Search - Pierre Boulez :: Berg: Wozzeck

Best Recording of the First True 20th Century Opera, Finally

Thomas Plotkin | West Hartford CT, United States | 04/18/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a re-posting of my review of an older edition whose out-of-print scarcity put its price in the 3-figures; its reissue at a bargain price merits this repetition:

Forget your 9 Inch Nails, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth ...or whatever art-rock/noise-punk allows the listener to wallow in dissonant decadent despair. Alban Berg's atonal opera got there first and did it best back in 1924. The story of a hulking "little man," a lowly dogfaced soldier bullied by his superiors, experimented upon by a deranged scientist, cuckolded by his lover, and generally beaten down by life to the point where he can only strike back in an act of futile violence, Wozzeck is Expressionist Verismo at its finest. Berg singlehandedly dragged Europe's gingerbread opera houses into the 20th century, not just by means of his elaborately designed Modernist music, but by depicting history's lumpen victims, the bitten who will one day bite back (true to real life the victims of Berg's victimized protagonists are never the oppressors, revolutions never work...see also Berg's next opera, Lulu).Berg's lush, huge score slithers, then strikes lethally, like an anaconda, its hallucinatory shocks and occasional dreaminess the very sound of a Freudian stream of consciousness. Werner Herzog directed a so-so film version of the Buchner play that is the opera's source, but if Rainer Werner Fassbinder had lived to turn his attention to opera direction, Wozzeck, which has much in common with his beloved Berlin Alexanderplatz, would have been a logical choice and a perfect match.

Conductor Pierre Boulez is the finest interpreter of the Modernist repertoire, and his interpretation eschews Berg's lunges in the direction of Romanticism in favor of bringing out every detail in the music imaginable, at a pace which carries the listener inexorably towards the final catastrophe.

Indispensible."