
WOZZECK
Opera by Alban Berg
“Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen! See the creature as God made it: nothing, absolutely nothing. Now behold the art: stands upright, wears a coat and trousers, wields a saber! The ape is a soldier; it’s not much yet, the lowest rank of the human species. Hey! Make a bow! Like this – you’re a baron. Give a kiss! – This creature is musical.”
The absurd presentation of a hawker from Büchner’s “Woyzeck” did not make it into Alban Berg’s groundbreaking opera. Yet, for KOMMANDO HIMMELFAHRT, it encapsulates the secret, nagging question at the heart of this opera: Is humanity truly wicked? Must it deceive, steal, and murder? And what can art add to the horrific balance sheet of the human beast?
In Berg’s “Wozzeck” from 1925, there is little hope in the realm of the libretto. He follows Büchner’s fragmentary work on abuse of power, human experiments, and male violence with a fatalistic worldview. Wozzeck, a simple soldier, has an illegitimate child with Marie. Desperately, he tries to support his small family, which leads him to work as a guinea pig for a doctor conducting experiments on the effects of a one-sided diet. However, the diet of nothing but legumes has a disastrous effect: Wozzeck begins to develop delusions. When Marie betrays him, his shattered mind sees only one way out…
Alban Berg’s highly complex emotional music propels the two protagonists further and further, ultimately to a cruel murder and death. But where do these lush string lines, these shimmering chords, these mysterious lights suddenly come from? On the musical level, Berg paints a more complex picture of humanity and its possibilities. If one could give voice to the many dead in the drama, what would they report?
Kommando Himmelfahrt stages “Wozzeck” at Theater Aachen as a séance of humans and life-sized puppets, seeking a utopian glimmer of hope in Büchner’s deep darkness.
Mai 2023, Theater Aachen