Berg Wozzeck ~ Dale Duesing (Wozzeck); Ronald Hamilton (Drum Major); Barry Banks (Andres); Dieter Bundschuh (Captain); Frode Olsen (Doctor); Kristine Ciesinski (Marie); soloists, Frankfurter Museumorchester, Choir and Children's Choir of the Frankfurter Oper; Sylvain Camberling, conductor; Peter Mussbach, director ~ Kultur D2915.

On the way to see Opera Lyra's Madama Butterfly last month, I remarked to my wife that I was happy we were going to see something "light and cheerful." She gave me a funny look, as you might imagine, but that was only because she hadn't spent the afternoon,watching Wozzeck.

Madama Butterfly tells one of the most crunchingly sad stories in Western art, but it is somehow a "nice" opera with all its fine tunes and dramatic symmetries. Wozzeck is not a nice opera. It's hard to think of another work with any kind of presence in the standard repertoire that is quite as nasty. And yet it is undoubtedly a masterwork, an opera of unparalleled power and concise musical expression, and therefore especially hard to take.

Briefly, the story portrays a soldier of unsound mind whose only pleasure is his girlfriend, Marie. He supports their child and her with the pittance he earns as a soldier, supplemented by small sums he receives for submitting to medical experiments.

Wozzeck's captain and the doctor are exceedingly grotesque characters, products of some expressionistic nightmare. Marie is not the most faithful of girlfriends and when the captain and doctor taunt him by revealing her doings with a certain drum major, Wozzeck becomes increasingly unhinged. He cuts her throat, albeit lovingly, makes an effort to resume his life but ends up drowning himself. The opera ends with his son, oblivious to what has happened, playing on a rocking horse.

There's a bit more to it than that, naturally, but nothing to lighten the tone. The brazenly weird staging in this production makes it that much more of a nightmare. It is hard not to admire the genius of the work and the effectiveness of seeing it on a DVD, but it is even harder to come away not feeling deeply shaken.

Dale Duesing, a bit of a John Malkovich look-alike, portrays Wozzeck sympathetically. The fact that he is the only character with whom an audience can even partly identify makes such a portrayal essential, and Duesing pulls it off magnificently. Most of the other characters are costumed and rendered so broadly that they exist entirely outside of waking reality, though Kristine Ciesinski's Marie has a kind of sordid grace about her.

As someone who has heretofore only known Wozzeck from sound recordings, I was particularly struck with how difficult it must be for singers in a full production to memorize their complex, pointillistic and atonal parts. It gives me nightmares just imagining having to learn it.