Poor Wozzeck. The guy can't catch a break. Hopelessly alienated male protagonists driven to violence may be ten a penny in opera. But Wozzeck seems to have drawn the shortest straw of them all. Abused ...

Alban Berg’s bleak opera “Wozzeck” might not seem suited to the holiday season. One of the least cheerful pieces in the repertory, it tells the story of an impoverished and increasingly delusional ...

Alban Berg realized that he and his mentor Arnold Schonberg were in the process of revolutionizing music, and so, when he came to write “Wozzeck,” he clung steadfastly to the late 19th-century ...

Manhattan’s Victorian, red-and-gilt Metropolitan Opera House was transformed one night last week into a nightmarish, shriekingly demented world of sight and sound. The occasion: the Met’s long overdue ...

Philadelphia has stolen an operatic march on Manhattan. While the Metropolitan was lavishing its resources last week on the revival of Pietro Mascagni’s sleazy Iris (Soprano Elisabeth Rethberg, Tenor ...

With all of its melodrama and bellicosity, opera has always been a tough nut for avant-garde composers to crack. The very nature of opera demands a certain traditionalism that requires composers to ...

Wozzeck sees red: the red moon; a bloody knife; flames in the sky. Zurich Opera’s production, directed by Andreas Homoki, is washed in radiation-yellow, a sickly glow evoked by lighting designer ...