Alban Berg
Wozzeck
LIVE IN HD
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Overview
After wowing audiences with his astounding production of Lulu in 2015, South African artist William Kentridge now focuses his extraordinary visual imagination on Berg’s other operatic masterpiece, which comes to cinemas for the first time on January 11. Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin is on the podium for this important event, with baritone Peter Mattei as the disturbed title character. Soprano Elza van den Heever is Wozzeck’s unfaithful mate, alongside a commanding cast that also includes tenor Christopher Ventris, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, and tenor Gerhard Siegel. This live cinema transmission is part of the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series, bringing opera to more than 2,200 theaters in more than 70 countries worldwide.
Buy tickets for Wozzeck live in the opera house here.
A co-production of the Metropolitan Opera; Salzburg Festival; the Canadian Opera Company, Toronto; and Opera Australia
Production a gift of Robert L. Turner
Languages
Languages sung in Wozzeck
Sung In
German
Titles
Title languages displayed for Wozzeck
Met Titles In
Timeline
Timeline for the show, Wozzeck
Estimated Run Time
1 hrs 42 mins
World Premiere: Staatsoper, Berlin, 1925. One of the emblematic achievements of the thriving artistic forces in Germany and Austria during the brief period between world wars, Wozzeck was a sensation and a scandal at its premiere. Remarkably, it has lost none of its power to fascinate, shock, and engage audiences, and its status as one of the defining musical works of the 20th century has not blunted its vitality.
Creators
Among the most visionary and influential composers of the 20th century, Alban Berg (1885–1935) came of age amid an explosion of artistic and intellectual creativity in Vienna. His vocal and instrumental writing merges the revolutionary techniques of Arnold Schoenberg with the grandeur of such late Romantic composers as Gustav Mahler. The libretto is Berg’s own close adaptation of the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1813–1837).
PRODUCTION
William Kentridge
CO-DIRECTOR
Luc De Wit
PROJECTION DESIGNER
Catherine Meyburgh
SET DESIGNER
Sabine Theunissen
COSTUME DESIGNER
Greta Goiris
LIGHTING DESIGNER
Urs Schönebaum
Composer
Alban Berg
Videos
Setting
Berg did not specify a time or location for the opera. The background of Büchner’s play has led to the assumption of Leipzig, Germany, circa 1821, as an appropriate setting, but the work’s universal ideas far outweigh any forced attempt at historical accuracy. William Kentridge’s new production updates the action to the period before the First World War.
Music
Berg’s score encapsulates the artistic ideals of Expressionism in music—emphasizing the unseen and the subconscious by focusing on the symbolic rather than the concrete. Atonality and whole-tone composition coexist in Berg’s score with moments of romanticism and melody. The vocal writing ranges from pure speech to declaimed speech with musical inflections to melodic singing. Recurring motifs are used but not in the strict Wagnerian sense of a musical phrase attached to a specific character or idea.