Culture d’été takes you on a discovery of “Wozzeck”, considered the masterpiece of avant-garde opera, created in 1925 in Berlin, and reinterpreted this summer at the Aix Lyric Art Festival. -in Provence.
When Alban Berg creates Wozzeck in 1925, he was freely inspired of the character of the German playwright Büchner, a century earlier. Son Wozzeck is a former soldier, humiliated by his superiors, who agrees to be the guinea pig of an unscrupulous doctor in order to survive. Father of a daughter he had with a prostitute, Wozzeck sinks into suffering until the final tragedy.
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For Simon McBurney, the director of the reinterpretation presented at the lyrical art festival, it is the war that generated all this misery, the one that falls on the most humble, yesterday as today. “The Opera of Wozzeck does not say all that, but perhaps it touches, in its moments of sensitivity, in its musical way which speaks directly to our consciences, to our interiors. Music speaks beyond words”says the director.
A finale that reflects our current times
If this Wozzeck will make a date, it is thanks to the conductor, Simon Rattle, as well as all the performers, at the height of their lyrical and theatrical art. Without loading the scene, Simon McBurney shows us the mental universe of the character: lost in the forest with the ghosts of dead soldiers, or lost in a bawdy party.
Dark and magnetic images, which explode in a finale that Simon McBurney sees as a reflection of our time: “At the end, this beautiful moment when the music goes up and up, up, and we have this wall coming down, crushing everything and we’re left with the generation after us. I have children, I’m going to leave this generation with the shit I did with all the others because I didn’t do anything or it wasn’t possible. It touches something in the present. It’s not a relic from the Opera Museum. On the contrary, it is alive, it lives.”
Wozzeck by Alban Berg, directed by Simon Mc Burney, at the Aix-en-Provence festival until July 21, 2023.