Wozzeck (Des Moines Opera Company)

Many 19th century operas feature so-called "mad scenes." These are episodes in which a singer, usually a high strung soprano, illustrates her range and vocal technique by simulating madness on stage. Verdi has scenes like this in his Nabucco and Macbeth; Donizetti specialized in these kind of coloratura displays, particularly in the famous "mad scene" in Lucia di Lammermoor. Mozart pioneered this species of aria in Idomeno and, as recently as Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten made one of his characters go luridly mad. It's form of excess and, since opera, is an art that thrives on excess, therefore, particularly suited to music-drama in its most florid form. Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925) doesn't feature a "mad scene," rather the entire opera, from first note to last, is madness embodied. Accordingly, it's fortunate that the opera is only about 90 minutes long -- even at that length, the opera is exhausting: it would be wholly unendurable if it were any longer.

Wozzeck is based on the fragments of an incomplete play written by Germany's literary Wunderkind, Georg Buechner. Buechner was a political radical, playwright, and formidable prose stylist. He was as gifted and precocious as Mozart. Buechner died when he was only 23 -- typhus killed him mid-pen-stroke in February 1837. It's impossible to imagine what Buechner would have accomplished had he survived even into his middle-age. By the time, he was 23, he had written an alarmingly vehement and celebrated political tract (his response to the French Revolution), an astonishing Shakespearian play about Danton's death, a bizarre comedy, also intensely Shakespearian in form and diction (but, also, it seems a precursor to the Theater of the Absurd"), a prose masterpiece, also about insanity called "Lenz", and, finally, the terrifying and fragmentary Woyzeck. This latter work, which almost perished with its author's untimely death, is written on 12 sheets of paper, inscribed in microscopic handwriting with scenes arranged arbitrarily, in no particular order -- no one knows exactly what Buechner intended for the play's final form and what we have is clearly incomplete. The play wasn't deciphered until the 1870's. When Berg saw the play performed in a conjectural edition in 1914, study of the text was still vestigial -- people misread the name "Woyzeck" as "Wozzeck." This misreading of Buechner's tiny script also confounded an understanding of the drama's source -- Buechner had studied trial transcripts and court documents relating to the proceedings against a murderer named Woyzeck, the last man to be beheaded in 19th century Leipzig -- Woyzeck who was an ex-soldier and a barber/wigmaker was convicted of killing his girlfriend, the mother of his illegitimate child. The case intrigued German intellectuals because it involved the defense of insanity. Buechner, who was training as a medical doctor, was fascinated by the question of free will. Woyzeck's lawyers had claimed that the defendant was overcome by madness and couldn't control his actions. Medical proof presented on this issue was rejected by the Court and Woyzeck was convicted and duly executed. Buechner's thesis is that the Court erred. The play, at least what was completed in the writer's hand, is a thoroughgoing brief dramatizing the notion that free will is an illusion. Woyzeck acted as he did on the basis of a complex of circumstances that wholly deprived him from the ability to make any meaningful voluntary decisions -- he is poor and trapped by his poverty; he is a soldier and, therefore, subject to the insane orders and demands of his commanding officer; he is superstitious and fears ghosts and "freemasons" among other things; he has been subjected to bizarre medical experiments (a monstrous doctor makes him eat only beans) that have eroded his will; he is jealous and has a girlfriend who can't resist a handsome man -- she has eyes that "let her look through seven pairs of leather trousers" and pursues an affair with a big leonine and vicious "drum major"; and, finally, Woyzeck broods, he thinks too much. All of these circumstances combine to force him into an insane state in which he cuts his unfaithful girlfriend's throat and, then, drowns himself in a haunted pool where people have seen a severed head ('very much like a hedgehog') floating over the dismal waters. Buechner's text is lightning quick, disjointed, written in a torrent of wild prose that simulates madness and employs often astonishing metaphors. How exactly he was able to imagine this bleak and horrifying theater piece that seems more radical today than Brecht is impossible to understand -- in fact, aspects of the text anticipate and, even, exceed Beckett in their confrontation with the most bitter aspects of human alienation, loneliness, isolation, and sheer panic. Berg's music is huge, using an immense orchestra with all possible expressionistic resources at the composer's command -- it's scrupulously atonal, but, nonetheless, imitates the action on stage. The more wild and discordant the words, the more lacerating the expression, the harsher and more insistently ferocious the music. Berg composes most of the libretto in "Sprechstimme" -- a sort of super-inflected sung-speech in which each syllable is given a hollow, rising note, an interrogative inflection so that the words seem to dissolve into a series of harried, anguished questions.

I have never seen this opera performed. It is terribly difficult. There's no melody for the singers to memorize. Somehow, they have to learn constellations of notes arranged in tone-rows that seem arbitrary to the ear. The music makes sense only as a continuous hysterical scream of indignation and horror. But this is consistent with the opera's text and, so, Berg's music, in fact, fits the terrifying imagery in the libretto like a hand in a tightly fitted glove. The Des Moines Opera Company's performance of the piece seemed to me close to flawless. From beginning to end, the opera is a barbaric howl of despair. The set was a complex barricade of black, seemingly timbered panels set together in a diagonal jigsaw pattern. Portions of the set could be opened to reveal interior spaces -- for instance, in the opening scene, Wozzeck shaving the fat, grotesque commander in an angular cubical revealed by winching up one of the angular panels in the set. Much of the action occurred in front of the proscenium arch -- the Blank Performance Center in Indianola where I saw the show is a thrust stage with a deep elevator shaft at its center. The orchestra played from an underground pit that the characters stalked around or, even, fought at its edges -- this sort of stage creates a continuous sense of menace and threat (you fear that someone is going to plunge into the pit). A mattress was thrown into the elevator hole for a scene in which Wozzeck says that the ground underfoot is hollow and swampy (sinister mushrooms are growing in the woods where a murder was committed). The stage simulated by the mattress, in fact, visibly yielded underfoot. In another scene, the enormously tall, stork-like and hideous doctor (he has a pointed witch's chin) straps Wozzeck in a chair and lifts him high in the air -- Wozzeck has his head enclosed in a vise-like sort of box. A stark and barren hill with some shadow shrubs at its edges leads diagonally to a sort of precipice. We see the large mob of supernumeraries, playing whores and soldiers, sometimes marching up the this diagonal landscape. At the base of this steep ramp, there's a rocky formation with a sort of tub-like vat of water -- this is the pond where Wozzeck drowns himself at the end of the opera. Clearly, staging this opera, which is rarely performed in this country, was a labor of love -- the large cast all strutted around like grotesque marionettes, everyone drunk or demented throughout the whole show. Wozzeck's son, a small blonde boy, is seen in the last moments of the opera -- he has been riding a stick horse in a circle next to the dangerous-looking orchestra pit. The music rises to a shriek like a tornado bearing down on the opera house. One of the older boys looks over a panel and sees the child's mother with her throat slit. He calls out that the little boy's mother is dead. The little boy rides a few hops on his horse, (the orchestra underlining the motion with froglike belches) pedals his tricycle c few feet and, then, stands impassively, his fists trembling slightly but no expression on his face. My only criticism is that the Blank performance space is quite small and Berg writes in either an almost imperceptible whisper or a howling fortissimo -- the loud notes, which signify insanity, were very, very loud: ear-splitting in fact. The effect was powerful but painful as well.