It is one of the finest performances we have seen in a long time at the Paris Opera, and which marks the debut in the noble house of the South African director William Kentridge, of whom one wonders why it took so long to invite him. A moving staging in its constant inventiveness, around the remarkable couple formed by Johan Reuter (Wozzeck) and Eva-Maria Westbroek (Marie) and directed by the seductive baton of Susanna Mälkki.
A “Wozzeck” mental nightmare
And again this Wozzeck-there was it not created for the Paris Opera but at the Salzburg festival five years ago… Nice intuition to have brought it in, to also succeed the old (and flat) Wozzeck (chronicle of 28/4/2017) by Christoph Marthaler (more Marthaler than Berg) -because this is how shows die, being replaced by others from the same work…
Wozzeck (Johan Reuter) and Marie (Eva-Maria Westbroek) C) Agathe Poupeney, Paris Opera
the Wozzeck by Kentridge is similar to that of Michel Fau recently seen in Toulouse (chronicle of 22/11/2021) by the overwhelming immensity of a mental decor-universe which drives Wozzeck (or locks him up) in madness. Even before the work begins, the same gray background of the decoration strewn with crosses… But if Michel Fau goes to seek in the mental universe of a child the nightmarish and bloody story of Wozzeck, Kentridge deliberately inscribes it in the he story, that not of Büchner’s play (1837, it could have been) but of Berg himself, for a work created in 1925, in a Germany that was artistically so creative but economically ruined and politically uncertain…
The captain (Gerhard Siegel) and the doctor (Falk Struckmann) C) Agathe Poupeney, Opéra national de Paris
A ravaged world where nothing goes right
A crooked set (like that of Michel Fau), images which are printed on the gray background (as with Fau) or sometimes on a small white screen in the middle of the stage which receives one of those old black and white films that one viewed in the families with a noise of breath and the dust of the projector; a network of planks rising to attack the sky and broken halfway, surmounting a cesspool that can be guessed in the shadows: an admirable allegory of a ravaged, lost world, and also of a nature, of a landscape, also upset by the war. Nothing goes straight, nothing goes straight, but some people pretend.
Wozzeck (Johan Reuter) walks C) Agathe Poupeney, Opéra national de Paris
Beings who pretend
They pretend, those around Wozzeck, this good soldier and whipping boy Wozzeck, and they shrug their shoulders in front of his hallucinations: this wind that makes me feel like a mouse, this teetering abyss, something moves below, with us. Or this world which becomes so dark that one thinks it is unraveling like a spider’s web. A Wozzeck that catches lizards. While the others, yes, pretend, the buddy Andres (a little crazy all the same) who hunts the hare, the Captain proud of his beautiful shako with feathers (so ridiculous), the Doctor who sees that Wozzeck is developing a marvelous aberratio mentalis partialis (and reproaches him more for pissing on the walls) As for the Drum Major, he flirts with anything that moves, and first of all Marie, the mother of Wozzeck’s child, a child this time represented (nicely) by a manipulated puppet on sight by a veteran-looking puppeteer. Marie, whom the neighbor, Margret (Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur, very good) accuses of, everyone knows, looking through seven pairs of leather pants.
Marie (Eva-Maria Westbroek) and her child C) Agathe Poupeney, OnP
A survivor of the war of 14
It is his universe, in Wozzeck, he who does barber for his Captain, cuts wood, serves as factotum, meeting his fellow soldiers and the common people of this modest garrison town. Except that this city no longer has the charm of romantic Germany. And Wozzeck is a war survivor. The Great War, the First World War (and perhaps also the Second), the war where the heads rotted in the fields, where the broken faces (no more noses, half a mouth less, the eye hanging the orbit, the ravaged cheek that reveals the bone) have haunted the reconstruction rooms, still haunt them. Wozzeck returned from that war, and in what a state, hallucinatory, broken from within, cursed by the blinded world that refuses to see anything – and that world, that of Berg, that Berg will not see since he will die in 1935, will plunge back into other years of horror, of another horror, or the same but from another dimension…
Wozzeck (Johan Reuter) returning from the battlefield C) Agathe Poupeney, OnP
The hallucinatory power of projected images
No doubt (we obviously haven’t seen them all) other stagings of Wozzeck relied on this barely over war when Wozzeck was created in Berlin in 1925 – the year a German president was elected, who was one of the great military leaders of defeat, Marshal Hindenburg. But how many have done it with the hallucinatory power of the images proposed by Kentridge, in these curfew lights streaked with lines of light as if the planes were flying over the scene – there is a painting by Vallotton like this which describes Verdun!
Drawings by Kentridge himself – in magnificent black and white to the point that we would like to see them one day simply exposed to better admire them – which is projected on the gray background, a landscape of skulls, a forest of crosses, an animated character without a mouth, horse, or its skeleton, galloping like those of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. And who, during this hour and a half collected from Berg’s masterpiece, impose, between George Grosz, the terrible post-war German expressionist, and Alfred Kubin, the morbid neurotic Czech surrealist who retired just before 1914 , in the definitive solitude of a sick hermit, the mental universe of a Wozzeck obsessed with such images which, finally, before coming from his own madness, first comes under the madness of men.
Wozzeck (Johan Reuter) and the doctor (Falk Struckmann) C) Agathe Poupeney, OnP
Victim peoples or executioner peoples?
Towards the end, an English plan of the Ypres region appears, with destroyed houses. Ypres, the martyred Belgian city rebuilt identically after the war, and which gave its name to mustard gas, the terrible mustard gas used there by the Germans. As for the ruins, they are perhaps precisely also German, but after 1945 since in 1918 the German territory was not touched. Executioner soldiers and victim soldiers, victim peoples or executioner peoples too (this magnificent scene where, to the sound of a derisory accordion and a few winds, poor wretches, wounded men and women, begin a sad waltz like ghosts with bandaged faces) , when peoples allow themselves to be carried away by criminal madmen without reacting, which always leads to their own loss. Büchner had written it, Berg lets it be understood implicitly, Kentridge says it clearly, having obviously conceived his staging before Ukraine…
The waltz: Wozzeck (Johan Reuter) at the top, Marie (EM Westbroek) and the Tambour-Major (John Daszak) dance C) Agathe Poupeney, OnP
We can also cite, not knowing who is responsible at Kentridge for this magnificent visual success, his collaborators, the co-director Luc de Wit, the set designer (what a great job!) Sabine Theunissen, the costume designer Greta Goiris, the two videographers Catherine Meyburgh and Kim Gunning.
The human story of chaos
Visual success to which some – they are very wrong – will reproach for stifling the story a little. But the story of Wozzeck is also the human story of chaos. A human story that will engulf two derisory humans, Wozzeck and Marie, in the general indifference of those around them, like many destinies. It will remain that they will live forever as fictional heroes, who are the true posterity of beings. And embodied, in what way, by a Johan Reuter so simple of gestures and so powerful of voice, without ever giving the illusion of power. By an Eva-Maria Westbroek of such beautiful presence, radiance, projection, so Wagnerian and which is overwhelming (so caressing, so sad) in the song to her child, turned towards God, of the third act (Und ist kein Betrug)
Again the doctor (Falk Struckmann) and the captain (Gerhard Siegel) C) Agathe Poupeney, OnP
More than modernity, sound beauty
Excellent Captain (all the treble, a little less the bass) of the tenor, deceptively good-natured, Gerhard Siegel. Tansel Akzeybek’s under-projected Andres. Tambour-Major a little pale (it’s the height) by John Daszak and Doctor slightly routine by Falk Struckmann (he often sings the role). Very good, the two soldiers, Mikhail Tymoshenko (in good progress) and Tobias Westman (both former, like Bouchard-Lesieur, of the Academy of the Opera) And remarkable intervention of the male chorus which we do not understand besides why he does not come to greet in the end!
Is there anyone? C) Agathe Poupeney, Paris Opera
Susanna Mälkki conducts an impeccable opera orchestra, nuances, phrasing, sound beauty. Mälkki chooses to highlight not the modernity of Berg (even if it means itself) but, within the dodecaphonic writing, the intelligence of the alloys of timbres, the instrumental fade. Thus, from the pit to the stage, everyone participates in this magnificent creation, the images of which will long haunt those who have seen it and will continue to see it, beyond, we hope, the current upheavals of Europe.
Wozzeck by Alban Berg, direction by William Kentridge, musical direction by Susanna Mälkki. Opera-Bastille, Paris. Next performances on March 24 and 30 at 8 p.m., March 27 at 2:30 p.m.