James Levine To Conduct Alban Berg’s Wozzeck 4/6

Met Music Director James Levine will lead Alban Berg's Wozzeck in a four-performance revival opening April 6. American baritone Alan Held will sing the title role, a character besieged by the evils of society and eventually driven to murder. German mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier will make her Met role debut as Marie, the woman whose infidelity fuels Wozzeck's violent rage. Singing the roles of Wozzeck's tormentors, Stuart Skelton will make his Met debut as the lecherous Drum Major, opposite Gerhard Siegel as the Captain and Walter Fink as the Doctor. The opera will be seen in Mark Lamos's 1997 production.

Levine has conducted Wozzeck often at the Met; since 1974, he has led 39 performances of the opera. Held made his Met debut in a 1989 Billy Budd and has gone on to sing nearly 200 performances with the company, most recently appearing as the Four Villains in the 2009 new production premiere of Les Contes d'Hoffmann. He sang the title role of Wozzeck in a 2005-06 Met revival of the opera, also conducted by Levine. Meier has earned an international reputation as a singing actress in roles like Kundry in Parsifal, Sieglinde in Die Walküre, Isolde in Tristan und Isolde, and Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana. She has performed the role of Marie at other opera houses, including the Berlin State Opera for a 1994 production that was recorded for commercial release, but this will be her first time singing in Wozzeck at the Met.
Mark Lamos's production features sets and costumes by Robert Israel and lighting by James F. Ingalls.

Live Broadcasts Around the World

Wozzeck will be experienced by millions of people around the world this season on the radio and on the internet, through distribution platforms the Met has established with various media partners.

The April 6 opening performance will be broadcast live on Metropolitan Opera Radio on SIRIUS channel 78 and XM channel 79, as will the April 16 performance.

The April 6 performance will also be available via internet streaming at the Met's web site www.metopera.org. The April 16 matinee will be broadcast live over the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network.