An opera in three acts, music and libretto by Alban Berg after the play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1836). First performed at the Berlin State Opera on 14 December 1925. This current version is a co-production between the Salzburg Festival; Opera Australia; the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and the Canadian Opera Company, Toronto.
There is a long history of involvement by modernist painters and sculptors in opera and ballet across the North Atlantic cultural arc. Well-known examples are Léon Bakst’s and Pablo Picasso’s work for the Ballets Russes;1 David Hockney’s work with numerous opera companies;2 and Sydney Nolan’s work for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (UK) and Opera Australia.3 Less well-known are recent projects for diverse operatic companies by artists such as Jannis Kounellis (Greece), Robert Wilson (USA), Zhang Huan (China), Olafur Eliasson (Iceland), Anish Kapoor (India/UK), Anselm Kiefer (Germany); and Guillermo Kuitca (Argentina).4 One might also describe the immersive, multisensory, interactive environments created by collectives such as teamLab (Japan) as operatic, in the sense that they approximate the gesamtkunstwerk(total work of art) imagined by German composer Richard Wagner (following philosopher K.S.E Trahndorff) in the nineteenth century. We should also not forget the work of Australian artist Justene Williams, especially her one-off collaboration with the Sydney Chamber Orchestra at the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), which recreated (with a new score by Huw Belling) the futurist Russian opera Victory Over the Sun(1913), for which painter Kazimir Malevich designed the original sets and costumes.
Despite these examples, the rarefied world of opera has seen very few visual artists become acclaimed operatic or theatre directors in the way that South African artist William Kentridge has, while maintaining his
Michael Honeyman as Wozzeck and ensemble in Opera Australia’s 2019 production of Wozzeck at the Sydney Opera House. Director William Kentridge. Photograph Keith Saunders.
