a different serial system. The text lends itself to such musical treatment, unlike Lutoslawki’s rendition of a French poem, which I strongly criticized in my review of the concert by the Philharmonia Orchestra on September 9, 2013. The language of Wozzeck is that of a person who must make great effort to utter what he has in mind, for pressure comes from all sides to silence him. It is a barren speech, but full of implications. And Alban Berg has a grand time in helping him to speak through a musical language. As a student of German literature, I love that passage when Wozzeck speaks of the abject, pitiable plight of people like him and finally says that if people like us ever get to heaven, we shall have to help with the thundering. A great hidden (pre-Marxist) revolutionary threat of sorts! The orchestra supports him with a crescendo leading to a fortissimo that could drown Wagner any time. There are several instances of this kind of orchestration. On the contrary, when Marie realizes her guilt and tries to seek comfort from reading the Bible, Berg transports us into another realm that even his blissful Violin Concerto cannot outdo. Here Waltraute Meier as Marie outdid too her own Isolde. I shall definitely have to spend time listening more attentively to this opera. I am not yet in a position to say why it is great.

A literary scholar naturally was expecting to experience Berg’s treatment of the Grandmother’s Tale, which has no literary rival in terms of its description of metaphysical desolation. He dared not touch it, for being a native speaker of German, he knew that there would be no music to match its linguistic uniqueness. (And this could have been a lesson for Lutoslawski!) This tale has been translated into Thai and taken up in a number of contemporary Thai dramas, including Khamron Gunatilaka’s “The Revolutionist”. It just happens to fit into many contexts, including alien ones. Are we talking here of universality? But the ending that Alban Berg gives to the opera proves to be an eye-opener to many a literary man. It ends with Wozzeck’s and Marie”s child following other children in the direction of the waterfront where Marie’s dead body has been found. The dark, empty stage looked awe-inspiring. The Editors have all in vain tried to find the right place for the Grand Mother’s tale. It was probably designed by Georg Buechner as the EPILOGUE of the play. Alban Berg had perhaps found the answer for us but would not want to stage it himself. He was just too modest.

The production by Andrea Breth is perhaps Director’s Theatre (Regietheater) at its most modest. (Those friends and colleagues who know my writings know my antipathy towards the “Regietheater”.) She does not work against the text as most German avant-garde directors do, but tries to support it. The early part of the opera is played out in a small barred chamber, looking like a television screen, thus emphasizing the claustrophobia that reflects Wozzeck’s life. It then relinquishes this spatial restriction in later scenes when more characters enter the stage, in order finally to broaden out into elemental expanse into which Marie is taken up. So physically speaking, the stage design moves from social constriction to metaphysical liberation (through death?), which does makes sense, for it moves along also with the music. But the “Regietheater” must preserve its identity at any price. The Drum Major who seduces Marie is supposed to be virile and sexy, but the singer, who was given the role and forced to go through the entire opera half-naked, happened to have a big belly (and therefore sang very well). He was not sexy at all, but repellent. Of course, the “Regietheater” had to be provocative: so the Drum Major made love to Marie in front of her child. I shall not say more about the excesses of the “Regietheater” which this time proved to be suicidal, and always does.

All in all, this is an opera with a big idea and a musical and dramatic ambition that requires to be taken seriously. But the Berlin audience, consisting mainly of elderly or salaried people who can afford the tickets, go to see their stars. And look how many of the singers have sung at Bayreuth, and the conductor too has conducted there so many times! Berlin, the capital of music? Between the 2 World Wars, definitely!