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Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wozzeck?

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WITH ITS LURID SUBJECT MATTER, potentially explosive social criticism and dissonant music, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is a big risk for San Diego Opera. As the performances scheduled in Civic Theatre draw near (April 14, 17, 20 and 22), Ian Campbell, SDO’s general and artistic director, must be taking some very deep breaths. Will ticket buyers pass this one up, even though it’s directed by two-time Tony Award–winning Des McAnuff?

Now with millions of admirers and holding a solid position in the standard repertoire, Wozzeck is nearly a century old (Berg began working on it in 1914) and is widely regarded as one of the greatest operatic masterpieces of the 20th century. Most of the best orchestral conductors approach it with admiration and awe. But say the words “atonal music” to some, and they start running in the other direction. As the Irving Berlin lyric goes, “I say it’s spinach, and the hell with it.”

If you still think Pablo Picasso was a fraud or that James Joyce was a pornographer, this opera is not for you. Yet for all its “singspeaking” and angular vocal lines, the score is not as dauntingly atonal as some imagine. In the orchestra, Berg’s musical language taps more deeply into the plush sonorities of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler than it does into the music of Berg’s fellow Viennese theorists Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. It is deeply felt and powerfully emotional stuff. As a whole——musically and dramatically——Wozzeck makes a work like Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah (just performed here) look like chopped liver.

So, how to approach this bogeyman? A little study of the work’s leitmotifs and its intricate musical structure is helpful, even recommended, but not absolutely necessary. Think German Expressionism. The Scream, the widely known painting by Norwegian symbolist painter Edvard Munch, is an excellent visual analogy. Title character Wozzeck could be uttering that scream. As in the painting, all around him the world becomes distorted and restructured according to his psychosis. Berg takes audiences directly into the heart and soul of this poor soldier/barber driven to madness and murder by a society that seems cruel, exploitative and indifferent to his humanity. And for those with ears, the penultimate tremendous tonal statement is utterly heartbreaking.

For one night, forget about beautiful singing and lulling melodies. Remember, opera literally means “the works,” like a burger with everything. This wildly elevated form of theater was originally cooked up in the Italian Renaissance as an attempt to re-create Greek tragedy, known to contain elements of speech, chant, singing and dance with instrumental accompaniment. Before long, what had started as drama got hijacked——first by composers and later by singers——and for some time the literary/theatrical basis for opera sank out of sight.

Opera is total theater. That’s what we get with Wozzeck——a piece, in many ways, closer in spirit to the origins of great tragic drama than what you usually see at the Old Globe.

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