Despite its title this post is in many and perhaps even in
most respects essentially a sequel to one penned nearly six years ago, “Lululations,” inasmuch
as it is likewise a polemic directed against the production of a Berg opera, in
this case the Metropolitan Opera’s current one of Wozzeck, as seen and heard by the present writer on Saturday,
January 12, 2020 at the Charles Theater here in Baltimore via live
transmission; but inasmuch as Wozzeck
is in many (and perhaps even most) respects a very different sort of opera than
Lulu, the Metropolitan Opera in some
(although undoubtedly not most) respects a very different sort of institution
than the Salzburg Festival, and 2020 in some (although undoubtedly not enough)
respects a very different sort of year than 2014, the title really must stand. Last and penultimate present
post-differentiating things first: what this new Met presentation of Wozzeck most eye-burstingly suggests is that
in its treatment of productions the Met has recently adopted (or more than
likely merely slid into) an ethos that is in some (albeit not all) respects
stridently at odds with the classic Met’s meta-productional ethos.—viz., an
ethos alternating with Eveready bunny-esque reliability between an attitude of “If
it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and one of
“If it ain’t going to be reused at least every other year, don’t bovver over-building
it.” Certainly as recently as 2010, and
very probably as recently as 2017, one could count on the Met to deliver an opera
under the auspices of one of exactly two styles of production—an opulently
old-school neo-verist style and a middle-school minimalist style. In either case, the production could be
counted on neither to contribute to nor to detract from the quality of the
performance very materially. In this
respect the Met differed at least intermittently from the Salzburg Festival, which
despite its ever-close affiliation with the local Mozartkugeln-propagating heritage industry has always been obliged
to give at least an occasional dramaturgical nod to its at least aspirantly
transgressive modernist roots; such that an objectionably licentious Salzburg Lulu production such as the one I
decried nearly ten years ago was for all its objectionability hardly an
out-of-left-field dramaturgical curve-ball.
Accordingly, the present Met presentation of Wozzeck, in being at least twice as objectionable as the Salzburg
one of Lulu, hit the present writer in
the goolies like a googly bowled from the return crease. Indeed, now that I have seen this Met
presentation of Wozzeck, my
objections to that older Salzburg presentation of Lulu have come to seem downright nitpicking. For at bottom, all these objections were
directed at mere tactical misplacements of dramaturgical emphasis eventuating at worst in a misapprehension of the opera’s tone, of its attitude towards its theme, misplacements that could not even
ever-so-slightly occlude or distort the spectator-cum-listener’s comprehension
the theme itself—viz., that human sexuality is a fundamentally destructive
force impervious to moralization of any kind in any register. For example, my chastisement of Lulu’s throwing
of her knickers to a manservant and this servant’s immediately subsequent
sniffing thereof, an episode of throwing-cum-sniffing nowhere indicated in the
libretto’s stage-directions, was occasioned by the entirely farcical tone of
the episode, by its distinctly anti-Bergian Carry
On film-esque intimation that the ineluctability of sexual obsession was
fundamentally ridiculous rather than fundamentally horrifying. But this episode for all its risibility did
nothing to undermine the centrality of the theme, to undermine the implied
assertion that whether under the dramaturgical auspices of tragedy, farce,
comedy of manners or grand guignol, sexuality must be regarded as a might(il)y
devastating nachon; indeed, the
episode fairly underscored that centrality, which is why I am almost inclined retrospectively
to tip my hat to it (as well as, incidentally, to the Carry On franchise, for all its reliable unwatchability on account
of its consistently ultra-lazy treatment of its source material, an
ultra-laziness that makes Mel Brooks’s History
of the World Part One look like a Ken Burns documentary). The faults to which I objected in the
Salzburg production’s treatment of the final scene likewise performed no fatally
deleterious theme-decentralizing work.
To be sure, in libretto-defyingly leaving Jack the Ripper onstage at the
conclusion it did rather give the decidedly wrong impression that one was to be
more interested in him than in his principal victim, but it did not leave
anyone in doubt about the motive of his crime; it did not lead one to believe
that he had killed Lulu for any other reason than that she was a beautiful
woman. To be sure, in that Salzburg
production there was exactly one
potentially fatally theme-decentralizing episode, the Act II-concluding
episode dramatizing the foreplay to Alwa’s presumptive inaugural act of coition
with Lulu, an episode whereby it was
erroneously intimated, via a libretto-unheeding bit of stage business (i.e., a
bit of stage business that in contrast to the retention of Jack was simply
unindicated by the libretto rather than proscribed altogether thereby) that
Alwa’s obsession with Lulu was but a stalking horse for his obsession with
writing the perfect opera. But this
episode mercifully never came into its fatally theme-decentralizing own because
its upshot went mercifully unechoed by any of the production’s treatment of
Alwa vis-à-vis Lulu in earlier or subsequent scenes, wherein he was faithfully
portrayed as a man utterly in thrall to an exclusively erotic obsession with
the opera’s eponym. And to be sure, the
dopey interruption of the toast scene at the beginning of the third act by bits
of fourth wall-breaking horseplay with the audience was inexcusably
gratuitous. But meta-dramaturgically
speaking, it could not be described as fatal,
inasmuch as it was probably accurately regarded as a genuine interruption (as
opposed to a written-in interruption) even by those members of the audience
unfamiliar with the opera, who in any case presumably could be counted on to
reabsorb themselves into the diagesis after the conclusion of this interruption. And to be surest if in hindsight least
significantly, the misrepresentation of the painter’s portrait of Lulu as a
gigantic semi-abstract mural did indeed make semantic mincemeat of every remark
made apropos of it by the dramatis personae.
But ultimately not even the most egregious of these licentious meta-dramaturgical
interventions detracted from the audience’s sense of what Lulu was about—viz., the rise and fall of an erotically
irresistible woman. The Met’s latest
production of Wozzeck in horrifying
contrast consists of almost nothing but episodes intended to deprive the
audience of any sense whatsoever of what it, Wozzeck, is about and to drown it, the audience, in a welter of
semiotic bilge (yes, yes, yes—and thus to drown it, the audience, even more
effectively than the protagonist is literally drowned in the penultimate scene). The principal conduit of this bilge-welter is
the transposal of the opera’s setting from its de facto one of just about any
garrison town in any part of pre-unified Germany to the trenches of the Western
Front in World War I. To the
transposition itself one is reflexively inclined to exclaim à la the opera’s
captain, Schon gut, schon gut!, for
after all, Wozzeck was composed
during the Great War war and moreover while Berg was in military service and
moreover being bossed about in a manner that made him feel a more-than-brotherly
sense of solidarity with Wozzeck (although it should be mentioned that this
about-bossing was taking place in the relative comfort and safety of an office sited
hundreds of miles from the Front, such that the original de facto-peacetime
setting more effectively captures the gratuitousness of Wozzeck’s about-bossing,
the sense that his about-bossing is not being occasioned by any imminent threat
to life or limb, that it is, rather, a manifestation of the Authoritarian
Personality fostered by the military modus
vivendi tout court). But any
conscientious effectuation of such a transposition must reconcile the new
setting with the libretto-cum-score in such a way that none of the anachronisms
detract from the basic gist or import of any of that libretto-cum-score’s
significant gestures; it must somehow convey the sense that whatever is
happening could have happened either in the original setting or in the new one
but not necessarily anywhere or anywhen else.
Such a reconciliation is admittedly deucedly difficult to pull off, and
at the moment only one such successful off-pulling occurs to me, this
off-pulling being Michael Haneke’s 1997 cinematic adaptation of Kafka’s Castle, in which, for example, each member
of the cast is attired in a manner that would not have been seen as
old-fashioned or excessively formal during the microepoch of the making of the
film and yet the only visible piece of technology not available in Kafka’s
lifetime is a single transistor radio allowed to relay its historically
unspecifiable bit of broadcastage for a mere handful of seconds. This Met production of Wozzeck by unsalutary contrast seems from start to finish to wish
to give the impression that the events of the opera could have taken place
between 1914 and 1918 and not a year earlier or later. And I do really mean from start to finish in a pedantically exact sense because the striking-up of the
orchestra in performance of the opera’s Falstaff-esque
ultra-brief overture is perfectly synchronized with the title character’s switching-on
of a silent film projector whose projected images then bathe the erect and
about-strutting form of the Captain as he delivers his opening mule
driver-esque adjuration Langsam, Wozzeck,
langsam! I shall address the content
of the images projected by this projector anon, but first I must mention that
the very inaugural appointment and positioning of Wozzeck as a
film-projectionist opposite an erect and about-strutting captain necessitates
the complete disregard of a stage-direction that governs the entire
dramaturgical essence of the first scene and consequently establishes the central
dramaturgical power dynamic of the entire opera—namely the direction that as
the curtain rises Wozzeck is to be seen shaving
the captain, a direction that of course most obviously requires Wozzeck to
perform a task that is by its very nature servile but even more signally places
the captain in a position in which his very life is more than figuratively in
Wozzeck’s hands: Wozzeck could slash
the captain’s throat at any moment; the captain cannot seem to open his mouth
without ridiculing or abusing Wozzeck; after a very few minutes of such
treatment, a certain sort of manservant, perhaps, indeed, the most usual sort,
would leave off shaving the captain long enough to remind him in no uncertain
terms of his life-and-death power over him; Wozzeck, in contrast, simply keeps
shaving and rejoins Jawohl, Herr
Hauptmann, to each of the captain’s utterances, as if he were seconding
them—until, that is, the captain takes it upon himself to impugn Wozzeck’s
siring of a child out of wedlock, whereupon Wozzeck leaves off shaving to
deliver an impassioned defense, not of himself, but of his child qua entirely
worthy receiver of eternal salvation despite his bastardy. Here the captain palpably registers alarm at
his corporeal vulnerability to Wozzeck. There
is clearly something very wrong, something very badly out of balance, here,
something that will eventually need to be put to rights. And of course it eventually is in a perverse
and horrifying fashion—which is to say via Wozzeck’s murdering of his common-law
wife Marie, of the only other adult whose life is so literally in his hands,
and not so much because she has cuckolded him as because in the military
hierarchy the agent of the cuckoldry, the drum-major, is both superior to him
and subordinate to the captain. So, I
say, the opening scene of the opera as properly presented with the captain
being shaved by Wozzeck implies with more-than-figuratively trenchant
eloquence. As for the opening scene as
presented in this latest Met production, on the other hand—well, sure, it’s
still evident enough that the captain is a domineering bully, that Wozzeck is
an armer Kerl, a poor wretched fellow,
but the bullying is of a purely verbal character, and all sense of impending
so-called pushback from this armer Kerl
is absent. Now to the content of the
projected film segments (which, incidentally, are not confined to the screen
aimed at by Wozzeck the projectionist, as there are also two much larger
screens situated at upstage left and right; needless to say, these two larger
screens would seem to be completely otiose in diagetical terms, which is to say
that they would seem to have no presence of any kind even in the
misrepresentation of the opera’s world imagined by the production, which is to
say a version thereof in which Wozzeck’s principal duty is to project movies
for his captain rather than to shave him): they consist prevailingly of still images
of WWI soldiers grotesquely disfigured by their war wounds, the sorts of images
made world-famous by the paintings of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, and presumably
a goodly chunk of the segments was taken from the works of those very artists. The substantial remainder of this content
would seem to consist of moving footage especially shot for the production—a
seeming fact that at first blush gives the lie to the pan-bienpensant-Anglospheric idée
reçue that Kulturkraftwerke like
the Met have been getting inexorably poorer year by year over the past
half-century, inasmuch as, as I mentioned in “Lululations,” the Met of 1980
couldn’t even manage to produce a proper movie for the cinematic interlude of Lulu.
This footage consists prevailingly or perhaps overwhelmingly of
sequences incorporating black people—or at least people presented as black (for
there is one particularly disturbing sequence centering on some sort of platoon
of black soldiers conspicuously pale immediately about the eyes [presumably
this was an implicitly condemnatory allusion to some supposedly white
supremacist visual tract like Birth of a
Nation {which the present writer has never seen and plans never to see}, in
which case I would strongly caution the producers against including this
footage in future presentations of their production, inasmuch as in the current
pseudo-political climate one simply cannot win with any sort of presentation of
blackface]) in sub-diagetic juxtaposition with presumably white people whose
faces are concealed by gas masks.
Presumably (this really is my favorite adverb, isn’t it?) the
juxtaposition is meant to underscore some supposed connection of the
prosecution of the Great War with the prosecution of Africa-oppressing European
colonialism and North American Jim Crow-ism, a connection that is presumably
worth drawing in a certain sense or context but whose applicability to Wozzeck eo ipso is much more and worse
than questionable, inasmuch as the connection of the opera’s diagesis to the
Great War is entirely of the producers’ making, and from the applicability of
certain sub-states of affairs of one historical period to another historical
period it eye-burstingly obviously does not follow that every other sub-state
of affairs of that historical period is ascribable to the other. For farthest-fetched and therefore most
eloquent example: in dramaturgically presenting the fifteenth-century discovery
of the so-called New World as a reenactment of the Apollo moon landing(s), one
would be well within one’s rights to require Columbus and his crew to quaff
tankards of Tang, because Tang was after all what the Apollo astronauts quaffed
throughout their trip to the moon, but one would be well without those selfsame
rights to back-project a television advertisement for Tang behind the quaffage inasmuch as such a
projection would give the highly misleading impression that Columbus, &co.
gave a twentieth century-style toss about the brand name of whatever they
happened to be drinking en route to the so-called New World. Now if some would-be producer of Wozzeck wished to situate the opera in
a meta-oppressive context that could actually be extrapolated from the opera
itself, he or she might profitably turn to the institution of serfdom, which
was abolished throughout central Europe only as late as the 1840s—in other
words, about a decade after Büchner’s writing of the play on which the libretto
of Wozzeck is based. Presumably (!) a
non-duplicitous allusion to this institution could be made even in a production
primarily diagetically set in the First World War; as to how it could thereby be included, why, that for the present beats
the carp out of the present writer, although the present writer flatters
himself that despite his CVs’ utter bareness of reference to the dramaturgical
preparation of operas he could contrive a serviceable enough answer to this
question if he were afforded the hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of
dollars that were presumably vouchsafed to the Met’s production team this time
round. But to get back to the inclusion of all the
cinematic screenage qua cinematic screenage: it presumably (!) is there to
highlight the more or less exact coincidence of the outbreak of the First World
War with the explosion of the popularity of movies and to intimate that this
coincidence was much more than a mere coincidence, that there is some causal
link between the one event and the other, an intimation that is presumably (!)
worth intimating (although as to how etc.).
But any such intimation by all rights must take into account the fact
that Berg himself was a witness to-cum-participant in the coincidence, and that
indeed he developed quite a well-thought-out dramaturgical modus operandi for
registering the recent sudden Lebenswelt-transforming
supervention of cinema in the presentation of his operas. The abovementioned silent movie desiderated
by Lulu is the most obvious
manifestation of this MO; a more obscure manifestation thereof is his hope,
imparted to his pupil Theodor W. Adorno, of having Wozzeck adapted for the screen in a manner whose-fine grained
sensitivity to stage action in real time was never even approximated vis-à-vis
any opera by any composer until the advent of the multi-camera video-recording
of performances for television broadcast in the late 1960s. But ultimately the
most salient manifestation of Berg’s awareness of the new power of cinema is
his apportionment of Wozzeck into a
succession of fairly-to-extremely brief scenes, the longest of which, the
tavern scene in Act II, is still just short enough at ten minutes to occupy a
single reel of film. (Admittedly the
fragmentary structure of Büchner’s play invites such an apportionment, but it required
a cinematically orientated mind such as Berg’s to realize that this structure
could be accommodated in dramaturgically intelligible and compelling terms,
that it did not have to be digested into the usual five-to-seven scene presentation
that makes even such masterly adaptations as Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff seem
so un-Shakespearean in their sluggardly pacing.) And that Berg conceived of these scenes as
scenes in the fullest dramaturgical sense—i.e., as requiring some sort of
stage-setup that distinguished them from their immediate predecessors and
successors--can readily be gleaned from his scrupulous inclusion of an
instrumental interlude between each pair of scenes, an interlude that was and
is in each and every case just long enough to accommodate the lifting of two or
three side-flats and the depositing of one or two backdrops. Accordingly any presentation of Wozzeck that even aspires to be worth
its salt must obscure the stage during these interludes and at their
conclusions re-enlighten the stage to reveal a mise-en-scène at least minimally
visually distinct from the preceding scene. The Met’s latest presentation of Wozzeck by disastrous contrast refuses
to obscure the stage at any point, and indeed, it seems positively and cheekily
to revel in its repudiation of such dramaturgical enlightenment by leaving the
entire set, one extending to multistory heights, exposed to view from beginning
to end. And not only is this set
agoraphobically overexposed, it is also entirely unintelligible, consisting of
a snakes and ladders-like network of poorly illuminated gangways that just might be intended to represent the
parapets of trenches on the front line but that actually evokes nothing so
vividly as the boardwalk of a so-called nature trail in a swampy national park.
At scarcely any point is there any sense
that the action is moving from one sort of place to another as indicated in the
libretto—from an officer’s apartment to a field to an enlisted soldier’s
apartment to doctor’s surgery, etc. To
be sure (in the interest of full disclosure), perhaps the present writer’s
favorite production of a Berg opera, Graham Vick’s of Lulu for the 1996 Glyndebourne Festival, was even more minimalist,
with no scenery whatsoever and hardly any props. But Lulu’s
libretto, being based as it is on a pair of finished plays written by a
professional playwright for a version of live theater at its technical apex,
rather than by a quasi-amateur poet for a German stage still in its infancy, is
a dramaturgically much more finely wrought affair than Wozzeck’s; its dialogue is chockful of descriptive cues evidently
designed to compensate for productional shortcomings—such cues as Schigolch’s
praising of the wall-hangings and plush carpet of the painter’s house, and Lulu’s
exhortation to tidy up the studio rather
than a mere room in the opening scene.
Vick’s was the first production of Lulu
I ever saw in its entirety, and yet thanks to these cues, at few if any points
during my initial spectation of it did I have any trouble figuring out in what
sort or genre of space the current scene was being enacted. Thankfully, I was not obliged to spectate on
this new Met Wozzeck in a state of
comparable innocence, as I was already casually to intimately familiar with
several fully staged productions; if I had been so obliged, I cannot imagine
how I would have been able to make head or tail of where anything was supposed
to be taking place; by default I suppose I would have assumed everything to be taking place in
so-called no-man’s land, in one of the stretches of open ground between the
trenches, although I assume I would have been hard-pressed to account for the
presence of a civilian woman (i.e., Marie) and her infant child in such an
environment, let alone for the un-machine gunned survival of a half-dozen noisy
soldiers therein during the scene that the libretto directs to be set in a
tavern. But by far the most perniciously
licentious of the production-team’s liberties is one not of staging but rather
of casting, or rather non-casting,
namely their complete omission of Wozzeck and Marie’s child from the embodied
dramatis personae. By this I do not mean
the excision of all parts of the libretto and score pertaining to the child—a
move that for all its prima facie greater drasticity could conceivably have led
to a less reprehensible outcome than the one actually achieved—but rather the
exclusion from the stage of an actor portraying the child as a self-contained
flesh-and-blood human being on par with Marie and Wozzeck in this regard. To be sure-stroke-don’t get me wrong, casting
this role appropriately cannot but be a whale of a Hündin. Wozzeck’s and Marie’s handful of references to the child as
a Bub, i.e., a boy, specify the sex
of the child; his age is not specified in any fashion by either Büchner or Berg, but
because in the final scene he is seen to be both old enough to ride a
hobby-horse and young enough not yet to understand what it means for his mother
to be dead, one may infer that he is between the ages of about three and five
and hence at that life-stage at which a child is both too old to be confined to
a crib and too young to be bribed into doing an adult’s bidding via even a
more-than-figurative mountain of sweets or so-called action figures—in short
when he or she is a stage-director’s worst nightmare not even barring a horse
with an irritable bowel. Granted, the
kid’s is an entirely mute role until the concluding scene, when he has only to
sing the pseudo-word Hopp-hopp
exactly six times, but for all that the temptation to fill this
three-to-five-year-old-child-shaped space with someone or something other than
an actual three-to-five-year-old child cannot but be a very strong one; and the
tradition-sanctified tendency to hand those six Hopp-hopps over to an offstage soprano (as in the otherwise
punctiliously score-cum-libretto-respecting Vienna State Opera production of
1987) cannot but make the temptation all but ineluctable. Howbeit, I must strenuously insist that this
temptation must be strenuously resisted inasmuch as the opera’s meta-thematic
upshot, its so-called communication of its so-called message, hinges on the
recurring presence of the child, and that it is impossible to cast an even very
slightly older person as a three-to-five-year old without generating an
instance of travesty or pantomime as outrageously un-Wozzeckian as that of the cigar-chomping cartoon baby of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Now that I have thus perforce strenuously
insisted, the reader naturally expects me to go on to reveal that in this Met
presentation the child was played by a hookah-huffing nonagenarian dude with a
ground-skirting white beard, but what I am actually going to reveal is
something quite different and yet far more horrifying, and something that I can
reveal only by way of an account of my own assimilation of the presentation’s
presentation of the first appearance of the child, wherein the addressee of
Marie’s first words thereunto is shown (at least by the camera; obviously viewers-cum-listeners at Lincoln Center did not
have their line of sight so guided) to be a lad aged at least twenty and
possibly as old as twenty-nine. And so,
after an initial frisson of horror, I gloomily resigned myself to having the
child presented to me as a teenager as played by a post-teen actor à la Michael
J. Fox’s characters in Family Ties
and the Back to the Future movies. But no sooner did I or had I tendered this
gloomy resignation, than the camera pulled back to show that the younker was
moving about a pair or trio of sticks connected to some sort of vaguely
baby-shaped-and-sized mannequin with a head completely enclosed in (guess
what?) a gas mask. Whereupon I naturally
experienced a second and more intense frisson of horror, but to my credit qua
meta-polemical non-ambulance chaser, I also tried to recuperate the
presentation in a manner that would not make utter mincemeat tartar of the
abovementioned meta-thematic upshot: OK,
I said to meself whilst breathing as slowly and deeply as I could manage, let’s say the kid is supposed to be a teen traumatized by the horrors of the war
and regressively acting out his traumatization via a baby-sized puppet. I can deal with that, at least between now
and the final scene, wherein the child’s incomprehension-cum-hobbyhorsicality
will be utterly unconvincing because utterly unverisimilitudinous. But alas!
Even this wretched meta-diagetic
pis aller was made mincemeat tartar of long before the final scene, and
indeed in the immediately subsequent child-including scene, wherein the baby-
puppet was manipulated by a manifestly different person, a young woman. When I happened to notice that this young
woman had a red cross on one of her sleeves, I could not forbear concluding
that she was a nurse and consequently immediately revising my sense of the
diagetic function of the puppet: presumably, I reflected, in this diagesis
there is no biologically current child; presumably in this diagesis Marie is in
a hospital (a hospital at which the young fellow in the previous
child-including scene is also a nurse whose red cross I failed to notice), and
is mentally disturbed in such a way and thanks to such a cause (perchance a
shellshock-induced miscarriage) that interacting with an artificial baby is
understood to be therapeutic for her.
But I immediately thereupon reflected that such a meta-diagetic exegesis
was pretty much untenable in the light of the first scene of the opera,
wherein, as mentioned before, both Wozzeck and the Captain refer to the
perduring biological existence of the child, such that if the child must be
regarded as merely an hallucination it must perforce be highly improbably
further regarded as a collective or Gestalt hallucination (the highly is to be ascribed to the ineluctable
participation in the hallucination of the Captain, who is at no point remotely
imaginable, even in this presentation, as a reformed Scrooge to the miscarried
child’s Tiny Tim). Howbeit, I managed to
cast one last saving throw in favor of this presentation’s diagesis: what if, I
conjectured, the child, although very much extra-uterally alive at some earlier
point in the diagesis was dead by the opening scene of the opera—dead, that is,
to the obvious knowledge of Wozzeck and Marie yet quite plausibly unbeknownst
to the captain. In the context of such a
diagesis, Wozzeck and Marie might quite plausibly for various motives go on
continuing as though the child were still alive, and indeed, at times they
might even be persuaded that he actually was
still alive. To be sure, this last
saving throw of a meta-exagetic diagesis left the child-centered final scene
diagetically un-accounted for, but perhaps, I reflected at numerous times
throughout roughly the second three-fifths of the presentation, the
show-runners had somehow managed to account for it. But no suchluck: in the final scene yet
another puppeteer was seen solitarily manipulating the baby-puppet to the
accompaniment of a succession of disembodied voices comprising not only the
boy-child’s Hopp-hopp! but also all
the other children’s registrations of the death of his mother. Try as I might then, while spectating on the
scene, and try as I have mighted in the three weeks since, I have been unable
to produce a single even vaguely meta-diagetically compelling interpretation of
this presentation of the final scene.
If, after all, the point of the puppet’s existence was to console Marie
for the death of her child, what point could there be in continuing to operate
the puppet after Marie’s death?
Moreover, if the child was either deceased or ever-non-existent, what
function could the voices of the other children possibly be serving? In the
highly improbable event that they have ever been queried about this meta-diagetic
conundrum, I suppose the show-runners have mealy-mouthedly yet brazenly stated
something to the utterly bullshittic effect that in the concluding scene the
baby-puppet, the puppeteer, and the disembodied children’s voices collectively
symbolize both the instigators and the survivors of the First World War, or better
yet both the instigators and the survivors of every war that has ever occurred
in human history-cum-prehistory.
Whatever it is meant to symbolize, this symbolization is manifestly
irreconcilable with the dramaturgical structure of Wozzeck as it presents itself on the page quite irrespective of
the composer-cum-librettist’s intentions. Wozzeck is manifestly and ineluctably an
opera about a real soldier with a real common law wife and a real very young
son; each and every presentation of the opera must take this manifest and
ineluctable philological fact as its starting point, and each and every
presentation that refuses to do so as the latest Met’s refuses to do so is
doomed to present not Wozzeck but a
kind of live-action music video with the score of Wozzeck as its utterly contingent soundtrack. Not that this soundtrack need in consequence
suffer a jot as a purely aural presentation of Wozzeck, and indeed to the extent that I could avoid being
distracted by the visuals, I found the soundtrack of the Met’s new ostensible Wozzeck to be among the most beautifully
sung and played Wozzecks that I had
ever heard. Indeed, I would go so far as
to say that to the limited extent to which the cast were able to circumvent or
sidestep the irrelevancies of the mise en scène, they put on quite a visually
compelling performance and that hence I found their contribution to the
presentation to be among the most beautifully acted Wozzecks that I had
ever seen. Peter Matei’s interpretation
of the title character was certainly an improvement on that of the reigning
Wozzeck of a generation ago, Franz Grundheber, who tended to look merely
sluggishly bemused rather than kinetically harried (verhetzt, as the Captain describes him in the opening scene) as
Matei does with appropriately slowly rising intensity; here, in a portrayal
evidently meant to underscore his resemblance to the Drum Major qua destroyer
of Wozzeck, the Captain as played and sung by Gerhard Siegel uncharacteristically
yet persuasively cut a fairly commanding figure despite his character-defining
cowardice; here Marie, as played and sung by Elza van den Heever, was adequately
plebbish without being gratuitously whorish (although I’m not sure her voice
has quite enough bottom for the part’s tessitura, as in the higher registers
she did tend rather to slip into the cartoon mouse-like timbre that I have
decried in Evelyn Lear’s Lulu); here the Doctor despite his character-defining
lugubriousness had a winning almost- Groucho Marx-at-a-Day at the Races-esque animated zaniness about him. Even vis-à-vis such a minor character as
Margret (I own that Andrew Staples’s portrayal of the slightly less minor
character of Andres made no impression on me whatsoever) some pains had
evidently been taken by somebody to present her in a new but not completely
perverse light: in both the tavern scenes she was seen holding a broom, which
of course suggested that she occupied the ultra-menial position of a
cleaning-woman; i.e., a position even lowlier than Wozzeck’s, which in turn
helped to explain, as perhaps no earlier presentation of the opera has
attempted to do, why Wozzeck was conjugally paired with Marie rather than with
Margret to begin with and why he finds it entirely natural to turn to Margret
for conjugal succor after Marie’s death—and also, persuasively enough, why in
this presentation Margret rebuffed his advances outright, apparently regarding
them as an assertion of a plebeian analogue to droit de signeur (shades of Figaro,
natch), rather than at least provisionally yielding to them by deigning to
dance with him in conformity with the established performance history. All the immediately preceding plainly
indicates that I am not opposed to innovative mises en scène eis ipsis, that indeed I welcome any
presentation of an opera that shews it in a new light provided that this new
light does not work at refractive cross-purposes with the letter of the
score-cum-libretto, that I believe that anything that is not expressly forbidden
by the score-cum-libretto and that does not preclude the conveyance of the
just-mentioned letter should be permitted.
And in a score-cum-libretto as schematically stage-directed as that of Wozzeck the scope for such innovation is
quite latitudinous—and not only latitudinous but also perhaps dramaturgically
exigent, for as Dr. Johnson averred vis-à-vis the presentation of the works of
a playwright whose authenticated stage directions (directions not to be
confused with the interpolated ones of his earliest editors, most of which were
silently assimilated to later editions and thence into the dramaturgical
tradition) were to say the least extremely spotty, namely Shakespeare, so-called
stage business, for all its manifest peripherality to the conveyance of the
gist of a drama on paper, is apparently indispensable to the conveyance of that
selfsame gist in a theater. So in the BBC’s early-1960s presentation of Richard III, Lord Hastings is seen
shaving his own beard with a straight razor at the exact moment at which he is
being asked to entertain the notion of elevating Richard Duke of Gloucester to
the throne, and he still has the cutting edge of the knife poised against his
own throat (such that, yes, yes, yes he is both his own Captain and his own
Wozzeck) when he eventually declares that he would rather have his head
separated from the rest of his body rather than accept Richard as the
legitimate king. Naturally here the
shaving-centered stage business has been interpolated into the mise en scène by
way of anticipating Hastings’s beheading a few scenes later. It can of course be compellingly argued that
such stark foreshadowing is more than a bit heavy-handed, but under our
post-Johnsonian dramaturgical dispensation the submitter of such an argument
cannot get away with simply leaving Hastings to twiddle his thumbs at most
during this scene; he must come up with something else for Hastings to do while
he is rebutting the proposal of Richard’s coronation; something as diagetically
plausible as, yet less semiotically loaded than, shaving. The Met’s present presentation of Wozzeck contains a paragon of such
unobtrusive stage business in the penultimate scene, wherein the Captain and
the Doctor are walking along the river (not, to be doubly sure, that it looks
anything like a river in this presentation) just after Wozzeck has disappeared
beneath its surface, and they are both trying to ascertain if they have been
hearing somebody drowning, towards which end the doctor, still clad in his
surgery-attire, quite naturally raises the funnel of his stethoscope as a
hearing aid. (Incidentally, the fact that the Doctor is equipped with such a
crude, Beethoven ear trumpet-esque, auscultational apparatus when by the First
World War doctors had long since been using stethoscopes more or less exactly
identical to the ones they are using now suggests that the show-runners
themselves felt at least slightly straitjacketed by the WWI setting.) If only all this presentation’s
interpolations had been so singularly felicitous, this might have been the best
presentation of Wozzeck ever. But doubtless if the show-runners of this
presentation had confined themselves to such interpolations, they would have
found their work unrecognized, and consequently themselves out of a job. Whence the entire bullshittic apparatus of
the trenches, the film projector, the woke-orientated films, etc. And whence further the non-gratuitousness of
the present post vis-à-vis “Lulullations,” which still naively treated the
fully staged live presentation of operas as though it could be reformed en
bloc, as though the shit-together-getting of all parties concerned could lead
to a coherent and faithful fully staged presentation of a given opera. For in the course of reflecting on his
spectation-cum-audition of the Met’s latest presentation of Wozzeck, the present writer cannot have
helped concluding that such reformation is utterly impracticable, because such
shit-together-getting is also utterly impracticable, because the
shit-getting-together attending any enterprise, very much including the literal
collection of animal waste, necessitates a sense of more or less equally
apportioned intentional involvement among all materially substantial parties
concerned in that enterprise, and the adequate presentation of operas does not
necessitate the eventuation of such a sense; this because the material contribution
of the show-runners can no longer ever be—if it ever was—equal in magnitude to
such contribution by the singers or even by the instrumentalists. To expatiate: nowadays, in this most-Whiggish
of all microepochs of the Whiggish era, one constantly hears talk about how we (i.e., effectively universally, all
of us apart from the present writer) are living through a golden age of this or that phenomenon or practice, and vis-à-vis
99.99…% percent of these phenomena the present writer would reach for it (or
them) rather than the nearest loo-roll in the event of a second-species loo-emergency. When people say, for instance, that we are
living through a golden age of television, I cannot but conclude that they are
simply registering the unprecedented abundance of nudity and profanity in
first-screenings accessible in a domestic setting, for nothing could be more
patently devoid of any other engaging—let alone redeemable—dramaturgical
feature than this microepoch’s most fulsomely lionized televisual franchises—The Crown, Ta-Tas & Dragons (a.k.a, G***
of T****s), etc. But when it comes
to performers and performances of serious music, I really do believe that there
is something to this Whiggish talk. It
strikes me as entirely plausible that, for example, Simone Dinnerstein and Paul
Lewis are among the most sensitive and accomplished interpreters of the
keyboard repertoire, and Alicia Weilerstein and Hilary Hahn, of the cello and
violin repertoire, respectively, ever to have lived; and these last two must be
singled out in particular for their outstanding recordings of two
extraordinarily difficult modern works—Carter’s cello concerto and Schoenberg’s
violin concerto. When badgered about the
apparent unperformability of his then-new concerto some eighty years ago,
Schoenberg is said to have frostily rejoined that he was willing to wait for the little finger to evolve to the point at
which it was capable of playing the work.
Well now in Ms. Hahn we have a violinist whose little finger has evolved
to that stage of competence. And Ms.
Hahn is by no means known as a specialist in especially recondite corners of
the repertoire—to the contrary, she is about as mainstream and successful as
one can get with a bowed instrument, a veritable fiddling superstar. Essentially, in the present generation of
musicians the entire corpus of serious modernist music, a corpus that was
widely regarded as unperformable only a generation ago, has found a pool of
interpreters entirely adequate to its realization. And not the least striking proofs of this
discovery is a Met orchestra to whom two of the three operatic masterpieces hailing
from that corpus, Wozzeck and Lulu (the third being Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, whose infrequency of
appearance at Lincoln Center is probably more up-chalkable to dramaturgical
causes than to musical-performative ones [for let’s face it, Schoenbergophiles:
M&A does not have a libretto that
is overall as remotely captivating as that of W or L, even if the
notorious-cum-celebrated episode of its dance around the golden calf does call
for some guaranteed lorgnette-attracting full-frontal nudity]), have apparently
become as familiar as Die Meistersinger
or Falstaff, an orchestra that can comfortably present Wozzeck every third or fourth season and
Lulu every fifth or sixth—not to
mention that this orchestra is able to interact with a cast of singers who, as
mentioned before in specific connection with Wozzeck, are also entirely adequate to the technical-cum-expressive
demands of these works. And yet although
we would seem to be living through a golden age of instrumental and vocal performance,
to judge by the likes of the current production on which the Met’s latest
presentation of Wozzeck is centered,
we would seem to be simultaneously living through a tin age of opera
shew-running. Whence emanates the
discrepancy in quality? This
discrepancy, at least so it presently seems to the present writer, seems at
least in the main to emanate from a deflatingly prosaic discrepancy in the
degree of amenability to improvement between the two lines of cultural
production. In instrumental musical
performance, there has always been room for technical improvement as composers
reliably continue to write works—e.g., the just-mentioned violin concerto—that
are too technically demanding for the best instrumentalists of their day; and
to a lesser but still pronounced extent as instrumentalists absorb the insights
of their predecessors, an absorption that has presumably become more and more
thorough and exacting over the past century with the ever-increasing expansion
of the archive of recorded performances.
Vis-à-vis the performance of vocal music the prevalence and
perdurability is at least slightly more disputable; how, after all, is one to
explain that Schoenberg deliberately composed his most technically challenging
piece of vocal music, the soprano concert aria “Herzgewächse,” for a vocal range
exactly as extensive as that of the
Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic
Flute, for if he was willing to wait for the human pinkie to evolve to play
his violin concerto, why should he not have been willing to wait for the human
larynx to evolve to sing a song with an even broader range than that of the
Queen of the Night—why not, indeed, if he did not presume that the human
larynx, unlike the human pinkie, was destined to undergo no further exploitable
evolution? For all that, it is aurally
observable that there has been at least a modest improvement in the overall
quality of singing in the past half-century, such that the listener is
generally benefited from hearing live or in new recordings the most celebrated
vocalists of today alongside recordings of the most celebrated vocalists of
yesteryear. That such improvements on
the performative end of musical production will continue into the indefinite or
even the near-term future seems unreasonable to assume not only and most
obviously on account of presumably insurmountable limitations to the human
organism qua vehicle of performance—to the presumptive fact that both the
pinkie and the larynx, how ever well nourished or exercised, will eventually be
incapable of becoming suppler or more articulate (except, perhaps, through
cybernetic means [but by all means let us not go thither of all places])—but
also, and probably even more materially definitively, because composers have
ceased to produce works that mutatis mutandis present technical challenges
equal to those of the likes of Wozzeck,
works that require performers to play them badly before they play them well. This is not to say that there are not new
compositions that present such technical challenges, but that none of these new
technically challenging compositions enjoy the pride of place among musicians
that the likes of Wozzeck enjoyed
nine-tenths of a century ago. In 1930
the American premiere of Wozzeck was
conducted by Leopold Stokowski, then the most famous conductor in the world
barring Toscanini and soon to be a collaborator with the most notoriously
successful peddler of cinematically animated kitsch in the world, Walt Disney;
in 1999 the world premiere of Elliott Carter’s What Next?, the most conspicuous heir apparent to Wozzeck in technical terms, was
conducted by Daniel Barenboim, then at most the tenth-most-famous conductor in
the world and a musician whose biggest pop-cultural splash had been his
portrayal by an obscure character actor in a moderately financially successful
biopic of his deceased wife, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. In general to the limited extent that today’s
most celebrated serious musicians—and I am thinking here in particular of the
abovementioned Mss. Hahn and Dinnerstei—have been interested in commissioning
new works, they have sought out composers working in a
technically-cum-expressively regressive idiom; most often an idiom consisting
of a combination of unwaveringly diatonic minimalism and pseudo-folk-derived
chromaticism; this perhaps because however ardently they may yearn for more
demanding works they yearn even more ardently to be more accessible to some
phantom bobo audience who unaccountably actually care about hearing the sort of
kitschy aural pabulum available on tap from their local pub’s open mic night’s
shittiest strummer or fiddler played by an artist who can and should know and do
quasi-infinitely better. Of course, if
these artists had any sense—note that I write sense and not integrity, inasmuch as I believe that the
aggrandizement of their own reputations is ultimately as much in point here as
any duty to the music itself, whatever that music may be—they would give over
trying to compete with their pop-cum-pseudo-folk-orientated counterparts and
commission works from composers generally guaranteed to come up with something
that is too difficult to sight-read and that therefore impels them to improve
their technique. But of course I am
being more than a bit too hard on these most celebrated serious musicians for
the purpose of the present digression, which purpose was after all to shew that
they were far superior to their official counterparts in the domain of opera
show-running, who in contrast to them (this was, by the way, the point to be
highlighted by the digression) have long since lost all wiggle-room for
technical-cum-expressive improvement.
They have lost this wiggle-room, in the first and perhaps foremost
place, because opera show-running has never been an art in the restrictive
sense in which violin-playing or piano-playing or singing or composing or even
conducting is an art. Nobody has ever
discovered, or had imposed on him or her at his or her earliest infancy, a
calling to become an opera show-runner as many a body has discovered or had
imposed on him or her at his or her earliest infancy a calling to become a
violinist aut al. (aut etc.), and thereby been compelled from earliest infancy
onwards to work night and day at becoming as good an opera show-runner as
possible in the manner that would-be violinists aut al.’s (aut etc.’s) have always
been compelled to work night and day at becoming etc.; rather, one starts out
pursuing some other sort of art or no art whatsoever and gets roped, or
deliberately ropes oneself into, the practice of show-running operas. A plurality, or perhaps even a slight majority,
of opera show-runners have started out as actors and directors for the
non-operatic stage, but a goodly proportion of them have hailed from such
wildly unstageworthy lines of work as medicine (Jonathan Miller) and filmmaking
(W***y A***n). Hardly any of them have
started out as aspiring professional musicians.
In describing opera show-running and opera show-runners in these admittedly
implicitly unflattering terms, I by no means wish it to be understood that I
take a dim view of opera-show-running as an ignoble pursuit eo ipso; for to the contrary, in the
absence of opera show-runners no operas ever could have been simultaneously seen
and heard by anyone anywhere, which would have been a sad loss in ca. 1790,
ca., 1890, and even ca. 1990 if not necessarily now (more on this anon). At the same time, from this description it
must be clear that opera show-running does not require anything in the way of
dedicated expertise in the way that the three activities in whose absence opera
would not exist at all—namely, composing, singing, and playing a musical instrument—do. The opera show-runner can bring to bear on
the presentation of his assigned or appropriated opera ideas drawn from his own
bailiwick or indeed any other bailiwick under the sun provided that he can
prevail upon the other material human forces involved in the presentation to
accept these ideas. At the same time2,
it cannot be denied that the archive of opera show-running constitutes a body
of work just as surely as the operatic repertoire itself does, an archive that
is as open to consultation as that repertoire (is). And such being the case, the latest
show-runner of a given opera cannot but be tempted to one-up each and every one
of his predecessors to whatever extent he is able within the scope of the
bailiwick he brings to bear on the presentation of that opera, to overload the
particular opera-show that he is running with every trick up his sleeve that
has not been exploited by preceding presenters of that particular opera. To be sure, there was a moment almost exactly
a century ago—a moment therefore
coinciding almost exactly with the world premiere of Wozzeck—when developments in operatic show-running seemed to be
moving in lock-step with developments in the abovementioned truly existentially
indispensable components of opera. Thus
when Wozzeck was new, it, like most
other works theretofore produced by the Schoenberg school, was regarded as an expressionistic composition and by
chance or design received a premiere with expressionistic
Edward Munch-esque painted backdrops.
Whether musical expressionism ever had much in common with painterly
expressionism is debatable; certainly Schoenberg’s own bewilderingly beguiling
paintings put the viewer in mind of the sound-world of his musical corpus, but
they are hardly typical expressionistic canvases. At any rate, by all admittedly spotty
accounts, the initial expressionistic staging worked well for Wozzeck, and while not all subsequent
successful presentations of the work could be described as expressionistic, all
of them have inherited from the first one a certain salutary austerity and
simplicity, a tendency to pare away everything that might impair the
viewer-cum-listener’s ability to follow the work’s dramaturgical arc. My favorite production, the late-80s Vienna
State Opera one, might most aptly be described as one of minimalistic
naturalism, inasmuch as while its costumes are all quite verisimilitudinously
detailed, its sets are all quite unverisimilitudinously schematic,
self-evidently designed with the aim of merely conveying where the scene
immediately to eye and ear is taking place.
The Met’s present singularly unfortunate production I would describe in
the phraseology of a certain Radio 4 panel show guest, an art critic whose name
has regrettably long since escaped me, as an essay in academic postmodernism. Academic postmodernism is the kind of art
that over the past thirty years we have come to expect by default in museums
thanks to the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin—a kind of art characterized
by the laziest sort of semiotic laissez-faire-ism, essentially by the
ad-nauseam visual quotation of the iconography of earlier artistic traditions,
pseudo-traditions, and sub-traditions without any regard for their mutual
semiotic interrelation. It is
postmodernist in virtue of its semiotic heterogeneity, which heterogeneity in
itself is not objectionable provided that is subservient to some sense of
purposive form (my norm here is the better portion of the musical corpus of
Alfred Schnittke, in which the styles of earlier periods are evoked only at
strategically significant points), and it is specifically academic postmodernism because of its laziness and because it is
now the long-established museal status quo despite its willful
unintelligibility. One is never bemused
or bewildered by exhibits of academic postmodernist art because bemusement and
bewilderment are contingent on curiosity, on the will to understand, and one
knows from the start that there is nothing to understand in connection with
these works, that they have been conceived from the start with an eye merely to
fulfilling the criterion for exhibition-worthiness—viz., semiotic heterogeneity. And in the light of the specifically academic character of this
postmodernism, my shock on seeing it applied to Wozzeck at the Metropolitan Opera last month seems more than a bit
gormless in hindsight. To be sure, the
Metropolitan Opera, the Other Old Gray Lady of New York, was almost duty-bound
to be slow to embrace a postmodernist opera show-running ethos. But once, ca. five years ago, the
postmodernist ethos had become a definitively academic ethos, once it had become the uncontested museal status
quo with no rival in its remotest offing, once it had become as definitively
functionally dead as the outermost skin cells of a centenarian’s big
toe-calluses, why, then the Metropolitan Opera qua Other Old Gray Lady of New
York was almost duty-bound to throw itself into the arms of that ethos like—well,
I don’t know; perhaps like Whistler’s newly transitioned trans-father
alacritously anally engaging with C*****n J****r in a MOMA-enshrined double
portrait; from that moment onwards the dearth of postmodern productions from
the Met’s stage must have seemed to Met general manager Peter Gelb at al. as
embarrassingly retardataire as the counterfactual absence of touchtone
telephones from the company’s administrative offices. And as far as the present writer is concerned,
the Met can put on academic postmodernist productions of its core repertoire until
the gender-queer cattle come home in wellies, inasmuch as he regards that
repertoire as aesthetically nugatory piffle that is impervious to either
elevation or degradation by any means apart from the quality of the playing and
singing involved. As far as the present
writer is concerned, the entire canon of bel canto, all those operas by the
likes of Bellini and Donizetti, might as well never have been composed had they
not attracted the vocal attention of Maria Callas and Luciano Pavarotti, whose
best versions of their arias he can in any case listen to at his pleasure
without even having to wade through a complete three-CD set of Norma, I
Puritani, autc., let alone sit through a complete kinescope or videotape
performance thereof. But Wozzeck is
an opera he cares deeply about, and it pains him to see it made dramaturgical
mincemeat of merely for the sake gratifying not even so comparatively noble a
creature as the whim of a misguided but enthusiastic show- runner—say, the
Peter Sellars of ca. 1985—but rather the sub-ignoble zombie of artistic
conformism. And he is pained not only or
even principally on his own behalf but also and principally on behalf of the
tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who in going to see Wozzeck at the Met are approaching this
masterpiece-cum-significant contribution to Occidental intellectual history as
an entirely new or at most highly unfamiliar work and who are
all-but-ineluctably bound to come away from the Met’s present presentation with
the impression that Wozzeck in its
essence is as chaotic, as incoherent, as the semiotic landscape of this
presentation, that the landscape of the presentation is indeed tantamount to a
perfect rendition of that chaotic, incoherent essence. Such an impression is well-nigh ineluctably
to be come away with by the newcomer because while the musical language of Wozzeck has long since become second
nature to the work’s principal empirical producers, to singers and
instrumentalists, this language has yet to become even tertiary nature to the
work’s principal empirical consumers, to opera-goers and listeners and viewers
of recordings of operas. A case in what
will ineluctably be thought of as all-too-convenient point (but so be
it-stroke-f**k it) is the reaction of the friend with whom I took in last
month’s Met HD presentation. This friend
is both an anciently ardent fan of Mahler and Dick Strauss and an anciently
ardent anti-fan of the entire so-called Second Viennese School. He has never been able to sit through
anything by Schoenberg himself, let alone by Webern, and has always found Lulu thoroughly off-putting. But by this or that same token he has always maintained
a tentatively sympathetic placelet in his heart for Wozzeck, has always at least grudgingly acknowledged that he can at
least understand why somebody might be moved by that work to the same extent
that he himself is moved by the works of Mahler and Dick Strauss. Howbeit, after watching that Met HD
presentation he remarked to me that that presentation, the first visual presentation of Wozzeck he had yet encountered, led him
to believe that he had always overestimated Wozzeck,
that while the several audio recordings of Wozzeck
he had heard had led him to conjecture that it was a work imbued with great meaning
and pathos, the presentation we had just seen led him to the contrary to
conjecture that it amounted to nothing but a lot of affectively neutral meaningless
noise. So whereas before spectating on
this bisensory presentation of Wozzeck
he had been on the royal road to appreciating Wozzeck in all its actual glory thanks to a purely aural
presentation of it, now he was on the plebian road to consigning Wozzeck to the same fictitious rubbish
heap to which he had (wrongly to be sure) preemptively consigned all the other
works of the SVS. Obviously any manner
of presentation of an opera (or indeed of any other so-called work of art) that
impedes its appreciation and understanding by someone as favorably disposed to appreciate
and understand it as my friend has been to appreciate and understand Wozzeck is pernicious from the point of
view of anyone but that opera’s would-be effective utter destroyers, its would-be
buriers in utter oblivion. But such
would-be destroyers-cum-buriers in oblivion is what the Met’s current crop of
show-runners undeniably are, however much at their insu. In this connexion I am
reminded of the third of Robert Conquest’s laws of politics: “The behavior of any
bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is
controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies,” not so much in connection with
the Met considered in isolation—if it even can be considered in isolation in
any so-called meaningful sense—or even with the opera show-running industry
considered in isolation, as with the entire high-cultural show-running
industry, which is undeniably tantamount to a mighty bureaucratic organization
comparable in personnel size if not in budget to one of the larger U.S. federal
governmental agencies. The present
writer admits to having always found Conquest’s Third Law a bit shy if not
quite wide of the mark in the light of his own experience of bureaucratic
organizations, an experience that tends rather to confirm Max Weber’s assertion
that such organizations are self-perpetuating and self-ramifying—i.e., inter
alia, that they are controlled by their friends rather than by their enemies,
and that, in the words of a judicious corrector of Conquest, in the case of
each such organization the controllers direct their enmity towards the
stated purpose of the organization rather than towards the organization itself. Thus the stated purpose of the high-cultural
show-running industry is the transmittal to the present of the best that has been
thought, said, and wrought in dramaturgical terms in the past, and yet as
instanced by the present Met presentation of Wozzeck, it seems to be controlled by people who wish to do
everything in their power to impede this transmittal. These controllers diabolically cloak their
willful impedance in the language of altruism by purporting to be making the
works in their care fresher and more relevant to today’s audience—all the while knowing that it is it
they themselves rather than today’s audience who have grown tired of and out of
touch with these works, which they have in general never appreciated in the
first place, as they have in turn in general never been placed in a position
requiring them to confront the works on the works’ own terms, as artifacts in
the fullest, richest sense, as repositories of objectified historically
conditioned experience—or in plainer terms, as crafted but fundamentally inert things
that can only be brought to life via the excavation of what was actually put
into them at the moment of their fabrication.
If the destiny of the great dramaturgically conceived works of the past
were entirely and permanently in the hands of the high-cultural show-running
industry, we who love these works would indeed have cause to vomit our own
hands in despair. Happily, as suggested
by the very recent moribundity or even outright demise of too many bureaucratic
quasi-organizations to be named, there is at least unbad reason to suppose that
in contravention of the present writer’s previous experience Conquest’s Third
Law holds true in a strong sense and that it will soon be borne out in the
fortunes of the high-cultural show-running industry, that this industry will
simply disintegrate in face of the manifest general awareness that it has no desire
to fulfill its stated purpose or even to perpetuate itself, that it continues
to exist simply in order to line the pockets of a passel of short term-minded
pirates who have no interest (either financial or affective) in sticking around
long enough to inculcate the cadges of their mystery into a succeeding
generation of show-runners. To be sure,
as long as these pirates remain alive and in business, intelligent but naïve
seekers after the best that has been thought, said, and wrought in
dramaturgical terms in the past will continue to seek out such abominations as
the Met’s latest Wozzeck and the
RSC’s latest travesty of a Shakespeare play in the delusory belief that they
are thereby getting as close as possible to that selfsame best; and a goodly
proportion of these intelligent naifs will subsequently erroneously conclude
that the bilge served up to them by the pirates is that selfsame best and will consequently give over taking any
interest whatsoever (affective or otherwise) in that selfsame best for the respective
durations of their respective naturals.
But once these pirates are safely slumbering forever after in Davy
Jones’s bosom, such intelligent naifs will be compelled to acquaint themselves
with this selfsame best via the audiovisual dramaturgical archive thereof, and
they will in every respect be all the better off for the supervention of this
compulsion. In the case of Shakespeare
they will be algorithmically directed to such yeomanly serviceable realizations
as the BBC’s 1980s survey of the complete plays and Trevor Nunn’s
quasi-contemporaneous TV adaptations of three of the four great tragedies; in
the case of Wozzeck etc. (the c. naturally comprising the at-most
butchers double-dozen other operas actually worth paying any attention to) to
the cream of the studio recordings and video-tapings made between the late
1960s and, say, the late 20-oughties. Of
course even under the auspices of this
post-piratic dispensation, the Met’s latest presentation of Wozzeck will figure among the
audiovisual choices offered, and if in point of viewerly-cum-listenerly hits it
happens to come out on top of the to-my-mind immeasurably superior likes of the
aforementioned 1987 Vienna State Opera presentation and Pierre Boulez’s 1966
double LP starring Walter Berry (to my mind still the ultimate Wozzeck, at
least in exclusively vocal terms), why, then, this will just go to show either
that the people really do imponderably regard this as the most faithful
realization of Wozzeck, or even more
discouragingly that they have a higher regard for academic postmodernism than
for anything that pre-academic modernism ever had to offer.
THE END
