“Review: The Searing Beauty of Kentridge’s ‘Wozzeck’ at the Met: The Artist William Kentridge Uses His Trademark Animations to Stage Berg’s Bleak Opera about a Delusional Soldier”, 2019-12-29 (; backlinks):
Alban Berg’s bleak opera “Wozzeck” might not seem suited to the holiday season. One of the least cheerful pieces in the repertory, it tells the story of an impoverished and increasingly delusional soldier, driven to murder and suicide. Yet this time of year is also a moment to take stock. And few works look at life with more searing honesty than “Wozzeck.” The issues that drive this wrenching, profound opera are especially timely: the impact of economic inequality on struggling families; the looming threats of war and environmental destruction; the rigid stratification—almost the militarization—of every element of society.
…The opera—which unfolds in 15 short, episodic scenes—is played atop a set (designed by Sabine Theunissen) built of platforms connected by rickety walkways, evoking a bombed-out city amid consuming chaos. Silent actors, most in gas masks, keep appearing here and there. An almost continual montage of animation, drawings and projections, mostly in black and white, appear on and behind the set: images of blown-up churches and buildings; military maps; charcoal drawings of bedraggled people morphing into spectral stick figures; despoiled rivers and hills. In the first scene, rather than shaving his officious captain, as indicated in the libretto, Wozzeck here is operating a small movie camera that projects cartoonish images of people on a small screen. Mr. Kentridge said in a recent interview with The New York Times that he conceived the action of the opera as taking place within that projection.
…The carousing at a seedy tavern, where the crazed Wozzeck shows up after stabbing Marie, was all the more eerie for the multilayered setting and the ominous costumes (by Greta Goiris), with the crowd in gas masks, a bitter premonition of the war to come…One of the daring elements of the production is the depiction of Wozzeck and Marie’s young son as a simple puppet, wearing ragged clothes and a gas mask. Mr. Kentridge said in the interview that using real children in crucial roles can be distracting. But I have found it moving to see a boy in the role—especially in the final scene when, riding a hobby horse, he finally follows the townspeople, who have discovered the body of his mother offstage. Mr. Kentridge’s use of a puppet seems like a solution in search of a problem.