WOZZECK

The audience is struck by an act of continuity in violence, continuity in division and continuity in vision: with all that lies behind the dream, as if the pit of the mind had opened up.

Pierre Jean Jouve and Michel Fano, Wozzeck d’Alban Berg (1964)

Wozzeck is a typical example of the poor humanity of modern times: a brave soldier, scapegoat of a whole social system, who kills his mistress out of jealousy and then commits suicide. The Romantic playwright Büchner painted this vivid portrait in the early days of industrialisation: a relentless movement of objectification of beings that culminates in the mass grave of the First World War – of which Berg's opera is, in its own way, the posttraumatic echo, as much as it prophesies the world to come. For his third time at the Festival, Simon McBurney captures Wozzeck’s last minute, the moment when he drowns, and makes it a spectacular externalisation of his tormented psyche, as well as a grotesque recollection of his obsessions. Sir Simon Rattle will conduct the London Symphony Orchestra and a first-rate cast; Christian Gerhaher brings all his Liedersänger skills
in a subtle and heart-rending incarnation of the title role as a myth of our time.