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Mar. 14th, 2014 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretNot sure how to review Wozzeck, so I will start by spoiling the ending. Wozzeck ends with the murder/suicide of its impoverished protagonists and their young son left behind. In the opera's final scene, the boy is ostracized and mocked by the other children, to which he spookily responds by continuing to play, singing "Hop Hop- Hop Hop". These are his first words of the night. I've long argued that there is an echo of "Pop Pop" in these words, a young boy asking where his father is. But broadly speaking you can cast this final scene in two ways:
1) The boy is aware in some dim way of the tragedy he is the victim of, and is asking for some sort of explanation, while trying to retreat into his play.
2) The boy is too young and is unaware of the tragedy he is fated to suffer from the rest of his life, and is playing because he knows no better.
The Met's production fully committed to the second choice. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this. In a way it is possibly a brighter ending, but it is also a creepier ending, because the sorrow in store for the boy remains unrevealed.
I was struck by Rigoletto comparisons... I think the arc of the boy's fate operates on similar wavelengths to Gilda's fate- because her father is stuck in a rut of depravity, he tries to rescue her from it by isolating her from his life. Because he is therefore the only vision she gets of that life, she is vulnerable to its lures. Wozzeck and Marie similarly wrestle with how to raise their child without the debts of ingrained habits that have doomed them to eternal miserable poverty, and the ending, regardless of which choice is interpreted, asks the same question about whether knowledge is a cure or the very disease. Whether biting the apple can save or doom. Whether Wozzeck's death is a sacrifice or a tragedy. How far a father and mother can lead a child down a path away from bitterly earned experience.
But this is interesting, but doesn't speak to the EXPERIENCE of seeing Wozzeck.
Wozzeck is harrowing. It is concise and it is incredibly carefully structured and it blends post-Romanticism with dark atonalism, and it is designed to strip the audience of hope and force them to rebuild it on their own terms. I greatly enjoyed it, but I honestly don't think I was in the right mindset for it on Monday night. It didn't take me as deeply into its monstrous embrace as it has on past viewings, and I can't give any real reason for that. I can't point to any failure of performative execution or staging misstep or lack of emotional commitment, and in fact Deborah Voigt was a phenomenal Marie. But somehow, though I still emerged from the performance emotionally numbed, weary of the world, it felt less catastrophically awful than usual.
That feels like a terrible thing to say. The idea that you go to Wozzeck to surrender yourself to the awfulness of daily life is the mesmerizing potency behind the opera, but it is also a thing to be experienced sparingly and probably it ought to be a thing you go into at least a little unwillingly. When I invitedroga to join me she declined, saying that she was "a little frightened" of it. Wozzeck is dangerous and moving and also wrong, because it is an entertainment which is not escapist.
This is my review of the Curtis Opera Theater's Wozzeck five years ago... I think what's interesting is how unchanged my opinion of the work is.
1) The boy is aware in some dim way of the tragedy he is the victim of, and is asking for some sort of explanation, while trying to retreat into his play.
2) The boy is too young and is unaware of the tragedy he is fated to suffer from the rest of his life, and is playing because he knows no better.
The Met's production fully committed to the second choice. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this. In a way it is possibly a brighter ending, but it is also a creepier ending, because the sorrow in store for the boy remains unrevealed.
I was struck by Rigoletto comparisons... I think the arc of the boy's fate operates on similar wavelengths to Gilda's fate- because her father is stuck in a rut of depravity, he tries to rescue her from it by isolating her from his life. Because he is therefore the only vision she gets of that life, she is vulnerable to its lures. Wozzeck and Marie similarly wrestle with how to raise their child without the debts of ingrained habits that have doomed them to eternal miserable poverty, and the ending, regardless of which choice is interpreted, asks the same question about whether knowledge is a cure or the very disease. Whether biting the apple can save or doom. Whether Wozzeck's death is a sacrifice or a tragedy. How far a father and mother can lead a child down a path away from bitterly earned experience.
But this is interesting, but doesn't speak to the EXPERIENCE of seeing Wozzeck.
Wozzeck is harrowing. It is concise and it is incredibly carefully structured and it blends post-Romanticism with dark atonalism, and it is designed to strip the audience of hope and force them to rebuild it on their own terms. I greatly enjoyed it, but I honestly don't think I was in the right mindset for it on Monday night. It didn't take me as deeply into its monstrous embrace as it has on past viewings, and I can't give any real reason for that. I can't point to any failure of performative execution or staging misstep or lack of emotional commitment, and in fact Deborah Voigt was a phenomenal Marie. But somehow, though I still emerged from the performance emotionally numbed, weary of the world, it felt less catastrophically awful than usual.
That feels like a terrible thing to say. The idea that you go to Wozzeck to surrender yourself to the awfulness of daily life is the mesmerizing potency behind the opera, but it is also a thing to be experienced sparingly and probably it ought to be a thing you go into at least a little unwillingly. When I invited
roga to join me she declined, saying that she was "a little frightened" of it. Wozzeck is dangerous and moving and also wrong, because it is an entertainment which is not escapist.This is my review of the Curtis Opera Theater's Wozzeck five years ago... I think what's interesting is how unchanged my opinion of the work is.