The artist William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955), internationally recognized for his drawings, films or theatrical and opera productions, is once again present in Barcelona after the exhibition dedicated to him by the CCCB already in a pandemic. Starting this Sunday, May 22 – or Friday, including the Under 35 show – his highly celebrated production of Wozzeck, Alban Berg's opera whose staging was premiered by the South African at the Salzburg Festival five years ago, arrives at the Liceu. The Gran Teatre programs six performances of this fourth and last title of the 20th century of its season.
It is not the first opera with which Kentridge has dared, not even his first Berg, since he has already staged Lulu and also Shostakovich's Nose, Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse or Mozart's The Magic Flute. However, the criticism of the absurdity and cruelty of the war that Wozzeck makes in the already military has a powerful reflection in the current European conflict in Ukraine.
Although the unfinished tragedy by playwright Georg Büchner on which Berg is based is from 1830, Kentridge places the action in the great war, with all the machinery of violence and warlike industrialization, since that is the period in which the composer writes it. And he does not have to make an effort to achieve it: he only has to underline the desperation and dehumanization that the opera points to, Berg's first and best known, which deals with the miserable daily life of a soldier abused by his captain and the military doctor and turned into a object by the ruling class. Seeing himself cheated on by his wife will unleash a spiral of tragedy.
“In his original Büchner prefigures visuals that could not happen in 1830, such as the earth opening up. Or a person's head. Or that the clouds were stained with blood. Only after seeing the bombs is it understood that this was prescient”, pointed out Víctor García de Gomar, artistic director of the Liceu, during the presentation of the opera.
For Josep Pons, musical director of the Gran Teatre and of this production, this is a perfect work and "it continues to be the most difficult in the repertoire". "It is complex and complicated, a milestone in opera production," he says. It brings a drama not yet seen: that of real people. And within a tremendous and continuous dramatic fluidity, there is a succession of different styles that obey the script and different emotional needs”.
Pons is facing a visionary, because Berg did not have enough elements at that time to write how it would be done today, after the Ligeti, the Stockhausen, the Berio. "He is infinitely more rhythmic than Stravinsky," he says. And in the harmonic he also plays with tonal and other atonal parts, in addition to the incipient Schönberg twelve-tone. Only Bach would give us such a wealth of perfect internal elements that we are not aware of”.
The opera on stage defends an "unbeatable" cast, in the words of Pons. Matthias Goerne is a unique Wozzeck in this production that for the German baritone is the one that reaches “the total climax in the theatrical aspects”. “This is a tragedy that fits and reflects the tragedy of our world today. It seems made for the current war situation,” he says.
Soprano Annemarie Kremer, replacing Elena Zhidkova in the role of Marie for health reasons, indicates how extreme Berg's writing for voices is. “It's the sprechgesang, with very high and low tones in all parts. And with no distance between notes and words, so you have to learn everything at once. But in the end you get into the world of the composer. Who by the way gives Marie a feminist touch, because she is a daring, passionate, expressive woman, who sees how Wozzeck does evil with her mental health and has to choose a better path for herself ".
In the absence of Kentridge, who these days receives a distinction at a university in New York before returning to the Liceu, Luc de Wit, the co-stage director, describes the set as a bombed-out landscape of the First World War in any place in Flanders .
“It is a unique stage that is surrounded by a series of projections. These are the ones that locate us geographically: we go from Casa Marie to the exteriors, or to the world seen by Wozzeck. The skulls come out of the ground and their premonitions and hallucinations appear. And there's a third layer: Kentridge's comments,” he explains. "The origins of Büchner are perceived, they are those of the theater of the absurd, but sometimes reality overcomes the absurdity of the theater -he concludes-, and this is the case".
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