Kentridge isn’t the worst sort of contemporary director/designer. He’s not literally rewriting the words and/or music of operas, or altering their scenarios. He’s not what I term an “adversarial” director/designer, i. e., one who critiques the moral and aesthetic assumptions of a work in order to replace them with his own (usually to make it “relevant,” or to bring it into compliance with sanctioned contemporary political views). At least, he doesn’t do this last overtly. I believe he thinks he’s advocating for the works he directs and designs. He simply assigns himself permission to take a foreign artform, in this case opera, and incorporate it whole into the one he’s comfortable working in, which is that of installation. Opera will now live as a bolus in the belly of installation, and follow its rules of digestion. What eventually comes out the other end is what we’ll get, and still call it opera, if we’re polite.

Kentridge’s installation for Wozzeck has two main components, one fixed and one mobile. The fixed component is the set itself (credited to Sabine Theurissen), a big junkpile whose levels, slopes, and niches are made to serve for all the rooms (The Captain’s, Marie’s, the guardhouse), streetscapes, public houses, and natural vistas (the open field with the city in the distance; the path alongside the pond) Berg was so eager to see profiled. The mobile component comprises the lighting, projections, and videos, including animation in the style we recognize from The Nose and Lulu. The set just sat there in a heap, begging to be seen as ingenious, and interesting only for the distracting danger it posed for the performers. The mobile elements, though, were eye-catching. There were two problems with this. The first was that, as the show went along, the images increasingly had to do with WW1, to whose time Kentridge had updated the story. I have no doubt that though, as Bergian scholars have established, the composer’s harmonic and structural language was already in place before the conflict, the music he wrote during and (mostly) after it is to some extent different than it would have been if completed earlier. But Wozzeck has almost nothing to do with war. Wozzeck, Andres, The Captain, and the Majordomo are posted to a peacetime garrison, and the horrors shown are not those of war or terrorism, but of the characters’ day-to-day lives—that’s the point.

The second, more fundamental problem was that while attention—the selection we make from the sensory input we receive—can sometimes give us an eye/ear simultaneity of great impact (opera depends on that happening with some frequency), for most of a given duration, one sense will be in the foreground and the other on background. When the eye is caught, and led on by constant movement, constant changes of level, constant actions and appeals for interpretation, the ear loses the battle for attention. In this opera, whose story is clear and simple but whose musical telling is complex and strange, the eye component (as Berg knew) needs to be quickly established and uncomplicated, requiring no interpretation, so that the ear has a hope of tracking the chain of audible micro-events, and of registering their cumulative force.