WOZZECK Q&A: William Kentridge

This season’s stunning original production of Berg’s Wozzeck is the brainchild of South African multidisciplinary artist William Kentridge, who recently took the time to answer a few of our burning questions about the creative process behind staging this landmark of 20th-century music.

COC: As an interdisciplinary visual artist with training in mime and drama, what is it that attracts you to opera as a creative medium?

Kentridge: As a director, I think of it in two ways: you can think you’re the person who’s been employed to look after one particular aspect of the production, directing how the actors move on stage and what their relationship is to the music—like a hired hand.

Or, you can look at it the way I do, which is to say, as a visual artist: the opera company comes and says, “Here, we’ll give you a canvas which is 17 metres wide and nine metres high. And, not only that: we’ll give you a depth of 10 metres on which you can make a drawing over 90 minutes. But, not only that: we’ll give you some of the great music composed in the last century and a half and, with that, we’ll give you 20 of the world’s top singers for you to put into your drawing. In addition to this, we’ll give you the resources to clothe them, to change the lights, to work with it.” So, you’ve got all the conditions you need and the time—a year and a half—to make this 90-minute drawing in four dimensions, in height, width, depth, and duration. And, so, this is I suppose the thing that attracts me to the medium as well as being seduced so strongly by, primarily, the music and secondarily, by the themes within the music.

COC: What attracts you creatively to lesser-known operas like Shostakovich’s The Nose, Berg’s Lulu and, particularly, the story of Wozzeck?

Kentridge: There always needs to be two things for a project to happen: there needs to be an impulse, a story, a theme that is broader than the studio, broader than the libretto itself; and some medium, some material in the studio with which to think about this theme. With Wozzeck, it was a kind of charcoal animation and the question of the desperation of the poor—the violence bred of desperation, I suppose, would be the theme of the opera. When [Alban] Berg wrote the music, it was about soldiers in the First World War. And, for me, it was saying this transposes to questions of violence bred out of desperation in South Africa during the 1990’s up until now.

When I first did Wozzeck, it was not as an opera but as a theatre production with the Handspring Puppet Company, 32 years ago. And it was always an idea that the music in the Berg was so remarkable. In the first theatre production, we only used the extraordinary chord that occurs after the stabbing of Marie but I always knew the opera was there. With an opera like The Nose, it’s about proclaiming the category of the absurd as a legitimate way of understanding the world. And with Lulu, it was about the illusive and fragmentary nature of desire. So, Lulu was made with black ink drawings that could be shattered and reconfigured, against the unstable object of desire.

COC: In your docuseries Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, you and some of the Wozzeck creative team (Luc De Wit, Sabine Theunissen, Greta Goiris) are seen creating an unusual play about the Stalin-era politburo involving oversized masks and dancing. What is it like building a unique production from scratch with such a daring set of collaborators who gravitate to such experimentation?

Kentridge: It is the same team for Wozzeck: the costume, the set, Luc as Assistant Director, Greta Goiris as Costume Designer, Urs Schönebaum as Lighting Designer, and an overlap of video editors working on it. It has all to do with people who are prepared to tolerate a big degree of uncertainty and doubt rather than knowing in advance how something should turn out and relying on a practical epistemology: watching it emerge in front of our eyes and seeing what we recognize and what feels right.

Oh to Believe in Another World was a film made to accompany a live performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which was about Shostakovich and Stalin and the whole question of artists during the Soviet era. One of the pleasures of that project was that we built models much the same way we built the model of a theatre set… [but] we could actually film in our 30 centimetre-high model and, when it was projected, it became the scale of a theatre. So, we didn’t have to rebuild it: we could do everything in cardboard.

COC: Among all the visual elements playing out onstage in real-time with the orchestra, how integral are the video projections to this production?

Kentridge: I think in all the theatre productions that I’ve done since the early 1990s, the video has been a vital part. This production is seen as a kind of premonition of the First World War, so it has images from the First World War: blasted Flanders landscape, destroyed towns. Sometimes it’s literally a set, and sometimes it’s much more what’s in peoples’ heads, what their thoughts are, a sideways look at what’s being performed on stage.

All opera is about excess: there’s too much to take in at a time. You know, you have the text of the libretto, you’ve got the performers on stage, you’ve got the scenery, you’ve got the orchestra, the conductor, music—you could focus on any one of them but you have someone in your head to choose which you’re putting together and how. The projections add yet one more layer. It means that your brain unconsciously is always constructing a possible view of that performance from different elements, which get foregrounded or pushed to the side or made completely invisible.

COC: What was your motivation for moving the opera's action from the 19th to the 20th century?

Kentridge: Well, there are always many times [to consider] in opera: you have the time in which the libretto was written, the 1830s; the time the opera was composed, 1918-1922, I think; you’ve got the period in which the opera production is made, 2017; and the time in which it is set. In our case, we set that at the same time as when the opera was written—the period of the First World War. When you watch it, you’re always aware of these very different timescales: you’re aware of yourself sitting in the theatre in 2025, you may be vaguely aware that this was made in seven or eight years before, you’re certainly aware of the First World War in 1918, you know from reading your program that the play was written 80 years before that. So, one always has this mixture of times in which you’re doing it.

For me, the question of the absurd and the violence in Wozzeck also resonates with the madness of the First World War. In this case, the documentary novel by Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, which is the great book about the First World War, was a kind of starting point for thinking about setting it in this period.

COC: You’ve said “One has to think, what is the violence in Wozzeck that takes him into the state in which he would kill that which he loves most: Marie? So long before he kills Marie, there is part of him that knows the way it is going to end.” Can you speak to the sense of inevitability in this opera (we can tell from the start that things are only going to get worse), and how you handle that?

Kentridge: Opera is different from movies, from other things, in that by and large the audience is going to come in knowing how an opera is going to end—one goes to one’s 25th version of The Marriage of Figaro, and there are no spoiler alerts; they’ve all been spoiled by your previous watchings, you know exactly what’s going to happen. In the same way here, there will be relatively few people who come into Wozzeck, which has been performed so often in the 100 years since it was written, that you kind of know. You know how Macbeth will end, you know how King Lear will end. It’s a different kind of watching the playing out of the inevitability: whether it’s inevitable that Wozzeck is going to kill Marie is not the same as the inevitability that the opera will end with her death and his death and one watches as the forces are yet again going into this disastrous conclusion.

So, the pleasure has to be in how we get there rather than by the surprise of an ending. There are some versions of Orfeo ed Euridice where she doesn’t look back or she chooses to not even walk up the hill with him. But these are all sort of cheap versions of what it is to be retelling that story. So, I guess it’s how well the singers perform; how intrigued the audience is by the combination of singing, text, and projection; how held they are by the story as it unfolds. I mean, it’s one of the great theatre scripts and opera librettos because the libretto is directly from the script by Büchner, and there’s not a misplaced line in it. So, I think one could also, you know, watch a great version of it simply by putting your fingers in your ears and reading the SURTITLES and doing kind of nothing else. But, obviously, all the layers help, we hope, propel it into its journey.

COC: Much of your work focuses on social injustice and wrestling with complex political legacies. Do you feel the subject matter of Wozzeck allows you to grapple with that here as well?

Kentridge: I don’t grapple with them in the sense I say, “here’s a complex political problem; let me deal with it.” I say, “Here’s an element of the world that intrigues me; let me work on it and see what comes out at the end. What does it seem to suggest?” So, when Wozzeck was done, not once did the question of “What is the political meaning of this? What does it symbolize?” None of those questions arose at all; it was, “Does this landscape work with this piece of music? Is the speed of transformation here off-kilter with Marie’s movement? What is the speed, the extravagance of the movement of the Drum Major on the stage?” And they gather a meaning around it, which is also a political meaning but it’s never a program of politics that has to be followed. The hope is, at the end, one is left, if not with answers, then with intriguing riddles that hover at the edge of an answer.

COC: Is there another opera you would love to produce?

Kentridge: Since doing Wozzeck, we’ve done three operas from the ground up: The Head & the Load, which was about African porters in the First World War and flowed very much from Wozzeck and was made more or less at the same time as Wozzeck. Then there was the chamber opera made for Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Waiting for the Sibyl, which looked at questions of fate and the mobiles of Alexander Calder. And then last year we opened a chamber opera, which is still being performed in different places, called The Great Yes, the Great No, about a ship’s journey from Marseille to Martinique during the Second World War—questions of refugees, of colonialism, of negritude, of [Franz] Fanon and Aimé Césaire. And, I suppose, the best description is that they are operas in the sense that the heart of the text is sung. But the next opera from the Western repertoire that I’m directing is Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which starts off at Glyndebourne in England next summer in July.

COC: Have there been any changes to this production of Wozzeck since its premiere at Salzburg Festival in 2017?

Kentridge: Always after we see a premiere properly and then before its next iteration, there are adjustments to the video and some of the staging. But, by now, it’s pretty close: the video is the same, we haven’t changed the video for this. You know, there are different singers that bring in enormously different emphases to it; it’s not as if there’s one style of conducting, or one tempo, or one psychological interpretation of Wozzeck or Marie that has to travel with the production. And that’s one of the pleasures of seeing it in different cities with different casts and different conductors and different orchestras and different choruses: that it shifts, it changes shape even though the bones are all in the same place.

Photo credits: William Kentridge (photo by: Norbert Miguletz); A scene from Wozzeck at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 (photo by: Ruth Walz); A scene from Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (still from documentary); Drawing for Wozzeck (4), Charcoal and red pencil on Velin Arches Cover White (2016);  Wozzeck workshop, held in January 2017 in William Kentridge's studio in Johannesberg; A scene from 2018's The Head and the Load (photo by: Stephanie Berger)