The Canadian Opera Company: Wozzeck by Alban Berg. Michael Kupfer-Radecky, Wozzeck; Ambur Braid, Marie; Matthew Cairns, Drum Major; Michael Schade, Captain; Anthony Robin Schneider, Doctor; Krisztina Szabó, Margret; Owen McCausland, Andres; Michael Colvin, The Fool. May 8, 2025, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto. Continues to May 25; tickets here.
Picture a tavern scene: two dozen chorus members cavort alongside a handful of actors, several in gas masks, moving along in broken, limping gait, lifting and shaking wooden chairs. Backstage a screen is projecting speeded-up clips of a woman being thrown from one man’s arms to another one’s lap. From a wooden wardrobe emerges a group of pub musicians. Two singers appear from behind them, singing distorted popular songs then drunkenly collapsing; two more (Wozzeck’s mistress Marie and her seducer, the Drum Major) enter dancing and swirling as Wozzeck himself looks on in outrage and despair. The backdrop presents dense charcoal drawings and video projections.
Trying to take all of this in, the eye frantically glances to and from the surtitles. And the music? On the one hand you could argue that it invites the disorienting visual barrage. On the other, you could say that it makes much of that barrage superfluous, if not infuriating.
The Kentridge Production
OK, we get it. Wozzeck is spiralling through disorientation to disintegration. He’s a soldier in the German army, subject to dehumanising cruelty. Berg is writing his opera at the time of the First World War. Expressionist theatre and film are all the rage. But, at the heart of the opera is the compassionate humanity with which Berg treats his central characters — Wozzeck, Marie and their child. And, humanity is what William Kentridge’s production (a co-commission of COC and the Salzburg Festival, where it premiered in 2017, Metropolitan Opera, and Opera Australia) conspicuously lacks.
It deploys tremendous care and skill to emphasize the already obvious. But, in so doing it rides roughshod over such textual details in the score as Wozzeck shaving the Captain (rather than projecting a film), experiencing apocalyptic visions while collecting firewood (rather than looking aimlessly anxious), and slitting Marie’s throat (rather than her belly), all of which makes a nonsense of the text and leaves one wondering whether Kentridge actually read the score or the libretto closely enough.
He imposes his own signature sensory overload on the most touching passages — Marie’s Bible-reading penitence, the Mahlerian orchestral interlude reflecting on the tragedy, and the final scene with the child. Did I mention that the child is ‘played’ by a Tim Burton-ish puppet? No wonder the audience reaction at the end is more perplexed than heartbroken. Berg’s idea was that the orphaned child, taunted by its ‘friends’, was destined to become the next Wozzeck. Kentridge’s staging could hardly have been wider of that mark.
A Premonition of WWI?
Not that every production has to follow Berg’s instructions to the letter (though Abbado and the Vienna State Opera did so to tremendous effect in the 1980s). But nor should it make us feel that it is merely serving the director. It should not be confusing either. In his notes, Kentridge claims that the opera serves as a premonition of the First World War. But, his images of strategic maps, exploded bodies, gas masks, wounded soldiers and nurses, downed planes, and blasting bombs, suggest that we are right in the middle of the conflict.
A post-explosion interior of what looks like an art studio for a dystopian La Bohème makes up the setting, almost unchanging in its grey and earth-colour hues during the entire 90 minutes of the opera. Kentridge treats the stage as a live canvas in which visual effects overtake the singers and even Berg’s music. A bit more emphasis on how the main characters interact and less on the historical context would have made all the difference. Where Wozzeck’s progressive delirium calls for visual shock, everything remains static. His exclamation that the tavern-drinkers are ‘waltzing in blood’ plays out only to a grotesque video of the dance on the on-stage canvas.
The Singers
That canvas at times reflects the state of mind and words of the singers and at others supplies a parade of military characters emulating the ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’: which is not the only part of the animation that carries a Pythonesque element of mockery. Quite entertaining, and executed with talent and flair. But, how much more chilling the effect can be when the grotesquerie is fully invested in the acting? Michael Schade, Anthony Robin Schneider and Matthew Cairns were vocally impressive as the Captain, the Doctor and the Drum Major, but visually only semi-convincing as Wozzeck’s tormentors-in-chief.
Admittedly, the largely static delivery works well enough for the doctor’s scene — in a claustrophobic wardrobe-cum-laboratory. But, the lack of chemistry between Michael Kupfer-Radecky’s Wozzeck and Ambur Braid’s Marie, and of course between Marie and her puppet-child, is a fatal flaw.
Final Thoughts
Johannes Debus and the COC orchestra navigate the complexities of the score confidently and sure-footedly. If they take the big orchestral interlude far too fast for its emotional impact to register, that may because they have to follow the timing of Kentridge’s background animations.
So, at the same time as their Eugene Onegin with minimal props and extraneous action, the COC’s offering of a Wozzeck at the opposite extreme shows how many ways there are to score a near-miss.
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