Yet against this uneasy, bleak, Brechtian palette, “Wozzeck” is overwhelmingly plush with the impact of Berg’s music. A fist rises in anger from the unfinished monument to the dead in eerie, avenging prophesy. What passes for beauty is dime-store cheap lies. Its grimy walls are little more than flimsy curtains. The world of this “Wozzeck,” which we see through the hapless soldier’s eyes, is the color of ash. His resulting opera, “Wozzeck,” completed in 1922, was first performed in Berlin in 1925.Īs envisioned by director David McVicar, set designer Vicki Mortimer and lighting designer Paule Constable, the era depicted by their new production is Berg’s own horrible post-World War I decade, and the effect of the whole is as deeply unsettling visually as it is musically rich. Berg considered its realism to be haunting, and he set about selecting fifteen short scenes to tell the tale. He resonated to “Woyzeck’s” expressionistic starkness, which seemed to fit the spirit of his modern times. It drew the portrait of a low-ranking working class soldier, dehumanized by the brutality of military life, who commits murder in a jealous rage.įrom 1915-1918, Berg was a soldier himself, an experience that only increased his belief in the opera project and his determination to set Büchner’s fragmentary play to music. Berg began working on “Wozzeck” in 1914 after seeing a production of the unfinished 19th-century stage play called “Woyzeck,” by Georg Büchner. Lyric Opera’s soaring new production of “Wozzeck” is set amid the rubble of the First World War’s aftermath, corresponding exactly to the years when Vienna-born composer Alban Berg penned its words and music. Review: “Wozzeck” by Alban Berg, in the world premiere of a production by David McVicar, conducted by Andrew Davis, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago through Nov.
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