William Kentridge Untitled (Drawing from Wozzeck 3), 2016 Charcoal and red pencil on Velin Arches Cover White (440gsm) Work: 121 x 160 cm
Kentridge was invited by the Salzburger Festspiele to be the creative director of a new production of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck which premiered in Salzburg in the summer of 2017. He produced a number of charcoal drawings that were used as projected backdrops in the critically acclaimed production.
Kentridge chose to set the opera, based on the 1837 Buchner play of the same title, at the time of "The Great War" in Europe, as he found the play “a premonition of the war to come”. The aesthetic of this production is characterised by bleak landscapes, denuded of their trees and scarred by shell craters. Kentridge was inspired by documentary photographs, which depict the ravaged battlefields of Flanders. He explains that the opera had “to meet a material for it to take fire - with Wozzeck, it’s the roughness of charcoal drawing. So all of the projections are made out of charcoal drawings and there’s something in the graininess of the drawing itself that echoes both with the music, obviously, but also with the world that it’s depicting – of things transforming, of sounds under the earth.” Since the Salzburg premiere, the opera has been performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2019 and will next be seen at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and Toronto, thereafter.
