Fare for the Common Man

Wozzeck strikes a chord in our Great Recession.

by A.D. Amorosi

Mark Stehle LAY OF THE LAND: Shuler Hensley (foreground) had been away from the opera world for 15 years before tackling the leading role in Wozzeck.

Plain and simple, Wozzeck is Austrian composer Alban Berg's abstract masterpiece, a subdued vocal epic whose elegant, grim atonality signaled the avant-garde's entrance into the staid traditionalism of classical opera.

"Plain and simple" is a very big part of this 20th-century marvel. For all of Wozzeck's puzzle-like complexity, dissonant bends and character-driven leitmotifs, Berg's ingenuous melodies (or lack thereof) are freeing for its singers — their atonal flow acts as a portal through which the drama easily unfurls. As horrible as the story is, Wozzeck becomes almost conversational in its ease. Its storyline, too, deals vividly with a simple concept: a poor working class struggling to get by. There's rampant poverty and unemployment, infidelity, dead mothers, orphaned babies, money and murder afoot throughout this chilling opera based on Georg Büchner's 1914 play Woyzeck. That's a fanfare for the common man.

Could Curtis Institute of Music's Opera Theatre — which'll enact Wozzeck as a co-op venture with the Opera Co. of Philadelphia and the Kimmel Center — have known of the blank stock portfolios we'd be facing when it planned to make a production of Berg's subject matter, the inevitability of hardship and exploitation of the poor? "As much as we would like to think we are prescient," laughs Mikael Eliasen, artistic director of vocal studies at Curtis, "it was purely accidental."

What wasn't accidental was Curtis' choice of Berg, a dynamic composer who took the new language of the 20th century — the atonal system — and, in Eliasen's words, "fused it together with romanticism and a great, powerful lyricism." Also no accident was the choice of Wozzeck's leading man, class of '93 Curtis alum Shuler Hensley, who took his starring status at Curtis (in Don Giovanni's title role) to spins on film and television (Van Helsing, Law & Order: SVU) and on Broadway (Oklahoma! and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein). In Wozzeck, Hensley's darkly cavernous baritone flies freely across Berg's fleeting melodies and poverty-stricken soliloquies.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

"I think you're absolutely correct that there's freedom to be found in this," notes Hensley at my mention of the open-note abstraction of Berg's composition. Hensley wasn't readily familiar with Berg's wild opera going into rehearsals, but as he went further and tested his own strengths, he found something more adventurous than anything he imagined. "Every day there is something within the score that pops up," Hensley says. "The freedom is that since there is no true melodic line and no grand aria that people can wait for, it's kinda liberating." Thus, Hensley is freer to nail the drama of the story. "Plus, there're no worries about the audience going, 'Yeah, that E flat was flat.'"

"I woke up one day and realized that Hensley would be perfect" for the role of Wozzeck, says Eliason. "Although he hadn't been singing opera very much for the past 15 years, when I saw him do Oklahoma! his portrayal of Jud made me think he was the person to do it." When the two met, Eliasen told Hensley it would be but a hop, skip and a jump from Broadway back to the grandeur of opera. "Now we've both decided it's really more than a hop and a skip," Eliasen jokes.

But muscles have memory. And for Hensley, the leap back to opera after being away so long was surprisingly easy. "Each day it's getting better in regard to the sheer strength it takes to do this," says Hensley. "And yes, I did get my chops back quicker than I thought."

From Wozzeck's powerful leitmotifs to the insistent, simple melodic lines that repeat when the plight of the poor weighs heavy and cold, Berg's atonal masterpiece can be likened, says Hensley, to the most puzzling of games. "I'm a crossword puzzle fiend and this just reminds me of the Sunday New York Times crossword," he says. "It's incredibly challenging but there's a theme, and if you can get through enough of it, it's a joy to complete."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Wozzeck | Fri., March 13, 8 p.m.; Sun., March 15, 2:30 p.m.; Wed., March 18, 7:30 p.m.; $40-$130, Kimmel Center, 300 S. Broad St., 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org.