#enowozzeck
In fact we didn’t all go to the same opera. My husband and daughter went to Don Carlos at Covent Garden (she will write about this in her own blog in due course), and when I realised that the final night of ENO’s Wozzeck was on the same night, I joined them on the train to London.
This new production by Carrie Cracknell updated the setting to the present, with familiar images such as soldiers carrying flag-draped coffins and modern dress (apart from Margret, whose get-up seemed to date from about 1960). The action played out entirely indoors, on a split-level, harshly lit set. This approach also influenced some musical decisions, such as performing the Sprechgesänge closer to speech than is sometimes done. I don’t really need to describe the production in detail as all the reviews below do that.
As a result quite a lot of references in the libretto couldn’t be taken literally. For example, the pool where Wozzeck drowns exists only in his head as he stabs himself, after which water flows down the set (a lot of reviewers thought this was meant to be blood, though it didn’t seem so to me).
One strength of this production which others haven’t commented on was that the minor characters such as Andres (here a veteran in a wheelchair) were better delineated than they sometimes are. And this is the first production of one of Berg’s operas that I’ve seen which featured drugs (although Berg himself seems to have been no stranger to them – if I understand his letters correctly he took at least two substances that would be class A these days).
I can only endorse the praise that was heaped on all performances, but the orchestral playing under Edward Gardner was the finest I’ve heard from ENO, with beautiful tone yet not afraid to take risks, as in the second crescendo after the murder scene, which was the most prolonged I’ve heard.
So I was glad to catch this production. It was reviewed all over the place, including in some papers that don’t normally do much opera, with the reviews demonstrating that performances of this work tend to be evaluated by the effect they have on the audience. Here’s a selection of them:
- Daily Mail
- Daily Express
- Observer
- Guardian
- Telegraph
- Independent
- Independent on Sunday
- The Arts Desk
- The Classical Source
- Capriccio
Berg’s music caught up with me again a couple of weeks later, at a church summer fête (as it once did at the equivalent event at the children’s school). Leafing through a few classical CDs which were being sold second-hand, I found an EMI compilation of ’20th century classics’ which included the Menuhin/Boulez recording of his violin concerto, which I have on LP but which has long since gone from the catalogue. I had transferred it as best I could to CD, crackles and all, but now I have a clean copy!