Opera on 3 Live from the Met - Berg: Wozzeck

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  • Eine Alpensinfonie
    Host
    • Nov 2010
    • 20572

    Opera on 3 Live from the Met - Berg: Wozzeck

    Saturday, 18:00 on BBC Radio 3
    SynopsisBerg's Wozzeck
    Live from the New York Metropolitan Opera.

    Here we go: jealousy, humiliation, murder and suicide. It sounds as if it could be any night at the opera. But Alban Berg's Wozzeck is one of the 20th century's greatest dramatic works, the story of a man at the bottom of the heap who goes to pieces under unrelenting pressure.

    It's an opera of extraordinary power which combines traditional musical forms with a plot of crushing despair, leaving no hint of hope or redemption.

    Berg's masterpiece calls for great singer-actors on stage and a virtuoso orchestra and conductor in the pit. Things are set fair with baritone Alan Held in the title role, mezzo Waltraud Meier as his common law wife, and an equally impressive supporting cast including Australian tenor-of-the-moment Stuart Skelton. James Levine conducts: over the past four decades, he has been the driving force behind the Met Orchestra's rise to the premiere league of US ensembles.

    Presented by Margaret Juntwait with guest commentator Ira Siff.

    Wozzeck ..... Alan Held (Baritone)
    Marie ..... Waltraud Meier (Mezzo-soprano)
    Drum Major ..... Stuart Skelton (Tenor)
    Captain ..... Gerhard Siegel (Tenor)
    Doctor ..... Walter Fink (Bass)
    Andres ..... Russell Thomas (tenor)
    Margret ..... Wendy White (contralto)
    First Apprentice ..... Richard Bernstein (bass)
    Second Apprentice ..... Mark Schowalter (baritone)
    Madman ..... Philippe Castagner (tenor)
    A Soldier ..... Daniel Clark Smith (tenor)

    New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus
    Conductor ..... James Levine.
  • Sydney Grew
    Banned
    • Mar 2007
    • 754

    #2
    Originally posted by Eine Alpensinfonie View Post
    . . . a man . . . who goes to pieces under unrelenting pressure.
    Our own conversation often has that effect upon puffed-up men we have noticed. There is an inherent power in simple logic and truth that can be devastating to one who has not before been exposed to its force. The pricking of life-long preconceptions and all that.

    So, "traditional musical forms" perhaps, but hardly traditional in opera. It is said for instance (by the man Perle) that the second act of Wozzeck (Berg's opus 7) constitutes his first symphony (or second if you count the Three Pieces opus 6). Well! It is certainly not marked "symphony" in the score! Operatic form - even Mozart's - has traditionally been the hotch-potch and Wozzeck is no exception. To be musical form must be driven by music not literature.

    Comment

    • JimD
      Full Member
      • Nov 2010
      • 267

      #3
      I sometimes feel that I am in a small minority in finding Wozzeck a better opera than Lulu: for me, it speaks more plainly to the emotions and of our fragile humanity.

      Comment

      • Bryn
        Banned
        • Mar 2007
        • 24688

        #4
        Unusually for a Met relay, Wozzeck has turned up on the iPlayer, (on demand, that is).

        Comment

        • bluestateprommer
          Full Member
          • Nov 2010
          • 3019

          #5
          translation of Berg's 1929 lecture on Wozzeck

          For those who've never seen this link, enjoy:

          This website is for sale! solomonsmusic.net is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, solomonsmusic.net has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

          Comment

          • Sydney Grew
            Banned
            • Mar 2007
            • 754

            #6
            Originally posted by bluestateprommer View Post
            For those who've never seen this link, enjoy:

            http://solomonsmusic.net/WozzeckLecture.htm
            Thank you for posting that link to Berg's lecture, which I found most interesting and have not seen before. It is always best to go to the horse's mouth in these matters - viz. to practising composers and what is more good ones. And indeed he does there explain all about that "symphony" of the Second Act. I see too that Berg agreed with me in finding "text and action alone" lacking:

            "Once I had decided to write an opera that would last a whole evening I faced a new problem, at least as far as harmony was concerned: how, without the proven means of tonality and without being able to use the formal structures based on it, could I achieve the same sense of completeness, the same compelling musical unity? . . .

            "Text and action alone could not guarantee this unity; certainly not in a work like Büchner's Woyzeck which, as is well known, consists of many (twenty-three) loose, fragmentary scenes. And even if it were possible to find a three-act scheme which achieved some unity of dramatic action, by arranging the scenes in three groups of five in a way that clearly distinguished between exposition, peripetia and catastrophe - so that a sense of dramatic unity was imposed on the work -- this, in itself, would not give a sense of unity and completeness to the music."

            That unity he so passionately sought is what distinguishes Art from mere Nature is it not. And how praiseworthy it is that in his talk he goes into the details of that! Attention to every detail is what distinguishes the great from the merely competent.

            We cannot though approve his supplications to that twentieth-century divinity the so-called "sub-conscious"!

            Nor do I think he was right to urge his audience to "forget everything he tried to explain about musical theory and æsthetics" when they came to see an actual performance of the opera on the stage. Schönberg used to say something similar about his method did he not, but neither man provided a convincing reason for their advocation of such absent-mindedness. Surely it must be better when one's audience keep all their wits about them!

            Comment

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