This somber but powerful opera has a strange history.
It began life as a play written in 1836 by German playwright Georg Buechner based on the true story of Johann Christian Wojciech who was publicly beheaded in 1821 for killing his mistress, who was the mother of his child.
Büchner died young and never completed the play, but his near-completed manuscripts were taken up by others and it was finally performed in Munich in 1913.
Its title was changed from “Woyzeck” to “Wozzeck” in error by the difficulty of deciphering Büchner’s minuscule font and spider.
The subject of the play is the dull and impoverished soldier who is bullied by his superiors and forced to do a variety of menial jobs and earn a little extra money by volunteering to take part in experiments conducted by an ambitious doctor.
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In 1922, the Austrian composer Alban Berg saw the play’s main character’s misery as driven by insanity and murder as an illustration of the plight of the common soldier in World War I.
Wozzeck’s opera premiered in Berlin in 1925 and retains a plot very close to Büchner’s play, as well as the misspelling of Woyzeck’s name.
However, Berg’s eroded music adds greatly to the intensity of the piece and even after nearly a century, its combination of tonelessness and dramatic force is still hard to listen to.
Deborah Warner’s new production opens in the men’s toilet which instantly sets up the filthy scene.
Several characters use urinals, which the hapless soldier Wozzeck later cleans up. This proves the downtrodden nature of his existence, which is underlined by the bullying treatment he receives from the captain, excellently played and sung by the British tenor Peter Hore, and the doctor, wonderfully portrayed with utter callousness by the British Brindley Sherrat.
As if these two weren’t tough enough, Wozzeck is beaten up by his colleagues, and his mistress and mother-in-law have an affair with Drum Major.
The entire cast copes excellently with the grandiose demands posed by Berg’s music, all held together brilliantly by the brilliant performance of the title role by German bass-baritone Christian Geyer.
The dramatic music is superbly conducted by Antonio Pappano, coaxing a powerful performance from the Covent Garden Orchestra, perfectly matching the intensity of the action on stage.
I’m not sure what we’ll expect to see in this opera.
Maybe it’s just a tragic story about a good man who descends to violence and eventual suicide through callous disregard and abusive coldness to those around him.
Some simply see Wozeck as a message that we should all be kinder to our fellow human beings, but the deeper lesson is that personal ambition and self-importance are perfect breeding grounds for cruelty.
- ticket window: roh.org.uk or 0207 304 4000 (tickets from £15 to £160 on various dates until 7 June).
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