Wozzeck: The Perfect Opera Movie

Okay, let's talk about Wozzeck and video (Berg's opera, not the play or its other adaptations). In the category of as good as it gets, allow me to put in a plug for a unique Wozzeck, which just may be the finest treatment of an opera committed to film:  Rolf Liebermann’s 1970 Wozzeck made for German television.  

Yes, ideally Wozzeck (and pretty much every other opera) is best experienced in the house, where its 3-dimensional brutality packs a visceral punch, Liebermann has populated his film with true singing actors (or vice versa) who live, breathe and become these characters down to their very marrow.  For this director, there is no separation of the music from its drama, nor any from its characters,not of the scenery or indeed, of any element of it whatsoever. Liebermann presents us with something truly extraordinary . . . as close to a complete embracing of the gesamtkunstwerk ideology as exists in film.  

Musically it’s in equally find hands in an almost outsized reading of Berg's score by the Hamburg Opera foces, led by Bruno Maderna. While clearly not film score music, Maderna matches Liebermann's vision through sound in a perfect wedding of both.  

Instead of a studio soundstage, Liebermann takes his cast and places them in and around an abandoned, ancient German castle or fortress (take your pick). It's yet another stroke of genius in creating a world both familiar and alien, and it works magnificently. 

Marie is performed by one of the most graceful interpreters of Strauss and Mozart of all time; Sena Jurinac.  Jurinac's Marie is sung with uncommon lusciousness and beauty of voice, which brought to mind the beautiful sounds of Eileen Farrell in the legendary Columbia recording with Mack Harrell, and Mitropoulos.  Jurinac takes the palm, however, both in musicianship (spot on) and in her sense of drama.  She looks lovely, and there is an incredible naturalness to her acting that one is actually able to feel her fear, and sense both her weary desperation and strained hope as she sings to her child. Jurinac lends a real you and me against the world  quality that, for my money has been matched only by Hildegard Behrens' take on the role .

With a perfect everyman hangdog quality about him, Toni Blankenheim quite simply is Wozzeck.  Through his interactions and reactions to the horrifying world around him and those in it, Blankenheim reveals a man whose pitiable sense of aloneness and repression feels like an open apology to the universe for his very existence.  He is a perfect Wozzeck and his is a performance both harrowing and heartbreaking. 

Liebermann  ingeniously uses Berg’s magnificent interludes as intended . . . stitching the entirety of the tale together, yet also bringing to its severe linear structure, something rather intangible but entirely profound (in the best sense). We become aware of art and beauty in an otherwise artless world. How they fit here with Maderna's pacing of the interludes provide us with moments to reflect on all we’ve just heard and seen, as its propulsive quality rushes, hurtling us forward to the inexorable, tragic conclusion.

I can’t think of a better made operatic film, nor one that offers the abundance of rewards as does this Wozzeck.  For those of us who enjoy filmed opera, it truly doesn’t come much better than this. And for those of you who don’t love it, well you just might be surprised by this one.