Orchestra Wellington’s Wozzeck: triumphant capture of Berg’s conception
Madeleine Pierard (Marie) and Julien van Mellaerts (Wozzeck) with Orchestra Wellington directed by Marc Taddei in the New Zealand premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck
Image credit: Chris Watson
When Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck was announced this time last year as the conclusion to Orchestra Wellington’s 2023 season, I was amazed by their brilliant audacity in planning the New Zealand premiere of this famously demanding work. The production itself, a few days ago, was nothing short of astonishing.
Composed a century ago, and immediately successful beyond its composer’s dreams, Wozzeck is now considered one of the most significant and influential operas of the 20th century. But it is also musically challenging for singers, orchestra and audience, an atonal work created using the 12-tone method of Arnold Schoenberg, Berg’s teacher and mentor. It’s a musical language audiences love to hate.
Marc Taddei is a visionary, one of the most talented concert programmers in the country, and a persuasive salesman. He regularly cajoles the large, loyal Orchestra Wellington audience into joining him on adventurous musical journeys. They’ve learned to trust him. Would Wozzeck shake that trust?
First, there’s the story itself. Wozzeck’s themes of madness, misery and murder are found in many opera plots. As audience for Berg’s opera, we're confronted as well by gritty realism that ends starkly without redemption or hope. Wozzeck, sometimes described as an anti-hero, is an ordinary man, a soldier. He’s the centre of the action but the energy is elsewhere; everything is done to Wozzeck, who’s ultimately powerless.
The fine cast is a major strength of the production. London-based New Zealand baritone Julien van Mellaerts is brilliant in the title role, understated and gloomy, yet always compelling. Berg’s writing and van Mellaerts’ portrayal insist we feel compassion for Wozzeck, bullied as he is by his bombastic Captain (Corey Bix), exploited by the psychopathic Doctor (Paul Whelan), mocked by his fellow soldiers, and working all hours to provide for his unfaithful lover Marie (Madeleine Pierard) and their illegitimate child.
Soprano Madeleine Pierard as Marie
“…her beautiful, elastic voice is perfect for the complicated heroine.”
Image credit: Chris Watson
These are flawed characters, revealed in all their complexity. Marie is a complicated heroine - gentle mother becomes guilty lover, as powerless as Wozzeck, seeking relief from her life of poverty in dancing, jewels and infidelity. Pierard’s beautiful, elastic soprano voice, full of emotion, is perfect for the role and her tender lullaby to her child an early highlight. She also finds an occasional deliberate coarseness of tone, as her Marie seeks more freedom and fun.
Van Mellaerts communicates Wozzeck’s growing depression and delusion throughout the opera, drawing us in with variety of tone and the lyrical beauty of his singing. At times, the orchestra threatens to overwhelm him, but surely this is Berg’s intention, illustrating how life is engulfing his vulnerable hero.
Baritone Julien van Mellaerts as Wozzeck
“…drawing us in with a compelling performance.”
Image credit: Chris Watson
American dramatic tenor Bix has sung the role of Captain before and reveals both his fine voice and the character’s range, boastfully over-confident but insecure enough to be terrified by the Doctor’s prediction of his death. New Zealand-born bass-baritone Whelan is splendidly cast vocally and visually as the cruel Doctor. A commanding stage presence, his character is self-obsessed and ambitious. Wozzeck’s rival, the seductive Drum Major, is played with convincing style by young American heldentenor, Jason Collins.
New Zealand singers shine in major and minor roles. Soprano Margaret Medlyn sings the role of Margret, Marie’s friend, with strong vocal presence and character. Robert Tucker and Patrick Shanahan impress as 1st and 2nd Apprentices. The singers of the Tudor Consort step into the vocal and theatrical challenges of Berg’s score with verve, as do the young voices of St Mark’s Schola Cantorum in the final scene.
Berg’s opera is a miracle of inventive construction, not only in its atonal language but also its structure. Three acts are each divided into five short scenes. Act 1 has five character pieces, Act 2 is a ‘symphony in five movements’, Act 3 six inventions or variations, the sixth an orchestral interlude before the final scene. Berg was determined, however, that his meticulous construction was not the business of the audience. “I demand,” he wrote, “that from the moment the curtain rises until it falls, no-one in the audience be conscious of this diversity of fugues, suite and sonata forms, variations and passacaglias.”
No curtain rises in this semi-staged production in the Michael Fowler Centre, but from the opening scene of Act 1, revealing the bleak reality of Wozzeck’s life, we are completely captured by the nightmarish drama unfolding before us. Using a chamber-sized orchestra, an arrangement by Eberhard Kloke that requires no orchestral pit, and with clever placement of the cast on both the full stage and elevated platforms, Taddei and director Jacqueline Coats achieve minimal separation of orchestra and singers.
This approach works splendidly for Berg’s conception. The composer creates and underlines shifting moods of fear, humour, tenderness and irony with his colourful orchestration. Lovely string solos, poignant winds, dark contrabassoon, harp, celeste, pizzicato basses, downright terrifying brass and percussion - all become characters in the drama. At times the musicians themselves are part of the action, as in the little tavern band in the big ensemble scene of Act 2.
Wozzeck Act 2 Scene 4: minimal separation of orchestra and singers adds to the drama
Image credit: Chris Watson
The singers move effortlessly around the orchestra. At one point, Wozzeck’s blithe friend Andres, sung with cheerful aplomb by Australian Alex Lewis, is somehow collapsed drunkenly over the celeste keyboard, raising his head to sing a line before subsiding again. The hilarious snoring chorus of intoxicated soldiers, in the final Act 2 barracks scene, has the male singers lying in a heap across the front of the stage and the orchestra.
The humour in the opera is often subtle and ironic, rendering Wozzeck’s misery even more touching. He can never share the joke; he is always its wretched butt. His increasing madness is expressed in his vocal lines, Berg sometimes using spechgesang, a kind of spoken singing, influenced by Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Van Mellaerts expresses these character shifts with subtle ease.
All is reinforced by stylish and understated design, using projected images, old photographs, and disturbing lighting. From the second scene, when the sky reddens ominously, hallucinatory red lighting and disturbing photos projected on screens behind the orchestra illustrate Wozzeck’s growing delusions and obsession with blood and death.
The scenes of the final act seem dominated by the colour red. A huge red moon rises, Wozzeck singing of “blood-stained steel” as he murders his lover. But Orchestra Wellington, playing this demanding music with commitment and flair, brings many more colours to the narrative. A huge unison crescendo, the “invention on a note”, repeats in full orchestral octaves with shattering intensity. After Wozzeck’s own death, a big quasi-Viennese orchestral interlude brings back motives and passions from the whole work in highly coloured music.
Most chilling is the apparently light-hearted childish play in the final scene. The orphaned lovechild of Marie and Wozzeck is uncomprehending when told by his friends of his mother’s death. “Hop, hop,” he sings, prancing across the stage on his wooden horse. No final curtain is needed to underline the tragedy.
Taddei is to be congratulated for his huge commitment to this ground-breaking production of Wozzeck. He has shown deep insight into both Berg’s musical intentions and the composer’s compassion for the poor and disempowered. Taddei has also drawn into his artistic vision wonderfully talented performers, many singing a role debut, alongside an inventive creative team. This may not have been the most flawless performance of Wozzeck ever presented, but it absolutely and triumphantly captured Berg’s modernist conception. Unforgettable!
The full cast of Wozzeck and the musicians of Orchestra Wellington, with Marc Taddei, accept enthusiastic applause at the end of the opera
Image credit: Chris Watson
Orchestra Wellington Wozzeck by Alban Berg with Julien van Mellaerts (Wozzeck), Madeleine Pierard (Marie), Marc Taddei (Music Director), Jacqueline Coats (Director), Lighting design (Daniel Wilson). Wellington November 11, 2023