The poster for Wozzeck’s new production foreshadowed a high-quality show. But we know that, like the rebellious bird, the live show likes to play tricks and that bringing together talents is not enough to create magic.
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Fortunately, it is there for this entry into the Aix repertoire of Berg’s masterpiece. At the end of the hallucinated tragedy of a man foreign to the world, the public, a little stunned but grateful, gives a legitimate ovation to the architects of this success.
The sound of the elements
Starting with Simon Rattle, at the head of the London Symphony Orchestra, whose deployment of colours, raw or sooty, warm or metallic, invites the ear to an almost unheard-of experience. If Berg stages characters of flesh and voice, he achieves in Wozzeck an incomparable instrumental genius, a moving sound incarnation of the elements (water, fire), objects (the knife), stars (the Moon), times of life (work, celebration, sleep, death). In tutti or soloists, the musicians of the LSO compete in beauty, poetry, whispering in the night or howling the cruelty of fate: after Wozzeck killed Marie, his unfaithful companion, two crescendo chords explode the earth and the heavens.
A couple doomed to failure
In a cast where finesse of embodiment prevails over vocal volume, Christian Gerhaher and Malin Byström form a passionately mismatched couple. He has lived, gone through a thousand ordeals, distilled into every word, every inflection, the German baritone having long since made this sublime and pitiful role his own. She seems so young, so graceful and so fresh, with her luminous voice, a rare flower unjustly pushed into this mire of misery and social oppression. How could they both resist the brutality of those who exploit and mock them?
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The question is constantly posed by the staging of Simon McBurney, until the final dissolution where we understand that the curse will pass to the next generation. Marrying the structure of the work, three times five tables which are linked inexorably, the vision of the Briton favors fluidity so as never to break the musical momentum. A simple door mounted on wheels delimits the enclosed spaces, identified by a few accessories manipulated by extras: an armchair, an infusion set and a pale lamp for the office of the doctor who “experiments” his theories on Wozzeck under the cheers of fascinated students; a mattress and a cushion for the room of Marie and her child…
Nature, mirror of the psyche
This sobriety does not prevent the large theatrical escapades, during the alcoholic and violently lit “celebrations” where the bodies are agitated so that the spirits avoid thinking, nor the street scenes with neighbors watching from their window the misfortune of some and the bravado of others. Nor, above all, the moments of phantasmagorical communion between Wozzeck’s sick psyche and nature. Thus, in search of the knife that could betray him, the murderer glides slowly, very slowly, through the waters. A drowning so sweet, so maternal, that it becomes a caress: the only one that will have been granted to him.
