Wozzeck - Review of 2025 Canadian Opera Company Production

In 1925 Alban Berg’s first opera Wozzeck received its first performance in Berlin. It gave a solid kick in the butt to the operatic tradition of the previous several centuries. Monteverdi, Mozert, Verdi and Puccini felt the kick but they survived and are still thriving. But Wozzeck made its mark. It is an opera about the wretched of the earth, the abused and downtrodden who live in poverty and hopelessness. It is composed in atonal music and you can forget nice melodies and arias but you do get powerful music that, combined with William Kentridge’s directing and art, will give you something stunning.
Wozzeck is a soldier around 1820 according to the libretto but director William Kentridge sets the production in the 20th century, perhaps around World War I. In the opening scene according to the libretto the soldier Wozzeck is shaving his Captain but Kentridge does away with that and we have Wozzeck wheeling in a movie projector and showing some fast clips. The Captain abusively tells him to slow down the gnarly film. We get a snapshot of the life of the pathetic Wozzeck.
It should be noted that this is not an ordinary production. William Kentridge is a brilliant artist who has become involved in theatre and opera productions of distinction, not to say genius. The current staging of Wozzeck is a co-production with The Salzburg Festival, The Metropolitan Opera and Opera Australia. It premiered at The Salzburg Festival in 2017.
The distinctive feature of this, as of all Kentridge productions, is the set. It is designed by Sabine Theunissen with generous use of video projections, especially of Kentridge’s line drawings. There are scenes that must be from World War I but one is never quite sure what is happening with the complex and changeable set.
The set is a complicated and almost incomprehensible mixture of paintings, drawings and physical objects that surround the poor soldier and the people in his life. You can only pay so much attention to it impressive as it is, or you may miss parts of the opera.
Baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky plays the pathetic Wozzeck He must deliver a man who is buffeted by misfortunes, like King Lear, without having any social position to fight back. Superb singing and acting by Kupfer-Radecky. Wozzeck is abused and ridiculed by his Captain (excellent work by tenor Michael Shade), used by the quack Doctor (bass Anthony Robin Schneider) and gets the coup de grace of humiliation by his common law wife and mother of his child, Marie (soprano Ambur Braid in a moving and stunning performance). Marie reads the Bible looking for solace from the guilt precipitated by her infidelity. Does that provide us with a twinge of sympathy for Marie? The strutting and macho Drum Major (a fine-voiced, strutting and macho tenor Matthew Cairns) is too strong of a sexual attraction for her to resist, Bible or no Bible.
As if that were not enough or because of it, Wozzeck has some strange visions that lead us to believe that he is unhinged. His neighbor Margret (mezzo soprano Krisztina Szabo) and his friend Andres (tenor Owen McCausland) are perhaps the sane people in his life but he is a pitiful creature without the standing of a tragic hero. We pity him for his simplicity and his suffering,
Kentridge’s direction, like his art, is brilliant as he combines the atonal music of Berg with the plot delineated by the superb acting and singing into ninety minutes of astonishing opera. The Canadian Opera Company Orchestra under the baton Johannes Debus plays Berg’s music magnificently for a memorable night at the opera.
Wozzeck by Alban Berg is being performed a total of seven times until May 16., 2025, at the Four Seasons Centre, 145 Queen St. West Toronto. www.coc.ca/

Scene from Wozzeck. Photo: Michael Cooper

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