Bad Taste Is Timeless

Martin Bernheimer’s pointed and accurate review of the “non-Wozzeck” production seen (heard?) at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera underlines the bad taste of our time (“Music Center Ventures a Too-Surreal ‘Wozzeck,’ ” Dec. 3).

The travesty inflicted upon Berg’s masterpiece--one of the great pinnacles of 20th-Century artistic expression--by the two Davids (Alden-Fielding) would be punished by ostracism in ancient Greece, by ex-communication in Christian times, by death by purifying fire at the equator of the Inquisition, by substantial fines in the Victorian epoch, by the throwing of eggs in the Parisian “belle epoque ,” or by perennial laugh in connoisseur land.

The only hero of the evening at the “non-Wozzeck” was Simon Rattle. How he made Berg’s glorious score shimmer and glow in the midst of the tawdry carnival was a touching miracle.

The LAMC Opera should refund the money to those who went to see an epochal “Wozzeck” and instead witnessed a boorish, nondescript, spurious theatrical concoction underlined with what amounted to be Berg’s pirated music.

AURELIO DE LA VEGA

Northridge