The Tempest,
an opera by Thomas Adès,
conducted by Thomas Adès.
Metropolitan Opera House, New York,
October–November 2012.
Wozzeck,
an opera by Alban Berg,
conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Avery Fisher Hall, New York,
November 19, 2012.
Thomas Adès, in composing an opera based on Shakespeare’s last play, wrote the part of Prospero with the English baritone Simon Keenlyside in mind. When the Metropolitan Opera gave the American premiere of The Tempest last October and November, Keenlyside reprised the role he had originated in England in 2004. Garbed in regal rags that left his chest bare, and wielding a sizable staff meant to signify his magical powers, this dignified, sorrowful, yet strangely diminished Prospero did his best to dominate Robert Lepage’s busy, over-elaborate staging. At times he succeeded. I loved the voice (I had loved it instantly, when I first heard Keenlyside and some of the other Tempest performers doing a brief evening of song at the downtown club Le Poisson Rouge), but even its skillful beauty was not enough to make complete sense of this role, for Adès’s Prospero is not Shakespeare’s, and the losses entailed in the transformation are considerable.
I couldn’t say whether Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is the same as Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, and to me it doesn’t matter, for though I have seen Büchner’s fragmentary play at least twice (and liked it at least once), it is the opera that defines the role. I have never seen it fail. Something about the pathos of that character, in combination with the power of the music that surrounds him, always brings me to a state of Aristotelian awe. Wozzeck is victimized not just by the self-centered captain who orders him around and the crazy doctor who performs experiments on him and the drum major who steals his girlfriend, Marie, and even by Marie herself; he is also victimized by the very music that gives rise to him. The music is the only thing that lends him a voice, that allows him a life he can call his own—and yet the music, too, conspires to do him in. Berg’s harsh, tender, dissonant, unsettling score weaves the net in which Wozzeck is caught, and in doing so weaves it around us as well. I can never see and hear the opera without feeling the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
“It was the first opera I ever conducted in my life, when I was in my twenties, in Stockholm; and it has been absolutely central to me since. It’s one of the most powerful things composed by anybody,” said Esa-Pekka Salonen in a brief interview posted online by the Philharmonia Orchestra. He was explaining why he had chosen Wozzeck for the Philharmonia’s U.S. tour, and if the performance at Avery Fisher Hall last November was anything to judge by, he chose exactly right. Elsewhere—in Berkeley, for instance, where Cal Performances sponsored the event—this concert-style Wozzeck had included many of the same marvelous singers we heard at Avery Fisher, including Angela Denoke as Marie, Peter Hoare as the captain, and Hubert Francis as the drum major. But only in New York, where Simon Keenlyside happened to be performing in The Tempest just across the Lincoln Center piazza, did we get the English baritone in the central role. It is a role Keenlyside will take on several more times in the coming seasons, and though you wouldn’t intuitively match his rich, nuanced voice with Wozzeck’s searing music, it turns out to be perfect for him. Adès may have composed his work specifically for Keenlyside, but it is the long-dead Berg who has put the singer’s talents most fully to use.
Part of what was great about the Salonen production was that it was only semi-staged. The soloists wore no costumes, and they occupied two very small front-and-side portions of the large stage, which was otherwise filled with members of the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Westminster Choir, as well as the conductor himself. But rather than detracting from the facial expressions, bodily gestures, and small interactions of the cornered singers, the assembled musicians served to expose and magnify them, as if precisely this condition—the condition of being surrounded by, penned in by, but also created by Berg’s music—was at the root of what defined these characters. And the singers’ acting, though necessarily limited in scope, was highly effective. As the doctor, Tijl Favyets uttered his lunatic lines with jerky, meaningless gestures of the hands and head. Peter Hoare’s captain wore on his face the everlasting equivalent of a fat, self-satisfied chortle. Angela Denoke’s Marie was both needy and pensive, filled with desire, resentment, and guilt. Keenlyside himself played Wozzeck as a dumbfounded, confused, frightened creature who constantly passed his hands over his face, as if to wipe away the harsh reality—or perhaps the encroaching unreality—he saw before his eyes. In the scenes between Marie and Hubert Francis’s drum major, there was a sinuous, persuasive lustfulness; and in the final encounter between Marie and Wozzeck, after he murders her, one could sense a tremendous, painful tenderness in the way Keenlyside bent nearly double, his head against Denoke’s back, and then pushed her gently offstage.
I suppose I was especially open to such stark staging because I had been so annoyed, less than a week earlier, by the silly clutter of Robert Lepage’s production of The Tempest. Other than in the opening sea-storm, which was rather brilliantly and schematically done, all of Lepage’s choices made nonsense of Shakespeare’s plot. Who, for instance, were those crowds of ladies in ballgowns on the stage? It was as if the King of Naples’ tempest-tossed ship had been turned, for the nonce, into the downed Titanic, with loads of dressed-up ladies and gentlemen marveling at their miraculous survival. I guess Shakespeare forgot to tell us about all those extra passengers on board. Nor did the playwright mention the numerous sprites and spirits that Lepage has dancing about Prospero’s island; in fact, I’m pretty sure Ariel alone, in Shakespeare’s version, is responsible for stage-managing all the sound-effects that made the island seem “full of noises.” But don’t get me started on the ways in which Shakespeare is absent from Adès’s opera, beginning and ending with Meredith Oakes’s appalling libretto. The glorious poetry has all been jettisoned in favor of rhyming couplets of doggerel (e.g., “You beat and strike me, you do not like me,” as Caliban says at one point to Prospero). If Adès felt he needed those kinds of rhythms to support his music, he would have done better to find his source material in Doctor Seuss.
Thomas Adès has suggested that The Tempest, because it already contained numerous references to sound and music, was a play that lent itself particularly well to operatic adaptation. This is one of those intellectual constructs that sound good on paper but don’t necessarily work out in practice. The music Adès has written, though beautiful in places, does not have much to say about the Shakespearean characters we see before us on the stage. In particular, very little of the sung line (except in the case of Ariel, who does something extremely interesting with her voice that I would hesitate to call singing) enhances either the plot or the characters. The two operatic functions that should collaborate to produce emotion—that is, sound and sense—remain for the most part separate; and as a result, the profound feelings that the play itself is capable of evoking never really have a chance to emerge.
The opposite is true of Wozzeck, in every production I’ve seen, but particularly in Salonen’s. When Wozzeck grabs his head and complains about the hallucinations that are driving him mad, we don’t just hear them, in the raucous cawing of brass and strings, the spine-chilling volume of drums and voices; in this case we actually see them being produced by the instruments and chorus ranged behind him. His pathetic solitariness is thrown into relief by the massive orchestra onstage, as if the whole overpowering force of the concert hall were lined up against him.
And this is true to Berg’s vision, for the doctor and the captain and the drum major, despicable as they are, cannot be held solely responsible for Wozzeck’s terrible fate. It is life that has done this to him—life, in which the poor man never had a chance against those who were richer or more powerful or more sophisticated than he—life as it is, I mean, and not just as Berg and Büchner imagined it for the stage. The triumph of Wozzeck, as a work of art, is that it manages to lend a quite specific pathos, a very personal degree of interest, to a man who is presented to us unashamedly as generic. We are used to sympathizing with the Prosperos of the world, those self-defined, self-making, self-destroying individuals in whom Shakespeare, above all others, specialized. It is much harder to see ourselves, feel ourselves, in a completely victimized character like Wozzeck. And yet Keenlyside, aided by Berg, aided by Salonen, helps us to do just that.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her tenth book, Why I Read, will be out next year from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
