101 years after its premiere in Berlin, Wozzeck remains the epitome of the modern opera. It also remains astonishing: for its musical sophistication as Berg’s score morphs from scene to scene, fusing atonality, Romanticism, traditional forms, elements of popular music (with a ‘pub piano’ in the mix) and even painstakingly contrived sound effects (the breathing of the sleeping soldiers in the final scene of Act 2); and for the way it elevates the fragments of Georg Büchner’s text – gritty, darkly comic, compassionate, tragic and even visionary – into metaphysical regions without losing its grip on brutal reality. The dying fall of the brief final scene, as Marie and Wozzeck’s son plays on his hobby horse, oblivious to the fact that he is now an orphan, is surely one of the most gut-wrenching moments in opera.
Presented in the context of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes – a “multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music” – the opera, drawing on Wozzeck’s pained exclamation “Wir arme Leut!”, became Wozzeck: Wretches Like Us. The production, conceived for a concert hall rather than a theatre, clearly aimed to compound the impact of the words and music, but in practice its effect was to diffuse it. A concert performance (with entrances and exits, some limited blocking and varying degrees of physical engagement from the principals) took place on the Festival Hall’s stage. Meanwhile, a succession of specially prepared still images, along with the surtitles, was projected above the stage, running in parallel rather than meshing with the libretto and the score. The opera became a kind of photonovel with a soundtrack, provoking a sense of detachment rather than visceral involvement.
Here Wozzeck was not a soldier but a migrant worker in a modern-day city (some of the images were recognisably of London) and the Captain became his exploitative boss. The photographic element, edgy reportage heightened by digitally manipulated surrealism, was in the hands of Ilya Shagalov (a video designer and multimedia artist who has worked extensively with the theatre director Kirill Serebrennikov), and Nina Guseva (who began her career on the stage but shifted her focus to making documentaries). The characters – a different cast from the singers – were seen in merciless close-up or transformed into dummy-like figures; Marie’s pregnant stomach filled the screen (the implication until the final scene was that the couple’s son was as yet unborn); there were drab cityscapes (skyscrapers and utilitarian suburban housing), shots of indeterminate internal anatomy and, repeatedly, Hitchcockian black birds.
The slideshow remained illustrative rather than narrative and the dramatic impulse came from the orchestra and the singers. The Royal Festival Hall, with its 2700 seats and broad, exposed stage will never be ideal for opera – and in dramatic terms Wozzeck is predominantly an intimate piece; nor did the hall’s somewhat unresponsive acoustic allow Berg’s intricate sonorities to achieve their full effect (at least not as experienced from the seventh row of the rear stalls). For all that, there was no doubting the meticulousness of Edward Gardner’s realisation of the score, the keen precision of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the tightly marshalled energy of the chorus, London Voices. Pain, passion and pathology were sensitively calibrated – this was no expressionist freakshow.
The charismatic cast could certainly have carried off a conventional concert performance in compelling fashion. Stéphane Degout’s contained physical tension and substantial, but not ‘heroic’ high baritone suited him ideally to portraying Wozzeck as both a victim and a potential menace. As Marie, Annette Dasch went through patches of cloudy tone, but her Marie leapt to life, not least through her vivid use of the text. Peter Hoare, theatrically mobile and vocally sinuous as the Captain, was set against the sober, sinister and sonorous Doctor of Brindley Sherratt. If not the most trumpeting Drum Major, Christopher Ventris meant business with his macho high notes. Eirik Grøtvedt used his assertive lyric tenor to raise the profile of Wozzeck’s sidekick Andres, and Kitty Whately’s Margret was both lucid and mordant. The two Apprentices, Callum Thorpe and Dominic Sedgwick, brought such firm-voiced vigour to their carousing that they almost overcame its desperation. Shortly afterwards, as Adrian Thompson sang the Fool’s blood-soaked lines with ethereal plangency from a raised position at the side of the stage, the evening’s most memorable sequence of images appeared above it: Wozzeck in the clinging grip of an oily-black homunculus.
Yehuda Shapiro
Wozzeck: Wretches Like Us
Music composed by Alban Berg
Libretto by Alban Berg, after the play by George Büchner
Cast and production staff:
Stéphane Degout – Wozzeck; Annette Dasch – Marie; Peter Hoare – Captain; Brindley Sherratt – Doctor; Christopher Ventris – Drum Major; Eirik Grøtvedt – Andres; Adrian Thompson – The Fool; Kitty Whately – Margret; Callum Thorpe – First Apprentice; Dominic – Sedgwick Second Apprentice
Visual co-creators – Ilya Shagalov; Nina Guseva; Conductor – Edward Gardner; London Voices; Tiffin Boys Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, 25 April 2026
All photos © Pete Woodhead