Wozzeck at the Met

Manhattan's Victorian, red-and-gilt Metropolitan Opera House was transformed one night last week into a nightmarish, shriekingly demented world of sight and sound. The occasion: the Met's long overdue production of Wozzeck, by the late, famed atonalist, Alban Berg. It was one of the great nights in Met history.

Based on a series of dramatic fragments by German Playwright Georg Buechner (1813-37), Wozzeck created a sensation when first performed in Berlin in 1925, was almost immediately recognized by European critics as one of the century's operatic masterpieces. But the fear that American audiences were not ready for Wozzeck's cerebral, atonal music long discouraged the Met from attempting it.

Dark Corridors. The opera's hero, Franz Wozzeck (Baritone Hermann Uhde), is a cloddish German soldier who recoils with protoplasmic twitches and tremors from the shock currents of life. Haunted by nameless terrors, persecuted by everybody around him, he stumbles down the dark corridors of his world like a crippled blind man, lacking even the tragic dignity that a suggestion of malevolent fate might give his life. He is ridiculed by his captain (Tenor Paul Franke), who seems to stand for all the bluster of petty militarism. He is used as a guinea pig by a doctor (Bass Karl Doench), a sadistic, fanatical embodiment of science. Finally, he is betrayed by his sluttish mistress Marie (Soprano Eleanor Steber), and he stabs her. Wozzeck himself drowns trying to recover the discarded knife. In a poignant last scene, their child (Alice Plotkin) trots off, unaware and innocent, on his hobbyhorse to view his mother's body.

The wonder of this sordid and symbolic tale is that it is suffused with compassion, heightened by the remarkable music Alban Berg wrote for it. The score, set in the tilted frame of nontonality, is carefully cast in a variety of classical musical forms: suite, passacaglia, sonata, fanatasie and fugue; scherzo, etc. The huge (113 instruments) orchestra sometimes bellows in brassy rages, sometimes shrieks in lines of shrill angularity, sometimes surprises with passages of softly breathing lyricism. The stark horror of the murder is conveyed in a howling, brassy crescendo in the orchestra that gives way abruptly to the tinselly tinkle of a cafe piano; Wozzeck's morbid fears are unforgettably etched in a single, slithering pianissimo in the strings; the cowardice that lurks beneath the captain's bluster becomes apparent in his occasional lapses into shrill, falsetto shrieking.

Blood-Red Moon. The Met's production of Wozzeck does full justice to its dramatic power. The sets by Germany's Caspar Neher are starkly effective: a phosphorescently glowing landscape dominated by a blood-red moon and lumpish, Van Gogh-like stumps of trees; a solidly bourgeois German hill town, contrasting with the madness unfolding before it. Hero of the evening: Conductor Karl Boehm, who, after an unprecedented 24 rehearsals, led his huge orchestra through Berg's convoluted score with masterful clarity and passion.

Wozzeck moved Manhattan critics to shouts of praise and touched off the most clamorous standing ovation of the current season. But on opening night (a benefit, with a $25 top), nearly 1,000 seats were empty in a heavily papered house, and there is virtually no demand for tickets for the remaining performances this season. The Met will not present Wozzeck next year. A quarter-century after his death, Composer Berg still seems to be a generation ahead of the times.

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