Cheers for Bland Perfection

There was thunderous applause and foot-stamping on the wooden floor of the Salzburg Festival’s largest opera house Monday night. Such ovations for cast and conductor are not uncommon here, and performances are regularly worthy of them.

Booing is equally the norm for directors. The Salzburg Festival began radicalizing its productions five years ago when Gerard Mortier became the artistic director of the festival and took it out of Herbert von Karajan’s shadow. The first-night audiences, heavily composed of Old World Viennese society, have been slow to follow. But in the case of the new “Wozzeck” Monday, there were only cheers.

Now you might say that that was because the director, Peter Stein, did not appear for a curtain call. But I seriously doubt that Stein would have been a target for rotten tomatoes even if he had. He is one of Germany’s most respected theater directors, and he also runs the theater segment of the Salzburg Festival (there are four plays this year, including an English-language “Othello” directed by Sam Mendes and the traditional outdoor presentation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman”).

Stein is not easily enticed into opera. It takes a special circumstance, like a collaboration with Pierre Boulez. Examples are their lucid and luminous production of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande,” available on Deutsche Grammophon video, and their magnificent version of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” given here last year.

The “Wozzeck” is a highly polished affair. The musical performance is accomplished. Claudio Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic are in the pit, and Alban Berg’s score is handled with great care. The cast contains no big-name singers (Bryn Terfel was to have used the occasion for his first Wozzeck, but the popular Welsh baritone didn’t find time to learn the role). Not that Stein is a star-singer director anyway; he is known for his attention to ensemble work.

But “Wozzeck” needs heat, plenty of it. Based on a 19th century fragment by Georg Buchner, Berg’s 1925 opera follows the latest news in psychology out of Vienna as it traces the inevitable road toward breakdown and homicide of the quintessential Everyman who can’t cope: nasty job (lowly soldier), poverty, unfaithful mate (unmarried mother of his child).

Berg’s innovation was to frame the drama as 15 scenes, each following a different musical form (such as passacaglia or variations). The vocal lines, however, are free and a compendium of expressionistic devices. Thus there never can be, in this opera, a resolution of tension between the individual and structured society. Germany and Austria were in chaos at the time, and the seeds of fascism were being sown.

Stein’s production begins with Wozzeck (Albert Dohmen) already half-crazed, with nowhere to go but down. Each scene is set in a small illuminated area of a darkened stage, as if each might be a window into Wozzeck’s psyche.

Marie (Angela Denoke) lives in a box that for some reason is outlined in neon from time to time; the field in which Wozzeck has his first freakout is a narrow rectangle at the bottom of the stage; the tavern where Marie becomes flirtatious is on a higher level.

Light is used as an important element, but not with the kind of power with which Stein has used it elsewhere (in “Moses und Aron,” spotlights blind the audience as evidence of an incomprehensible God). Nor do Stein and his set designer, Stefan Mayer, achieve the precision of design in their minimal production that Robert Wilson does in his new “Pelleas et Melisande,” also at the festival this summer.

The real power of the production is left to singers, who are, to a character, note-perfect and dramatically bland, and to the orchestra, which is note-perfect and tonally bland. An Abbado “Wozzeck” with Vienna State Opera put out on Deutsche Grammophon eight years ago (and also on Pioneer video) has more character.

But the playing this time is all smoothness and blend. That can make for an extraordinary moment here and there. The orchestra has a huge unison near the end of the opera. Wozzeck has murdered Marie and then drowned while searching for the knife in a lake. The Vienna Philharmonic plays that unison with a richness that sets the red moon on the stage vibrating.

That, though, was the exception. Rarely was there the sense of sheer power that Simon Rattle achieved when he conducted it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for L.A. Opera or that James Levine now gets from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

“Wozzeck” is a horrifying musical tale and should not be an easy opera to absorb. But in the new Salzburg, where everything is turned upside down, written-off Mozart can have crushing urban energy while “Wozzeck” can prove, at least to some longtime festival goers, comforting.