Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, written in 1836, is one of theatre’s great elliptical masterworks. The action, which unfolds over the course of numerous isolated episodes – Büchner died before arranging them into a definitive structure – delineates its characters and plot in a way that is arrestingly free of judgment or interpretation, leaving both the nature and causes of Woyzeck’s madness for the audience to decide. Less than a century later, the beautiful imprecision of Büchner’s drama would find its ideal musical form in the harmonic explorations of Alban Berg, whose adaptation remains one of the great achievements of twentieth-century opera.
Sir David McVicar’s meticulous, and somewhat imposing new production, which opened at Chicago’s Lyric Opera this November, has replaced the implied ellipses in Berg’s musical drama with a series of…
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