On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music THE LEGACY OF ALBAN BERG by m. anatole gurewitsch A Jl. JLlban Berg, who died in 1935 at age 50, has been making the international headlines lately. Last year his second opera, Lulu,...
...Michael Rippon, singled out for loving accompaniment from the pit, chatted his way through the part of Leporello, hardly bothering to sing a note...
...As Donna Anna, Carol Va-ness showed a fiery temperament and keen musical intelligence...
...These provide a neat outline for the plot but are more memorable for the sharp images (sometimes compassionate, often grotesque) employed to evoke character and atmosphere...
...But the Captain Wozzeck shaves for extra money, and the Doctor who pays him to participate in crackpot experiments—with their sadistic, patronizing interest in his morality, his hygiene, his delusions—are potent symbols of forces that drive a man to destruction...
...she phrased fearlessly, and her imposing soprano shone from the top to the bottom of its compass...
...The breeze that played through the orchestra at the word " Wind" in the first scene was fresh and light enough to be felt...
...Jose van Dam, an unusually elegant vocalist for so gritty, downtrodden and declamatory a role, proved a painfully affecting Wozzeck...
...Wozzeck also incorporates the stricter forms of the passacag-lia and fugue...
...The composer's widow, Helene, refused to allow the opera's third act to be completed on the basis of the composer's notes...
...the other two are employed for their sense of closure, to ring down the curtain con brio...
...Berg used as his text the handful of dramatic fragments that make up George Biichner's Woyzeck...
...in fact, it is hardly a tale at all...
...Even before Marie betrays him, Woz-zeck is a haunted man: Out in the open field in the second scene of the opera, he is tormented by hallucinations of severed heads and subterranean warfare...
...About the musical performance, I have more substantive reservations...
...Wozzeck does...
...Rudel was especially responsive to the music for the Don's rascal servant Leporello: In the Catalogue Aria the orchestra played with real delicacy and wit, and in the little mock prayer, "Ah, pieta, signori miei," the instrumentalists once again paid attention to their music...
...The bully Drum Major who brags about stealing Wozzeck's woman as he beats him delivers only the most obvious in a barrage of crushing blows...
...Perhaps if he was to compose at all, Berg needed to pose himself challenges most other composers would have found inhibiting, not to say crippling...
...But this is a matter for the psychologist, not the critic—and in any case, it does not follow that a listener must decode Berg's formal language to "understand" his music...
...Tutto nel mondo e burla" the close of Falstaff, and the street fight in Act Two of Die Meistersinger...
...The sets and costumes, dating back to Caspar Neher's 1959 production—the only one the Met has ever owned—proved supremely worth preserving...
...Berg's formal rigor in this opera indeed surpasses that of any other music ever composed as a vehicle for dramatic action...
...Julius Rudel is regarded in some quarters as a major Mozartean conductor, though the evidence for this has been elusive...
...The Captain's room with its striped wallpaper, the poverty of Marie's room, the dingy gaiety of the beer garden, the cheerless fields outside the town—all are immediately communicative...
...Although appropriately possessive, she projected a drab and unromantic character...
...True, the Met's revival was courageous because Wozzeck is hardly the sort of opera that fills the house on nonsubscription nights...
...Meanwhile, every bit as worthy of headlines are the recent performances, also led by Levine, of Berg's first opera, Wozzeck...
...The purpose of Berg's academic exercises is more mysterious...
...The two other women in the cast were more captivating...
...Certain passages in the recent production were admirable, even revelatory...
...Most eloquent of all is the orchestral accompaniment, painting internal and external landscapes and commenting on the action all at once...
...For Donna Elvira's desperate aria, "Ah, fuggi il traditor," the meter verged on the tyrannical...
...Berg's score is not, however, the relentless onslaught of dissonances these scenes might suggest...
...As the peasant girl Zerlina, crowned with white roses on her wedding day, Faith Esham made a lovely picture and gave a vocal performance to match...
...She is capable of some melting tones, yet when faced with a leap higher than a major third she flails at the pitch...
...It was too bad that they were occasionally blanketed by the orchestra, for at such moments those of us who did not carry the full text inscribed indelibly in our memories could not grasp, let alone appreciate, the nuances of their expert characterizations...
...T JL...
...But Universal Edition, Berg's publisher, nevertheless engaged the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha to carry out the necessary work and, after Frau Berg's death in 1976—in express violation of her will—proceeded to make the music available for performance...
...For most musicologists, however, Wozzeck needs no apology: It is the masterpiece of 20th-century music-drama...
...The Paris production created a sensation and was subsequently recorded for Deutsche Grammaphon (DG 2711 024...
...The solo assignments for the brass were superbly dispatched, and the strings gave off a brilliant sheen...
...No fire, no desperate cry could escape from that metric prison...
...Fifty-five years after its world premiere, the work is popularly thought of as "contemporary" (usually meaning "difficult," "inaccessible," and "not for me...
...She sets about florid passages warily, at half voice...
...and the crescendos after the murder built to the most tremendous climax of sound 1 have ever heard at the house, without growing harsh or unfocussed in tone...
...Thus we find that the first scene is cast as a suite, consisting of a prelude, a sarabande, a gigue, a gavotte, an air, and a reprise of the prelude in cancrizans...
...But the accompaniment for the delightful duet, "La ci darem la mano," was so plodding in rhythm and so rigid in its phrasing that the singers could do nothing to rescue it...
...Last year his second opera, Lulu, was finally revealed in its complete form at the Paris Opera under the baton of Pierre Boulez...
...Some critics have gone to great lengths to demonstrate that they each have a dramatic aptness, but all of these arguments seem to me to rest on remarkably shaky ground...
...Hour" may be taken almost literally, for the opera was presented without intermission in just 97 minutes, yet what musical and dramatic substance is concentrated in that brief period...
...It has been announced that New York will be able to hear all three acts of Lulu next year at the Metropolitan Opera, under the baton of James Levine...
...Only the third serves a demonstrable dramatic function...
...Unfortunately, he does not have the personal allure the title role requires, and his reading of the lines wavered disconcertingly from the musicianly to the prosaic...
...Offhand, I can think of three great fugues in opera: "Questo e il fin di chi fa mat," the final movement of Don Giovanni...
...Lullabies, marches, folk songs, and dances keep their distinct, vibrant colors as they are woven into Berg's atonal fabric...
...As Marie, Anja Silja was fierce in her independence, sincere in contrition, and rang out with gleaming tones...
...It would not matter a jot how accomplished his counterpoint was if the score did not speak directly to the heart...
...The decor by Michael Annals evoked memories of such tacky MGM musicals as The Pirate...
...the finely-wrought orchestral interludes were radiant...
...Esther Hinds, the Elvira, is not an artist who could prevail in such circumstances...
...the costumes, also by Annals, were better, though the Don did not always manage to keep his shirt on in the presence of women...
...James Levine's reading could hardly have been more colorful, precise or impassioned...
...The men were inconsistently satisfying...
...A jealous soldier kills his unfaithful mistress, the mother of his child, and drowns while trying to hide the bloody knife...
...For all of the effortless breath control, cool fluency, and gracious cultivation that Rockwell Blake brought to Don Ottavio's two arias, his tenor lacked the desirable sensuous-ness—and he seemed to be absent from the action altogether...
...The vocal writing may not be conventionally beautiful, but its cadences embrace a world of emotion, from the piety of Wozzeck's " Wir arme Leut" to the exuberance of Marie's "Soldaten, Soldaten" to the strangled revulsion of Margret's cry when she sees Wozzeck's bloody hands...
...They are performed as spoken theater, too, and have recently been filmed by Werner Herzog...
...Samuel Ramey is endowed with a bass of great suavity and lofty sonority, and commands a refined technique...
...The rest of the large cast performed with no less intensity, skill and conviction...
...The tale it tells has a bleak simplicity...
...here was nothing expert about the new Don Giovanni at the New York City Opera...
...The action was newly directed by David Hays, who filled the 15 brief scenes with incisive dramatic gesture, complementing the text and the music...
...These marked the Met's finest hour this season...
...The Met performances were a triumph on every level...
Vol. 63 • May 1980 • No. 8
