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Wozzeck

Feb. 18, 2020, 7:30 p.m.

Opernhaus Zürich
Falkenstrasse 1
8008 Zürich

«Radical, oppressive and profound» was Zurich’s Tages-Anzeiger newspaper’s verdict of Andreas Homoki’s production of Wozzeck. The director did not stage a painful drama of social compassion, but rather a grotesque piece that is full of wicked humour. Like puppets, at the mercy of an inscrutable fate, his figures move on the sophisticated proscenium stage designed by Michael Levine. For the revival of this successful 2015/16 production, we have again been able to engage the exceptional singer Christian Gerhaher, who débuted in Zurich at the première as Wozzeck and was voted as Singer of the Year by the magazine Opernwelt for this character portrait. The première cast also included Gun-Brit Barkmin as Marie and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as the captain, who will again be on stage. Hartmut Haenchen, who was voted Conductor of the Year for his interpretation of Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival in 2017, will introduce himself at the rostrum of the Philharmonia Zurich for the first time.

The soldier Wozzeck flits through a world that he is unable to decipher. He is humiliated and ridiculed by the captain; the doctor torments him with absurd medical experiments. And his lover, Marie, with whom he has a child, cuckolds him with the drum major. Wozzeck becomes a murderer, stabbing Marie to death. Premièred in 1925, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is an ideal interpretation of Georg Büchner’s stark drama, written a century earlier. Berg’s freely atonal score is stringently structured, yet simultaneously bears witness to the composer’s pronounced instinct for the theatre. With his first opera, Berg created a seminal work of modernism and one of the most significant contributions to operatic history.

[Text by Opernhaus Zurich]

https://www.opernhaus.ch/en/spielplan/calendar/wozzeck/2019-2020/

Kulturstelle contact: Alexander Fink email

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