Opera - Peter Conrad is unmoved by two different interpretations of Buchner's tragedy
Georg Buchner's proletarian tragedy Woyzeck, left in scribbled fragments when the dramatist died of typhus at the age of 23 in 1837, invented modern drama more than half a century in advance. It is as terse and elliptical as Beckett, as righteously furious - in its account of a wretched soldier, abused by his superiors, who slaughters his slatternly mistress - as Brecht. For decades, the ravaged manuscript was thought unfit for performance, and doubt persisted about how the protagonist's name should be spelled. In 1924, Alban Berg entitled his operatic adaptation Wozzeck. That name stuck, and Berg has long been considered the saviour of Buchner's text. Thanks to the orchestra, the baffled, inarticulate characters acquire a thunderous musical eloquence. The play concludes with a clinical autopsy after Woyzeck's suicide; the opera, in its final interlude, composes a lacerating threnody for a wasted, tormented life.
Now the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen has gone back to Buchner, in a production of Woyzeck directed by Robert Wilson which visited the Barbican last month. Though it dispenses with Berg, it still relies on music to voice the grievances for which the characters cannot find words: songs - gravelly ballads and hard-boiled, unlyrical diatribes - have been composed for it by Tom Waits. The German subaltern incongruously turns into an American rocker, who now hallucinates about Coney Island. It's a pity that the salty words are delivered in a liltingly unidiomatic Scandinavian version of English, rather than the rasping vernacular Waits had in mind.
Wilson stages his usual attitudinising puppet show. The text, so terrifyingly abbreviated in its summary of Woyzeck's breakdown, is elongated and decelerated by the preening and posturing of Wilson's mannequins. Characters who should be wracked by misery or convulsed by rage spend their time assuming elegant sculptural poses and maintaining them in the absence of dramatic necessity. Woyzeck's common-law wife Marie, is lifted out of her squalid hovel, squeezed into a scarlet dress, and given lacquered hair like a model strutting on a catwalk. The result is absurdly glamorous, operatic in the worst, old-fashioned sense. I await Wilson's promised AIda at Covent Garden with dread, and anticipate an evening in the company of two-dimensional hieroglyphs.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure that the Royal Opera has done justice to either Berg or Buchner in its new production of Wozzeck. The director Keith Warner seems intent on ruining the play's jittery, fractured dramatic structure. Each of Buchner's scenes offers a different glimpse of a suffocating small town: a fetid bar, a barracks, a doctor's office, a miasmal stretch of open ground. Warner erases these locations and resituates the action in an asylum walled with lavatorial tiles. Buchner's settings appear miniaturised in display cases, wheeled to and fro as exhibits; among them is a bottled lake in a tank, into which Wozzeck plunges when he drowns. It all looks coolly analytical or even academic, which is hardly apt. Before the music starts, Wozzeck's bastard son is onstage conscientiously doing his homework beneath a drop curtain showing a medical diagram of a cross-sectioned head.
The boy, who appears only intermittently in the play, is here present throughout, and watches his mother being sodomised by a snorting officer. He ends tethered to the bed, which ruins Berg's final scene. He is supposed to be playing in the street when his jeering friends run on to tell him that his mother is dead. He goes on hopping and skipping - indifferent, or mercifully anaesthetised? Because Warner's boy is trussed up, he can't go out to play, and the voices of his callous friends are miked echoes inside his head. He ends staring at his father's corpse in the tank: the hallucinating mental collapse has begun to repeat itself. It is no small achievement to have upstaged the hero's tragedy and twisted the opera into an investigation of child abuse.
Warner's meddling would matter less if Matthias Goerne were a stronger Wozzeck. I admire him inordinately as an interpreter of lieder, but his voice is too soft-grained for the role, and he insists on singing phrases that should be delivered as pitched speech. He has also ballooned physically, which blunts his violence. He is certainly game: he urinates and copulates as required, rolls on the floor, and allows plastic tubes to be inserted in either end of his body- first an enema to test his farts after he is fed an experimental diet of beans, then a snorkel to allow him to go on breathing underwater for the last ten minutes of the opera, after he has supposedly drowned (though why, I wonder, subject a singer to this discomfort when the illusion is so obviously fake?). I loved Goerne's Papageno in Die Zauberflote at Salzburg a few years ago, and perhaps he is closer to Mozart's jocose version of the natural man than to Buchner's naturalistic Everyman. At least Katarina Dalayman, as Marie, gives a properly operatic performance - sensual, angry, agonisingly remorseful in her Bible-reading, and plaintively tender just before Wozzeck slits her throat.
Antonio Pappano conducts Berg's fraught chamber music with finesse, but the orchestra never rages as volcanically as it should. I was dismayed to find myself unmoved by both Warner's over-cerebral Wozzeck and Wilson's brainlessly balletic Woyzeck. Has expressionism had its day, killed off by our chilly, defensive irony?
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