Wozzeck

There’s an interesting version of Berg’s violent opera in here; it just requires viewers to close their eyes and block out Bieito’s entire concept. Franz Hawlata, who recently sang in Lyric Opera’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, is a beaten-down Wozzeck, one who’s driven to murder his lover Marie (Angela Denoke), but whose heart isn’t really in it. Both Hawlata and Denoke give strong performances, with Hawlata’s earthy baritone matching the commonplace quality of his character. Denoke is a supremely confident Marie, and sings Berg’s vertiginous vocal lines almost as if they were art songs.

Then we come to Bieito’s production, staged in Barcelona’s opera house, which upends and/or distorts virtually everything that makes Wozzeck the unsettling work it is. Instead of Wozzeck being a soldier, he now works in a factory, as does Marie. Wrong. The other characters’ names, such as Captain and Drum Major, thus lose all meaning. The set (by Alfons Flores, but who cares?) is a mess of sewer pipes. Instead of disposing of Marie’s body in a pond, as Wozzeck says he does, he stuffs her into a pipe, then crawls into one himself, ostensibly drowning. It’s nonsense.

Bieito loves to shock the squares wherever he directs, so the scene of an incredibly hot group of naked men and women emerging from the shadows at the end is to be expected. Also to be expected is that it makes no dramatic sense, since we have no idea who these unsinging supernumeraries represent. Still, they are good-looking. Maybe this opera DVD can be put to other uses.