The opera as Theater
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger The Opera as Theater While fond of music, I am not often found in the opera house. Perhaps my first experience there has something to do with it. In my mind's eye, I...
...His love for Marie is the one thing he can hold on to, and when that too is questioned, metaphors assume a horrible reality as the tangible world melts...
...The first prerequisite is to insist on simplicity from Marie and Wozzeck...
...Thus he cannot walk, he must always bounce or lurch...
...What remains for the director is to adjust the singers to this subtext, to provide them with movement appropriate, to the world summoned to life by the music...
...She even contrives to die with a large, sweeping gesture, when all that was called for was to sink to the floor...
...Franke is a competent actor in a competent company, but Evelyn Lear, who has a considerable reputation as an actress, only demonstrates the shallow ideals of performing prevalent in operatic circles...
...it is especially remarkable that they do not bump into each other...
...This credo is given lip service around the opera house but rarely upheld...
...George Buchner's original play, which Berg's libretto follows closely, deserves a complete essay on its dramatic felicity...
...Berg's opera is not a collection of striking arias, but a play truly heightened by music...
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...And the music, though subject to some interpretation, does not change...
...There is no predicting his reaction to any event...
...The operaphile will say that this scarcely matters—the music is all important...
...As a result, Miss Lear overemphasizes Marie's feelings of degradation and repentance...
...There is a clarity, a matter-of-factness to BUchner that Berg did not retain...
...Yet in Wozzeck Berg's earthly vision seems almost palpable, making definite demands upon the performers...
...The Drum Major struts and preens, other people existing only to enhance his ego...
...I could hear form being wrenched, and knew Berg was breaking with something precious to him when he defied older conventions...
...For Wozzeck himself, the world is no longer stable...
...She too often seems a well-brought-up young lady playing at being naughty instead of a girl who has been through a number of liasions and knows very well that such is her fate...
...It is all too obvious that no one is in charge here, that no one has decided what the dramatic structure is and imposed an overriding style on the singers...
...They can be aided by a director who insists that in this opera men are trapped by their own delusions, glancing off each other, with their minds firmly fixed on their fantasies...
...The present Metropolitan Opera production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck contains the seed of drama, at least stimulating one to consider the possibility of successful dramma per inusica...
...On the other hand, the stiffness and strain in Wozzeck (which the other characters comment on) do not have to appear in every move...
...a soprano carrying easily 50 pounds of excess avoirdupois, who clumped on stage, sang quaveringly, then galumphed off...
...Wozzeck can be acted by singers who are sufficiently in control of their bodies to restrict themselves to significant motions...
...Similarly, Evans stresses Wozzeck's insanity a little too heavily in his vocal line...
...In Berg's work, Wozzeck in his madness differs only in degree from the other inhabitants of a deranged world...
...The ordinary acting faults are easy enough to discern...
...he can transmogrify the setting sun into a minor apocalypse...
...One music critic has noted Paul Franke's long experience as the Captain...
...Although opera production, as I have indicated, faces certain difficulties, it also has a unique advantage—the music...
...and a Gypsy who inspired even less mystery than Harpo Marx's burlesque of the same role...
...His plays are full of solid people and solid situations exactly rendered, but without any theatrical machinery grinding all the mystery from the world and its people...
...But that is diminished by what happens on the stage...
...In rehearsing a play, actors often grope for weeks for the meaning of sections of the text, and the director (though he may pretend otherwise) is often feeling his way along with them...
...The music, not the libretto, shows us the gulf separating Berg from his master...
...Only the Doctor and the Captain are so enraptured by chimeric vision as to display it proudly...
...as we listen we cannot help feeling he is demented...
...The libretto defines a world of hallucination-plagued men who can no longer see each other, who hear in another's speech only what meets their own obsessions...
...you imagine that he leaves the lush harmonic universe of Gustav Mahler not because he wants to, but because he must...
...His mind darts from idea to idea, constantly swirling...
...His wandering mind is a burden he must bear, something he is stuck with, part of that "nature" he sometimes talks of...
...if he gestures with his hand, his whole body comes tumbling after it...
...I take it on faith that the Metropolitan Opera no longer supports productions quite so idiotically slack...
...Thus, where Buchner's Captain is eccentric, in Berg the alarming range of his voice, continually darting into a falsetto which the character cannot control, goes far beyond mere eccentricity...
...And in Marie, the ebb and flow of emotion from love of Wozzeck and her child to promiscuity is similarly a fact of life...
...While Berg has been faithful to the play, his work has an entirely different texture...
...But these shortcomings are kept within bounds, and one certainly gets the general idea of what the Captain is all about, if not any very illuminating particulars, from Franke's performance...
...Evans can do things simply: He can stand and sing without throwing his hands into the air or rolling his eyes, and that is a great virtue in a Wozzeck...
...More important, when listening to a hi-fi your imagination can summon a vision to charm the inner eye, unimpeded by the sight of graceless flesh rattling around before mildewed scenery...
...Every scene has a formal musical design ranging from rhapsody to fantasy and fugue, and the whole second act is in the form of a five-movement symphony...
...In my mind's eye, I can still see all the glorious futility: // Trovatore featuring a Manrico who gestured first with one arm, then the other, with metronomic regularity...
...Wozzeck is no more proud of his irrationality than Berg was of tearing apart the 19th-century harmonic tradition...
...At the Met, the force, of this music makes Wozzeck an intense experience...
...The situation was frivolously melodramatic, the music loathsome, yet Callas sang with such intense conviction that she showed me a suffering human being...
...Berg's atonality is accompanied by an almost excessive formal obeisance to the past...
...All 1 can do at present it suggest that the essence of Buchner's dramaturgy is the knack of making one plus one...
...This is the reality the singers must capture...
...The staging must thus be attuned to Berg's effects or even a capable singing actor like Evans cannot attain much...
...Buchner's hero verges on being the much put-upon little man, a case history driven mad by poverty, religion and ill-treatment...
...Wild statements are all the more powerful when not underlined with portent...
...equal infinity...
...He is not just capriciously different...
...It is hardly surprising that singers who often have not rehearsed together seldom sustain a dramatic illusion...
...A character in the opera may be following Buchner's dialogue word for word, but the strained relation of his vocal line to the orchestral accompaniment colors his speech, places it in an odd context that stresses the irrationality in the text while siphoning off any element of sanity...
...But the music comes through quite delightfully on the phonograph, without the distraction of chattering matrons...
...Most productions, though, continue almost to obliviate the possibility of dramatic criticism...
...The Doctor and the Captain run on about their ideas, never considering Wozzeck a human being, but only a convenient object on which to hang their scientific and moral speculations...
...nothing has a fixed meaning...
...The music accentuates these developments...
...The point is really better made when it is simply reinforced from time to time with distinctive gestures...
...In opera, the music, not the words, carries the meaning...
...Not that an untrained ear like mine caught all of this, but I was aware of familiar strains in a different context...
...There is always a logical flow in Buchner, never a mechanical model...
...Geraint Evans as Wozzeck often conveys the essence of his character, and might have arrived at heights of pathos if better supported...
...He does not willingly show his madness: Those long, wailing cries should be drawn from him almost against his will...
...These feelings permeate the opera and strengthen the suggestion of a universe running to chaos, of men wandering through life staring fixedly ahead, never noticing what is around them...
...The orchestra, expanding on the dramatic situation in interludes between each of the 15 scenes, insists on a vision more integrated and profound than the singers convey...
...Still, it is difficult enough to mount a play in the usual six weeks of rehearsal...
...add music, and the present system of having sopranos jet through a maze of one-night stands, and one has created seemingly insuperable obstacles to realizing a composer's intentions...
...Miss Lear does far too much acting, I am afraid, for the rather simple girl Wozzeck's mistress, Marie, is...
...Still, it must be difficult for Evans to develop his characterization, pitted against Lear's grande dame and the general amorphousness of the stock company...
...Franke may be at his work a little too long, for he has picked up all the stock gestures of the opera house...
...it is the subtext, the emotional texture, the poetry, while the libretto is merely the prosaic gloss indicating the general argument...
...If this were attempted, Wozzeck might be an overwhelming dramatic experience...
...And the world on the stage should float on the music, which is constantly trying to attain solid forms only to watch them dissolve...
...Ideally, opera can be acted, for I also recall Maria Callas emerging from among the jugglers on the Ed Sullivan Show to sing a bit of Tosca...
Vol. 52 • April 1969 • No. 8
