This spring season of the Canadian Opera Company feels a bit like the second coming of Alexander Neef, their former General Director. Next week we’ll be seeing the revival of Robert Carsen’s Eugene Onegin, a production that Neef brought to Toronto in 2018. But this week it’s Wozzeck, a show I saw in the Metropolitan Opera’s High Definition series in 2020, announced this way:
“A co-production of the Metropolitan Opera;
Salzburg Festival; the Canadian Opera Company, Toronto; and Opera Australia.”
More than five years later, the co-pro has finally come to Toronto, long after Neef left Toronto and even his successor Perryn Leech left the COC.
The other fellow in the picture is even more important.
Johannes Debus and the COC Orchestra met all the challenges of Alban Berg’s score, except perhaps one. In the scene when the Drum Major comes into the barracks, to boast about his conquest of Marie, the whistles weren’t easily audible. Except for that tiny silly detail, the orchestra and the chorus were absolutely perfect! I had to mention the whistle to underline my appreciation for what Debus and company accomplished. The lyrical last moments for each of Marie and Wozzeck were truly breath-taking, gorgeous and beautiful even if they were also eerie and grotesque.
Wozzeck is the pinnacle of 20th Century modernism, the top of a mountain first discerned by Liszt, shaped and climbed by Wagner, Strauss and Mahler. While there’s dissonance in the score, it’s not atonal, but the music is difficult.
But if you have seen this Wozzeck you’re probably ready to label me a music nerd, given that I am omitting the real key figure in this production, one of the most remarkable stagings I’ve ever seen on a COC stage, namely the director William Kentridge.
Kentridge has a fascinating vision of the opera. We see a design that seems to relocate the story to the period of the First World War. Okay, that’s what I assumed: until I heard him explain on Youtube that what we’re seeing is “a premonition of the First World War”.
So the puppet child wears a gas mask.
Kentridge leads a brilliant team, presenting something different for the Toronto version of Wozzeck, including Co-Director Luc De Wit, Set Designer Sabine Theunissen, Costume Designer Greta Goiris, Original Lighting Designer Urs Schönebaum, Revival Lighting Designer Mikael Kangas, Projection Designer Catherine Meyburgh and Video Control Kim Gunning. Yes Wozzeck is played by the COC Orchestra and sung by a remarkable cast of singers, but first and foremost you will be immersed in the flamboyant images of Kentridge’s vision for Wozzeck.
Ambur Braid as Marie continues her winning streak at the COC, inevitably the most sympathetic person onstage regardless of the composer or the style she’s required to play. I never doubted her for a moment as the mother of a puppet-child, indeed she will move you to tears. I think Michael Kupfer-Radecky is a more believable Wozzeck than the Met’s star Peter Mattei, a singer whose ambition to be an artist got in the way of the credibility of his portrayal of this sad everyman in the High Def broadcast (which gives us extreme closeups).
Michael felt so much more direct, and wonderfully musical. I’m not sure whether I was crying in the scene between him & Marie in Act II where he gives her some money because of Ambur’s response or the way he sang his lines, before his exit. OMG, so gorgeous. I guess it helps Ambur to be hearing that exquisite unaffected delivery. I’m envious, they get to hear each other every show.
The first voice we hear is Michael Schade as the Captain, berating Wozzeck in the opening scene. We’ve seen so many superb portrayals from Michael, it’s no surprise he gives us such a fascinating Captain. In Kentridge’s theatrical world it’s a caricature such as we might find in Commedia dell’Arte, a self-consistent wooden stock figure that bounces back and forth between quirky and grotesque. There are other comic stock figures who torment Wozzeck. Anthony Robin Schneider is the Doctor, whose experiments will lead to immortality and possibly kill his subject.
And the other tormentor is a Miles Gloriosus, the bullying Drum Major of Matthew Cairns.
Wozzeck also has a friend named Andres although the scene where we might see Andres as upbeat, in contrast to the torment Wozzeck is getting in the other scenes, is rather dark in Kentridge’s interpretation. Owen McCausland handled all its challenges including the high C in the tavern scene, effortlessly.
In the conversation after seeing this new Wozzeck we were somewhat perplexed. Alas the theatre was not full, even though what we saw is a powerfully cinematic experience, an overwhelming combination of images and performances. My friend Alexander Cappellazzo thought it was the most completely relatable combination of story, action and music that you will find on an operatic stage.
He compared it to Taxi Driver, suggesting that maybe it shouldn’t be promoted as a conventional opera: because of course that’s not what it is. We wonder: how do we get this across to the potential audience? What should the COC do differently to promote this absolute jewel of a production? I feel sad, seeing the best opera performance today that I’ve seen in a long time in a half-empty theatre. I’m reminded of the conversations I’ve been having about popularity, a tricky concept. I believe Wozzeck could be sold out if the audience knew what they were getting. Maybe we need to see Kentridge’s edgy designs, the overpowering stage picture, rather than the usual operatic sales-job with its focus on the singers. It’s more like a movie than an opera, and it sweeps you away.
Okay a bit more nerdy stuff, then I’m done. Wozzeck is an example of a genre called “literaturoper”, a genre that isn’t terribly well-known. If the opera is an adaptation from a play or work of literature one could make the case that it’s a literaturoper. Salome and Elektra by Richard Strauss, Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy take a play and adapt it without the intervening step of a libretto, such as you’d find with La boheme or Traviata or Carmen. Wozzeck is a fascinating case given that the original is a framentary play reassembled by Karl Emil Franzos, who has a dubious claim to fame. He’s responsible for mistaking the title of Georg Büchner’s fragmentary play Woyzeck as Wozzeck instead. I am not surprised, speaking as someone whose handwriting used to be pretty terrible in the days before I started using laptops & smartphones instead. And while I have never seen Eugene Onegin mentioned for inclusion in the list of literaturopern, maybe it also belongs there given that Tchaikovsky adapted the work from Pushkin’s poem. Or maybe the designation doesn’t mean much of anything.
I’m looking forward to seeing Onegin next week, as we come up on the renewal deadline for COC subscriptions mid-week. Yes I will renew my subscription. I’m looking forward to seeing Wozzeck again later in the run, but this time sitting up close. Kentridge’s production makes this opera fabulous to watch from any distance, exciting from any seat in the house.
Wozzeck continues with performances May 3, 8, 10, 14, 16.
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