The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (28 page)

The opera is predominantly choral, and some of this music is rhythmically spoken rather than sung.
To dramatize the extreme contrast between their philosophical outlooks, Moses is composed for a bass speaking voice, Aaron for a singing tenor.
The score is also notable for its use of small ensembles, such as the four naked virgins sacrificed during the orgy and the six voices representing God.

In performance

The opera pivots on the contrast between Moses, whose religion is purely internal and spiritual, and Aaron, the man of action and rationality – a contrast which raises a parallel question: can Schoenberg’s own vision be realized in theatrical terms, or is this opera better performed as an oratorio, its drama left in the mind’s eye?
Two important recent productions took different approaches: in Amsterdam, Peter Stein interpreted the elaborate stage directions quite literally, using floodlight to suggest the power and presence of God; in Frankfurt and Paris, Herbert Wernicke avoided any pretence of naturalism.
At the Met, Graham Vick presented Moses as a tired corporate businessman, Aaron as his sleek spin-doctor, but such modern references seem both glib and tendentious.

Recording

CD: Chris Merritt (Aron); Pierre Boulez (cond.).
DG 449 1742

Alban Berg

(1885–1935)

Wozzeck

Three acts (usually performed without an interval).

First performed Berlin, 1925. Libretto adapted by the composer from the play by Georg Büchner

When Georg Büchner died at the age of twenty-three in 1837, he left his play
Woyzeck
in a fragmentary and confused manuscript (the spelling ‘Wozzeck’ is a misreading of almost illegible handwriting).
Attracted by its short scenes and emotional directness, Berg began to set the text to music during the First World War, but did not finish it until 1922, by which time he had himself experienced something of Wozzeck’s situation as a miserable conscript in the Austrian army.

Early performances caused a great stir, with the more conservative critics branding the music insane and obscene – along with all Berg’s ‘decadent’
œuvre,
the opera was subsequently forbidden by the Nazis.
Over the last half-century, however,
Wozzeck
has been increasingly recognized as the crucial masterpiece of operatic modernism, and its gritty subject-matter, complex musical and dramatic structure have proved profoundly influential on composers such as Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Britten.

Plot

In a small garrison town, the poor soldier Wozzeck is haunted by hallucinatory visions and bullied by a sadistic Captain and a Doctor, who uses him as a guinea-pig for his experiments.
Wozzeck’s girlfriend Marie, mother of his son, is seduced by a dashing Drum Major.

After taunting hints are dropped by the Captain, Wozzeck becomes suspicious of Marie, who feels terrible guilt at her lapse.
Wozzeck is involved in a fight with the Drum Major, and then takes Marie out on a walk in the forest, where he stabs and kills her.

Back in the town, Wozzeck visits a tavern where he is seen to have blood on his hands.
In a state of terrible mental torment, he rushes back into the forest to retrieve the murder weapon and drowns in a pond, imagining himself to be covered in blood.
Back in the town, Wozzeck’s and Marie’s son plays in the street as news breaks of the discovery of Marie’s corpse.

What to listen for

The opera lasts barely a hundred minutes.
Each of its fifteen scenes is tightly organized around one musical form (sonata, fugue, rondo, passacaglia), device or invention, all but two separated by orchestral interludes.
The parallels and echoes between them are remarkably intricate and complex, but the effect of the music is anything but cerebral – the force of the drama is immediately and graphically striking.
The opera bears the mark of Berg’s teacher Schoenberg in its atonal elements, but it also contains folk-songs, dance-hall tunes and passages of searing orchestral lyricism.
The vocal line is marked by
‘Sprechgesang
’‚ a style of singing which requires the voice to adapt a tone close to speech, while following musical rhythm and pitch.

In performance

The opera has often been staged as an exercise in the style of German expressionism, with visual references to the caricatures of George Grosz and a Brechtian theatrical flavour – the danger being that such an approach can end up making this most compassionate and involving of operas seem cold and cynical, with Wozzeck depicted simply as a moron-turned-psychopath and Marie as nothing more than a whore.
More sensitive recent productions by Deborah Warner (at Opera North) and Patrice Chéreau (for the Châtelet in Paris and the Berlin Staatsoper) have rediscovered the opera’s human heart, presenting Wozzeck and Marie as essentially decent people battered and manipulated by a brutal and exploitative social order.

Recordings

CD: Anja Silja (Marie); Christoph von Dohnanyi (cond.).
Decca 417 348 2

Video: Waltraud Meier (Marie); Daniel Barenboim (cond.).
Berlin Staatsoper production.
Warner 0630 16338 3

Lulu

Three acts. First performed Zurich, 1937 (two acts); Paris, 1979 (three act-version).

Libretto by the composer from two plays by Frank Wedekind

Berg worked on this opera, based on two scandalous plays written at the turn of the century, from 1928 until his death in 1935.
He left Act III slightly incomplete, and his widow refused to sanction any posthumous completion.
After her death, Friedrich Cerha was able to complete the gaps in Act III, and his edition, first performed in 1979, has now become standard.

Plot

The Animal Trainer presents his menagerie, with the sexually devastating Lulu as the snake.

Lulu’s lover, Dr Schön, and his son, the composer, Alwa watch Lulu being painted.
After they leave to attend a rehearsal of Aiwa’s new ballet, the Painter seduces Lulu.
When Lulu’s husband bursts in, he is so shocked that he drops dead.

Lulu marries the Painter.
She is visited by the sinister Schigolch: it is not clear whether he is Lulu’s former lover or her father, but he expresses satisfaction at seeing Lulu in comfortable circumstances.
Schön wishes to be respectably married and attempts to break off the affair he has covertly been having with Lulu, but first he tells the Painter about her sordid past.
The Painter kills himself.
Lulu presses Schön to break off his engagement and marry her instead.

But even when she is established as Frau Schön.
Lulu continues to attract admirers – including a desperate schoolboy, the lesbian Countess Geschwitz and Schön’s son Alwa.
When Schön hears the latter confessing love to Lulu, he is enraged and hands Lulu a revolver, suggesting that she kill herself.
But Lulu kills Schön instead.
A silent film interlude shows how Lulu is then arrested, imprisoned and contracts cholera.
With the self-sacrificial help of the Countess Geschwitz, Lulu escapes from jail and takes up with Alwa.

They escape to Paris, where Lulu is blackmailed by a white-slave-trafficking Marquis, and then to London.
To eke out her miserable existence – with Alwa, Schigolch and the Countess Geschwitz still in tow – Lulu takes to prostitution and is murdered by Jack the Ripper.