Berg - Wozzeck [Opera in English] [CD]

Unless you are a speaker of German there is no way you can get the full impact of Berg's wrenchingly dramatic 'Wozzeck' in a German-language recording. Even following along with libretto in hand is a diluted experience. This 2-CD recording, part of the Chandos's laudable 'Opera in English' series, underwritten by the equally laudable Moores Foundation who have now underwritten more than 30 English-language opera recordings including the wonderful 'English Ring' conducted by Reginald Goodall, meets the need for a recording that has an immediate, visceral impact for opera-lovers who don't understand German.

I have loved 'Wozzeck' ever since the Mitropoulos recording made in the early 1950s with Mack Harrell and Eileen Farrell and have owned recordings conducted by Abbado, von Dohnanyi and Böhm. I had never heard it before in English and I have to admit that in this recording I heard and understood things I simply had missed before [and my German is passable]. The diction in this recording is clear and understandable, but Chandos also includes an English libretto to help you understand any of the occasional misheard words.

The rising young English conductor, Paul Daniel, does a remarkable job; he keeps things moving along but also tightens the tension appropriately as we move towards the shattering final scenes. The Philharmonia play the complex score brilliantly. The singers--Andrew Shore as Wozzeck, Josephine Barstow as Marie, Alan Woodrow as the Drum Major, Peter Bronder as Andres, Stuart Kyle as the Doctor, Jean Rigby as Margret--are first-rate and generally the equals of singers on earlier recordings. I had worried that Barstow, who is no longer young, wouldn't sound right as Marie, but indeed she does. For instance, the lullaby ['What will you do now, poor lamb?'] is a perfect combination of gentleness and mounting anxiety. Later, as the drama progresses her tone becomes more harried and harrying. She has always been a good actress and that is in evidence here.

Andrew Shore, as Wozzeck, is as good as I've ever heard. He catches the simple humanity of the man as I've never heard it. He tries so hard to be good and one sees him slipping into insanity in spite of his efforts. In Act III, especially, his singing and acting are riveting.

The marvelous new English translation is by Richard Stokes. It not only preserves the meaning of the German original, but faithfully follows the flow of the music in much the same way the German words--by Berg, after Büchner--do. The recorded sound is state-of-of-the-art.

I suspect this will the recording of 'Wozzeck' I reach for most often.

Recommended.

CD I, Act I, 34:00
CD II, Acts II & III, 57:43
TT=91:43
(There appears to be a small price break on account of the short timing for two CDs.)

Scott Morrison

Great translation, works very well on CD and an altogether convincing performance. The only reason for withholding a star from a possible 5, is that while Andrew Shore is great in the more lyrical passage, he does lack a certain edge in the more brutal anguished scenes.

The Orchestra and conductor are stunning

This is an excellent CD set which I will come back to over the years.

For collectors who have no problem with Wozzeck, music lovers for whom the status and quality of the work are established rather than questionable, this set ought in my own opinion to be a very safe recommendation. Does anyone have a problem with its being sung in English? Part of Wagner's prospectus for his new music-dramas, and an important reason for the type of vocal lines he used, was precisely to enable them to be sung in the vernacular wherever they were performed. Demands to hear opera in its original language struck him as snobbish and irrational, and one can sympathise. However the traditional type of opera with arias made translations problematical - it would never be easy to get audiences to accept much-loved favourites like Mozart's Voi che sapete or Verdi's Di quella pira in some sort of translation, and it was not unreasonable either to counter Wagner's position by arguing that if we would not tolerate the Requiems of these masters in anything but Latin why should we be more accommodating in the case of opera? To attain the emancipation that Wagner wanted, arias had to go, and Berg was not exactly likely to bring them back. That really settles the issue so far as I and Berg are concerned: I cannot even imagine why I would want to struggle with the work in German when I can hear it without effort in my own native tongue.

The performance, the recording and the production in general are admirable. The cast is a large one but I detected no weaknesses. Few of the names were familiar to me, but in the cases where their dates of birth are given I saw that the artists were the age of my own children, so that will be the reason for that. Berg himself gushed that Wozzeck should be sung as if it were Trovatore, and the performers here are careful to keep a sustained musical line, lyric as far as the idiom permits, even in the semi-spoken passages. Paul Daniel directs the great Philharmonia to fine effect, keeping light and air in the orchestral textures and never letting the onward movement sag, and I experienced no problems with the short choral contributions. The sound-quality is admirable, and the liner-note is from the distinguished pen of Lord Harewood, civilised and dignified as we might expect. Now read no further if you have no problems with the work itself.

Berg is regarded, I suppose rightly, as the most approachable exponent of the second Viennese school led by Schoenberg. My own collection of his work also contains the violin concerto, the lyric suite and the piano sonata. All of these compositions leave the same impression on me - not really very demanding in idiom but conveying a great sense that the composer is less than 100% convinced of what he is doing. In life Berg was not one to stand up to the powerful intellect and dominating personality of Schoenberg. I suspect that his purely musical gift was greater than Schoenberg's, but that does not seem any great claim to me, and I feel a tension in him between his timid desire for recognition and his dread of offending the leader of the cerebral and artificial musical movement that he had, for better or for worse, embraced.

There is also the matter of the libretto. This is based on the chaotic manuscript of a play really called `Woyzeck' by one Georg Buechner, a `revolutionary' his lordship tells us, who died at the age of 23. Is the picture just a trifle familiar? I suspect so, and I'm rather less bowled over by it all than the noble Earl is. What is the theme really? Revolutionary manifestations, then and for quite a time later, were focused on the economic exploitation of the working class in line with Marx's analysis. There is certainly exploitation in this script, but of a much more basic and standard kind. Wozzeck himself seems mentally unstable and easy meat for his tormentor the Drum Major, whether the latter's insinuations that he had seduced Wozzeck's woman are true or just drunken braggadoccio. It was Berg himself who mentioned the name of Verdi, and it takes very little effort to spot the real Verdian association, which is not with Trovatore but with Otello - in the final scene above all but conspicuously also in the cry of `Blood blood blood'. In other respects poor Wozzeck is toyed with by Marie and dictated to by an eccentric doctor and a brainless-sounding commanding officer. It is all a reasonable enough opera libretto I do not deny, but I might be able to share Lord Harewood's enthusiasm more fully if I felt that either Buechner or Berg were fully clear in their minds what their message for us is.

It would be a pity if our exploration of musical or any other form of artistic creation limited itself to safe bets and AAA-rated masterpieces, a criterion that from my point of view would exclude a fair amount of Beethoven for one. I like Berg's Wozzeck, I am wholly open to the suggestion that a certain confusion that I associate with it is at least partly my own, and I recommend it strongly in this particular performance. One detail that intrigued me in the story was the short appearance of The Idiot, whose remarks in fact seemed more significant for the plot than those of, say, the Doctor or the Captain. These personages seem more than slightly futile, I believe that is consciously intended by the author whether or not for sound reasons, and it may be that I shall someday come belatedly to the view that Buechner, Berg, Wozzeck and the rest of them are having the last laugh over various other idiots if only we realised.