Wozzeck

Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco, California

One could easily make the case for Wozzeck as the first acknowledged masterpiece of 20th Century opera, a point of demarcation sandwiched between two World Wars, that embodies as much an abandonment of the Romanticism and verismo style that characterized opera in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as any heralding in of a new aesthetic, an aesthetic of gritty realism and social commentary that emerged in the 1920s, the frailties of the human condition confronted by the cruelties of an increasingly mechanized society—futurism turned on its head.

John Duykers as the Captain and Bojan Knezevic as Wozzeck; photo by Steve DiBartolomeo, courtesy of Ensemble Parallèle.