Wozzeck | © ROH 2023. Photograph by Tristram Kenton

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As topless hunks stalked around the spacious communal washroom that had been expensively built on stage, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching the work of another director than Deborah Warner. As it turned out, it was merely the first style-over-substance moment of an evening that didn’t make good the promise of its parts.

You are supposed to leave a performance of Alban Berg’s 1917 opera shaken to the core, enraged, purged with pity, full of horror at man’s inhumanity and the fate of poor Wozzeck. So it was alarming to feel just a bit depressed at the end of Covent Garden’s latest staging. Either I’ve had a catastrophic sympathy bypass, or there was something wrong with the show.

No, Wozzeck must harrow you whether you want to be harrowed or not. Alban Berg’s revolutionary opera is so good on many levels, so influential of everything that came afterwards in 20^th-century opera, and still so strongly modern and brutal in feeling, it must hit you like a train. Without a proper catharsis of rage, pity, horror, you emerge merely bruised and saddened – and you can get that from EastEnders.

A lot of things appeared good and right. Antonio Pappano knows exactly what he wants his orchestra to do in this fearfully demanding piece, and produced all the wonderful sounds (tinged with Pappano’s usual romantic ardour) that Berg requires, Christian Gerhaher, as the outstanding German baritone of our days, must be the singer you want to see, and Deborah Warner has a string of successes (though by no means universally loved) on this stage.

But there are many ways Wozzeck can miss its mark. A good example happened right at the top. The captain, being shaved by Wozzeck, tells him nervously “Slow down!” – just like you would if some highly-strung, depressive chap had a razor at your neck. Here, Peter Hoare’s Captain barked it out at the soldier as he’s cleaning those communal bogs. There is absolutely no reason for this, but it instantly removed a level of actual truth and relationship from the proceedings. (In any case, the usual military order is “Get on with it!”, not “Slow down!”).


Doctor BRINDLEY SHERRATT, Captain PETER HOARE, Wozzeck | © ROH 2023. Photograph by Tristram Kenton

This kind of point-missing went on. Captain and Doctor were not actually presented as completely crazed, as in many a misguided staging, but the army set-up was subsumed in a very clichéd, generalised world of male brutality. Does this matter? I think it does. There is something very specific about the military setup of Wozzeck, its particular absurdity, something Berg knew very well from his own service. Of course lifetime opera directors usually have absolutely no idea about how things work in real life – but Wozzeck of all things surely needs more involvement and detail, not just hand-wringing with high production values.

Wozzeck must be about him, and Marie, and the hopelessness of their specific lives – amplified by Wozzeck’s unstable nature, itself a product of hunger, poverty, abuse. This has to be leavened by something else – humour might be putting it a bit strong, but you can’t keep levels of intensity going unmediated for 100 minutes. This staging tried hard to look good, with its huge fiery backcloths, expensive sets, fancy screen-wipe scene changes (high-end designs by Hyemi Shin, brilliantly lit by Adam Silverman). But none of this is helpful: actually this opera just needs an empty stage and some desperate people to make its effect.

And with this musical performance, that could have been shattering. Gerhaher is a big, passionate Wozzeck, that voice breaking out in emotion and anger in a way you don’t hear in recital. Anja Kampe’s Marie had some appallingly touching scenes with the child, and Clay Hilley’s Drum Major was a force of nature. Brindley Sherratt and Peter Hoare were eminently hateable as Doctor and Captain, Sam Furness sang the sympathetic Andres. The wizard Pappano and his band charted the horror in the starkest, spookiest, lovingest way. Poor Wozzeck the well-meaning puppet helplessly followed his inevitable doom from stick-picking to murder to death. None of this was actually lost in the 'big show' on stage, but it was certainly diluted.

Music 5, stage 3 stars.