Wozzeck - Opera - Season 16/17 Programming

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Wozzeck

Opéra Bastille - from 24 April to 15 May 2017

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Wozzeck

Opera Alban Berg

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Opéra Bastille - from 24 April to 15 May 2017

1h45 no interval

About

In few words:

"Our kind don’t get a chance in this world or the next. If we go to heaven, they’ll put us to work on the thunder!"
Georg Büchner, Woyzeck

Alban Berg discovered Büchner’s Woyzeck in 1914. Highly impressed, he began work adapting the play with a view to writing an opera. The work had its premiere in Berlin in 1925 after a legendary number of rehearsals –137– and quickly earned its reputation as a masterpiece of 20th century music. Separated and fragmented, the scenes combine in a series of tableaux to tell the story of Wozzeck, an ordinary soldier whose only solace is the love of his companion Marie. However, the latter’s fidelity is not unfailing and Wozzeck is haunted by torment. His officers and comrades in arms do little to improve the situation. The omnipresent tension in this profoundly romantic work unifies the fifteen scenes with their complex tonalities alternating between Verist notes and the force of ritualised actions. The interplay of musical citations and the balance between tonality and atonality underline a disquietingly authentic portrait of humanity where drama attains the status of myth. The work entered the Paris Opera’s repertoire relatively late in 1963. Christoph Marthaler’s production provides an atmosphere of contemporaneity strongly accentuated by the choice of a single set, where the men’s despair is submerged in Berg’s dearly sought-after sobriety.

Wozzeck

Opera in three acts (1925)

After Georg Büchner, Woyzeck
In German

Music :

Alban Berg

Libretto :

Alban Berg

Conductor :

Michael Schønwandt

Director :

Christoph Marthaler

Co-stage director :

Joachim Rathke

Set design :

Anna Viebrock

Costume design :

Anna Viebrock

Lighting design :

Olaf Winter

Dramaturgy :

Malte Ubenauf

Chorus master :

Alessandro Di Stefano
Orchestre et Choeurs de l’Opéra national de Paris

Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine / Choeur d’enfants de l’Opéra national de Paris
Wozzeck :

Johannes Martin Kränzle

Tambour-Major :

Štefan Margita

Andrès :

Nicky Spence

Hauptmann :

Stephan Rügamer

Doktor :

Kurt Rydl

Erster Handwerksbursch :

Mikhail Timoshenko

Zweiter Handwerksbursch :

Tomasz Kumiega

Der Narr :

Rodolphe Briand

Marie :

Gun-Brit Barkmin

Margret :

Eve-Maud Hubeaux

Ein Soldat :

Fernando Velasquez