Dramaturg Jörg Königsdorf on „Wozzeck“

Opera is dead! Long live opera!

The 1920s marked a period of change. In WOZZECK, Alban Berg wrote the first opera to explore the pain of the modern age – and its hero touches us to this day.

“Wozzeck”
Conductor: Donald Runnicles
Director: Ole Anders Tandberg
With Johan Reuter, Thomas Blondelle, Matthew Newlin, Burkhard Ulrich, Seth Carico, Elena Zhidkova and others
From 5th October 2018

The man was the perfect example of an underdog. A man who, for all his effort, would never make anything of himself and occupied the lowest rung in the social hierarchy. And no one attending the execution of Johann Christian Woyzeck in Leipzig’s market square on 27th August 1824 will have had an inkling that this half-crazed murderer was to provide the template for the biggest operatic hero of the 20th century.

Yet it is symptomatic that of all the tales he could have chosen, this story drenched in distinctly unoperatic precariat tristesse was the one seized upon by Alban Berg. WOZZECK is Berg’s response to a question that occupied all the major opera composers of his time: how could this opulent artistic form with roots in feudal society survive the breakdown of the old order in 1918? How would it have to adapt if it were to assert itself in a world that suddenly ticked so differently? What music would people who had experienced the collapse of societies and value systems want to listen to? What stories did they want to watch onstage? And how might opera preserve its status in the face of competition from film, operettas, revues? The situation was grave and it is significant that Leoš Janácek even made the issue the subject of an opera in its own right, with minimal obfuscation: in his THE MAKROPULOS AFFAIR old-school opera dies along with the 337-year-old prima donna, Emilia Marty – and without providing a hint of what form the musical theatre of the future might take.

Up till now the popularity of opera had been guaranteed by the great arias, the blockbuster hits of the time. Who was capable of writing true hits now, with Puccini mouldering in his grave? The young Viennese composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had turned out a catchy number in the form of “Glück, das mir verblieb” from THE DEAD CITY (1920)? The old maestro Richard Strauss, maybe? Or the king of the operettas, Franz Lehár, whose works were increasingly resembling operas? And then there were young composers of the likes of Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek, who made tabula rasa, wrote pithy little operas dealing with modern everyday situations and provoked their audiences with touches of jazz, even if they did not go as far as the Frenchman Darius Milhaud, whose mini operas were questioning the idea of musical theatre as a full-length, evening-filling form.

This age of questing and testing gave rise to works of untold diversity, especially in Germany – and the world premiere of WOZZECK at the Berliner Staatsoper on 14th December 1925 made a huge splash. One thing was patently obvious: this opera was nothing like anything audiences had seen or heard before on the opera stage.

Here, as in the popular film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari”, reality merges with subjective perception. As in the pictures of Otto Dix, society’s functionaries and office-holders are portrayed as weird caricatures. And as in the novels of Alfred Döblin, the main protagonist and identification figure is a man at the bottom of the social ladder. Moreover, this tale of humiliation, murder and madness is accompanied by a music that, since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s theories, was fully able to convey society’s new awareness of the complexity of the human condition. A music that, instead of transmitting a feeling in as intensive a way as possible, uncovered - particularly in its eponymous hero, Wozzeck - a galaxy of spiritual stimuli, urges and delusions that appeared closer to real life than the music of the heroes, princes and villains of an earlier age. With WOZZECK, opera had finally arrived in the 20th century.

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