‘Wozzeck’ Review: On the Brink of Madness

William Kentridge’s new production of Alban Berg’s work at the Metropolitan Opera is rich, expansive and revelatory on stage and in the pit.

ByHeidi WalesonDec. 30, 2019 2:46 pm ET

Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” (1925) tends to be thought of as bitter medicine with its brutal story and its harsh, often atonal score. Think again. The new production created by William Kentridge and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin that opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday is rich, expansive and revelatory on stage and in the pit. Director and conductor opened up this grim tale of a mistreated soldier, giving its themes a larger canvas and finding heart-stopping beauty in its bleakness.

Berg adapted his libretto from Georg Büchner’s play “Woyzeck,” which he saw at its Vienna premiere in 1914. (The play, left unfinished when Büchner died in 1837, was discovered in 1875, edited, and finally staged in 1913.) In 15 brief scenes, interspersed with orchestral interludes, it recounts the downfall of the impoverished Wozzeck. Taunted by his Captain and experimented on by the unscrupulous Doctor while Marie, his girlfriend and mother of his child, dallies with the handsome Drum-Major, Wozzeck has terrifying apocalyptic visions. Ground down by humiliation and fear, he murders Marie and then drowns himself.

The opera usually takes place in Germany around 1821, the time of the real-life events that inspired the story. Mr. Kentridge has set it just before World War I, making Wozzeck’s visions and the cruelty surrounding him reflect the disintegration of the world order. Sabine Theunissen’s set and Catherine Meyburgh’s projections, ominously lighted by Urs Schönebaum, act like an art installation. Live characters gingerly navigate a rickety pile of platforms, connected by duckboards that suggest the trenches of France. Piled-up wooden chairs are repurposed as weapons or firewood. Wozzeck and Marie’s child is a puppet wearing a gas mask. An actor wearing a field nurse’s apron and a gas mask and carrying a crutch opens the armoire where the Doctor’s experiments take place; in the final scene, the crutch becomes the child’s hobbyhorse.

The cyclorama backdrop and a projection screen that is part of the built set are canvases for Mr. Kentridge’s instantly recognizable black-and-white drawings, rendered in smudgy charcoal and subtly animated so that, for example, giant heads slowly appear on a battlefield as Wozzeck hallucinates them, and figures, including a horse and a pompous officer, strut by. There are blasted towns, barbed wire, a dirigible, a crashed plane, exploding shells and battlefield maps. The images are often suggestive rather than explicit—as when two dancing shadows turn out to be running soldiers who fall after being shot—making the installation’s evocation of chaos and overwhelming dread even stronger.

As directed by Mr. Kentridge and co-director Luc De Wit, the opera’s characters stood out powerfully even in the visual cacophony. Baritone Peter Mattei embraced Wozzeck’s music in both its angularity and lyricism. He never made an ugly sound as he limned Wozzeck’s deepening anguish and the progression of his madness. In the first scenes, he seemed despondent but sane; by the time he stabbed Marie, he was, like the war itself, beyond human control. Elza van den Heever’s voluptuous, clarion soprano made Marie a vivid figure, full of desires and regrets. Her red dress, the one brightly colored garment among Greta Goiris’s otherwise olive drab or earth-toned costumes, proclaimed her vitality, though its sack-like cut avoided the sexiness cliché.

As for Wozzeck’s tormentors, Gerhard Siegel’s tenor took the pompous Captain’s zig-zagging Sprechstimme (pitched speech) into extreme edges of his range, making him comical and cruel; bass-baritone Christian Van Horn gave the sadistic, egomaniacal Doctor an unctuous quality; and tenor Christopher Ventris was all puffed-up vanity as the Drum-Major. Andrew Staples (Andres), David Crawford and Miles Mykkanen (Apprentices), and Tamara Mumford (Margret) shone in their smaller roles, as did the Met chorus.

Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s orchestra was as big a star as any of the singers. Every moment was distinctively colored and diamond-clear, whether it was a sharp attack on a tutti outburst or a passage of shimmering lyricism. The orchestra propelled the tale and commented on it in the interludes, weaving the opera’s beauty and cruelty into a shattering experience.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).