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Review: “Lulu,” opera by Alban Berg at the Met

Writer's picture: Larry WallachLarry Wallach

Performed at the Metropolitan Opera, May 8, 2010, directed by John Dexter, conducted
by Fabio Luisi; with Marlis Petersen (Lulu), James Morris (Dr. Schön), Anne Sofie von
Otter (Countess Geschwitz), Gary Lehman (Alwa), Gwynne Howell (Schigolch), Michael
Schade (Painter, Negro), Bradley Garvin (Animal Tamer, Acrobat), and others.

“Lulu” is an enigma. It is also one of the greatest operas of the 20th century. Those two observations are not as unrelated as they might appear. The truth of opera is in its musically expressed emotions; the literal stories are inherently ambiguous, open scripts
available to the personalities of singers and directors for interpretation. In opera, emotional conditions are their own reasons for being; causes and explanations take second place. As a result, the ‘meanings’ of operatic plots and characters can be nendlessly redefined. “Lulu” is a particularly active site of contention, pulling into its powerful orbit many of the aesthetic, political, and social controversies that have characterized its time and our own. The emotions embodied in Berg’s extraordinary score rock us back on our heels and at the same time ask us to critically examine ourselves and our responses, ultimately our own identities. In a way that seems almost unfathomable, Berg brings together the antinomial theatrical aesthetics of Wagner and Brecht, and leaves them to fight it out once the final curtain goes down.

No production can reveal all facets of such a work; the director needs to take a stand, to
limit the field of interpretation, to steer the audience in certain directions. In doing so,
it is to be hoped that the production helps the audience hear the score fully, to notice
its musical dramaturgy. Berg was finicky in his concern for this: he described the sets in
detail, precisely notated the rhythms of stage movements, and composed musical
responses to almost every detail of activity in his luxuriously complex score. John
Dexter’s highly serviceable, thirty-year-old production that was revived this spring at the
Met was laudably faithful to the composer’s demands, with one big exception (more
about that later). Jocelyn Herbert’s set and costumes were of the period of the
Wedekind plays on which the opera is based, as required by Berg. The luxurious fin-desiècle
Viennese interiors with draperies, fire-screens, upholstered chairs and rugs,
smoking jackets, etc, the entire bourgeouis apparatus of sensual ease and conspicuous
consumption, were fully on display, and played their important role in the stage action.
There was no attempt made to modernize the representation through expressionist
distortion (as is often found in productions of “Wozzeck”) or modernist abstraction (as
in the excellent DVD from Glyndebourne).

The result was not only a faithful visual rendering of the score, but a lightening of the
mood, particularly in the first half. The atmosphere of drawing-room comedy
encouraged the audience to laugh at the incongruous or even monstrous ways that the
characters responded to each other. Paradoxically, the more realistic the set, the more
the characters’ behavior assumed an incongruous quality. This was abetted by Marlis
Petersen’s highly accomplished realization of the title role. The body-language of her
tall, slender and elegant frame corresponded perfectly to her musical lines, including
some full-body shakes at the moments of Lulu’s freakishly high coloratura outbursts,
making palpable the power she was exerting over those around her. That along with
the transparently lustful and selfish behavior of the men around her and the sudden
violent deaths of two husbands in the first two scenes maintained the atmosphere of
slapstick and cartoon, climaxing in the first scene of the second act in which various of
Lulu’s admirers are sequestered all over the set, only to be discovered by Dr. Schön
moments before he becomes her third dead husband.

James Morris’s stuffy portrayal of Dr. Schön, the powerful rich white male who views
those around him as ornaments to his own importance, was suitably pompous, irritable,
and paradoxically incapable of controlling his own destiny, an ironic descendent of
another of Morris’s well-known portrayals, Wotan. Berg designed his opera around the
two Wedekind dramas by forming the libretto into two symmetrical halves. One way
that Berg dramatized the symmetry was to have three of the male singers take on
double roles, one for each half. Thus Dr. Schön returns at the end as Jack the Ripper,
who murders Lulu, enacting a strange form of revenge. Morris effectively gave both of
his roles the same inflexible, peremptory characterization.

All the other members of the cast displayed easy command over the grueling vocal and
musical demands of this score. The most striking was Anne Sophie von Otter’s Countess
Geschwitz, another of Lulu’s would-be lovers who sacrifices all and destroys herself on
behalf of her idol. In previous productions, this character has been portrayed with a
hint of the grotesque, as if a lesbian were another kind of creature in the menagerie
that is conjured up by the Animal Tamer in the Prologue. But von Otter’s performance
contained no trace of homophobia; she was an elegant and sympathetic figure, as I
believe Berg meant her to be, and she is of crucial importance as the only character who
is uncompromised by the desire to dominate the one she loves. If there is anything
grotesque about her, it is the lengths she will go toward sacrificing herself; and in this
portrayal, our sympathies were with her. It was refreshing to see that Lulu and the
Countess were physically similar, rendering plausible their exchange of clothing as part
of the plot to get Lulu out of prison. This situation is an echo of other clothing
exchanges in opera, notably that of Don Giovanni and Leporello, which works best if the
two characters are similar in size and shape, something not always provided for by the
casting.


The character of Alwa has some clues to Berg’s own position within the story, for Alwa is
in many ways Berg himself. He is a composer, and when contemplating Lulu’s story,
says “That girl and her lovers, they would make a most daring theme for my next work,”
at which point we hear the opening bars of “Wozzeck.” But that does not mean that
Alwa is sympathetic; in fact, it is a rather scathing self-portrait in which the composer gives way to a powerful sense of lust which destroys his life and dishonors both of his parents (Berg fathered an illegitimate child at age 17 and had affairs while married). His solo at the end of Act Two is a parody of the way artists exploit their “real” emotions as
raw material for their works: Alwa feverishly runs his hands all over Lulu and describes the music each part of her body would generate. As staged at the Met, he ended up with his head caught awkwardly between her two bare legs, cutting an appropriately farcical picture. In tenor Gary Lehman, we saw Alwa as a rather conventional figure whose aesthetic sensibilities provide entré to the erotic force that takes over his life. His bourgeois conventionality is confirmed by his enthusiastic participation in the marvelous gambling/investing scene in the beginning of Act Three. Here, the unseemly spectacle/disaster of capitalist greed was exposed and reflected back to the audience by means of a giant mirror at the rear of the set in which the patrons in the best seats of the house could see themselves placed onstage with desperate stock speculators and recreational gamblers, Alwa among them. At the collapse of the stock enterprise, the line “Where has all the money gone?” drew a particularly knowing laugh from the
audience.

It is a measure of Berg’s (and Wedekind’s) success that the large cast of characters
leaves so many strong impressions of personality, especially when they are well
portrayed. For me, the character of Schigolch, as sung by bass Gwynne Howell, was
particularly compelling, probably because of the number of paradoxical traits he
embodies, and the mysteriously pervasive presence he has been in Lulu’s life. Schigolch
at first seems to be an old bum who stops in to see Lulu for a handout. They clearly
have a history; he is the only character to call her “Lulu,” which she acknowledges as her
real name. The other men appropriate her identity by choosing names for her, including
“Mignon,” Dr. Schön’s appellation which relates to his ‘adopting’ her as a pre-teen
whom he ‘found’ on the street selling flowers. Like her namesake in Goethe, this young
girl was exerting an unusual attraction over men and had some unnamed early sexual
experiences. Schigolch behaves in a fatherly or protective way, but we come to realize
that he also has had a sexual relationship with her in the past. (The painter thinks that
her name is “Nelly” and renames her “Eva” in his deluded attempt to cast her as an
innocent.) It has been noticed that the character of Schigolch seems to have semimythic
connections; his motive is low-pitched and chromatic, which traditionally evokes
the image of a serpent. In the prologue, the Animal Tamer had described Lulu as “our
human snake; God created her for evil and for havoc, To snare us and seduce us, to
infect us / And destroy us, never leaving finger prints.”

Schigolch seems to take on the role of this God, facilitating each step of Lulu’s up-anddown
journey with a weird mixture of solicitude, indifference, and exploitation. He is
the one who informs the group of admirers (all of whom want to marry her!) that she
never had a father, to which she replies “Yes, that’s true, I am a miracle.” These clues,
along with her name, point toward Lulu as an avatar of the shadowy figure of Lilith, the
first wife of Adam. The mythical resonances of this character, the multiple roles that
others play, the allegorical prologue, all are somewhat reminiscent of “Finnegan’s
Wake,” with its quotidian here-and-now events echoing through the corridors of time to
various mythic pasts. It is only through the enigmatic quality, the partial illegibility of
events, that these other dimensions are open to us. And this is a quality that Berg
himself intensified many times over with his multi-layered score.

In life and in music, Berg loved secrets, riddles, and puzzles. He left clues about his love
life all over his music but it took more than forty years after his death for scholars to
decode them. Lulu herself is a puzzle. Most of the critical contentiousness swirling
around this opera center on the question of who she really is, and how Berg felt about
her. Even the history of the opera itself fueled controversy; Berg left it incomplete, with
parts (not all) of the third act unorchestrated. After initially seeking help
(unsuccessfully) to complete it posthumously, Berg’s widow Helene reversed herself and
declared the task undoable, locking it away and refusing to let anyone see it. (In 1969
she wrote in her will “…no one [is] allowed to examine the manuscript of Act III of Lulu
nor is anyone to be allowed to study the photocopy in the possession of Universal
Edition.”) Only after her death could its scoring be finished, by Friedrich Cerha. The
final product is seamless with the rest of the opera. The only dissenting voice of
consequence toward the completion of the opera was Robin Holloway who found the
third act disturbing in the distance between the apparent emotions being expressed and
the actual events portrayed. Perhaps that response was based on knowing the opera in
its two-act form long enough to think of it as in some way already complete. But what
was missing was the musical portrait of a long deterioration.

When I saw the two-act version in a production brought by the Hamburg opera to New
York in 1967 as part of the opening year of the new Metropolitan Opera House at
Lincoln Center, the story of the third act was narrated with painted slides while the
extant orchestrated section of the music was performed, taken from the “Lulu
Symphony” which Berg had extracted from the opera before finishing it. Act III portrays
the downfall of Lulu as the reversal of the events of Act I, in which Lulu rises to the
position of the wife of Dr. Schön. Actually, the downfall begins at the moment (end of
Act II, scene 1) when Lulu shoots and kills Dr. Schön. The interlude between that and
the next scene not only represents the transition from the first to the second of
Wedekind’s two plays, it also musically narrates Lulu’s imprisonment and subsequent
escape through the actions of Countess Geschwitz.

The music of this interlude is in forward-and-backward (palindromic) form, correlated to
a very detailed scenario of incarceration and escape. Here is where a disappointment of
the present production lay: Berg called for a three minute silent film to be shown
during this music, but at the Met, we simply sat looking at the red-and-white motley
pattern of the curtain rather than a film. This was probably motivated by practical
considerations—a special film would need to be made using members of the very cast
that was performing, and considering that this was a run of only two performances, the
time and expense of such an undertaking must have been deemed impractical. The
Times’ reviewer Steve Smith felt that the music was explicit enough for the film to be
unnecessary, but the Glyndebourne DVD includes such a film and it is incredibly
effective in enhancing the way the music enacts the speeding up of time, in expressing
the suffering that both Lulu and the Countess experience followed by Lulu’s return to
freedom, and in adding another semi-mythic layer to the signification of the opera, since
movie-watching places the performers and audience alike into new roles: Lulu as movie
star! We as the adoring fans! (Where else would you find our modern Lulus but at the
movies?1) The filmic interruption also enhances the sense that significant time has
passed in that compressed three minutes.

What is so disturbing about Act III is actually characteristic of the whole opera, but it
emerges gradually over the course of the work, registering most clearly toward the end.
We may not notice it during the farcical, cartoonish or shockingly absurd moments, but
it builds up over time: an underlying sense of horror at the predatory and selfaggrandizing
behavior of the characters combined with lush, gorgeous, soaringly
romantic music. This has generated conflicting explanations and commentaries.

But first, a word needs to be said about Berg’s musical language (which is much more
fully described in two books devoted to the opera, by Douglas Jarman and by George
Perle). Berg uses a number of interrelated 12-tone rows from which emanate a complex
family of leitmotives that maintain a running commentary on the action throughout the
opera. But as anyone familiar with Berg’s later music knows, he has a way of sounding
tonal despite his use of the rows. This is because Berg is thinking on several different
layers of musical style simultaneously, one of which is the late-romantic, chromatically
extended tonality with which he started his composing career, as found in his Piano
Sonata, op. 1, or in the interlude before the final scene of Wozzeck which had its origin
in an unpublished piano piece Berg composed while still a student. This “Mahler-esque”
style is programmed into the row material so that there can be stretches of music that
feel ripely tonal, and as a result, emotionally familiar (the adjectives used are often
“ardent” or “soaring”). Actually, the programming of the row and the use of multiple
rows permit the crafting of a wide range of highly individualized motivic materials which
are at least subconsciously recognizable: the “picture motive” of built-up harmonic
fourths is unmistakeable, as are the Acrobat’s piano clusters of black keys alternating
with white keys (still connected to the row material!) illustrating his brutality. All this
flows so naturally that the listener is never distracted by the formidable technical
apparatus just below the surface of the music.

Many commentators believe that in the passages of hyper-romantic music, Berg is
portraying the emergence of Lulu’s true inner self (as in “Lulu’s Song”). But in an article
entitled “Lulu’s Feminine Performance,” Judy Lochhead plausibly proposes that Lulu’s
“soaring” or “rapturous” music is no more a privileged view of Lulu’s unmediated
interiority than any other music in the opera; it is, rather, a conscious performance of (sometimes exaggerated) feminine behavior designed to effect the other characters
(rather than one directly aimed at the audience). It represents Lulu’s attempt to assert
agency in surroundings that have taught her that her only power lies in the ability to
manipulate others, indeed, that her survival depends upon it. As audience we are
tempted to project our own fantasies about the “star” who has super-erotic power, but
the contradictions and horrors of this story ought to make us cautious about indulging
those fantasies. In fact, we are warned several times, first, when the Animal Tamer
concludes his prologue by naming us, the audience, as the most fierce animal of all
between whose jaws he is placing his head; and second, when the off-stage applause for
Lulu’s dancing act is described by Alwa as sounding like zoo animals at feeding time. It is
we, the opera audience, who are being thus described, beasts like those onstage, and
we feed on romantic or erotic illusions fueled by exploitation.
 
1 Lulu did make it into the movies in the form of a G. W. Pabst 1929 film, “Pandora’s Box,” starring the
iconic Louise Brookes. This was the second of the two Wedekind plays, the basis for the second part of
the opera. Brookes is amazing in the role, a kind of cheerful Garbo who seduces the audience with her
unique demeanor as her operatic counterpart does with her hyperactive vocalizing. It is fascinating as
well to compare Pabst’s characterizations of Schön, Alwa, the Countess, Schigolch, and the Acrobat with
those in the opera.
 
As in “Wozzeck” and the Violin Concerto, Berg’s music contains allusions to various
popular styles, including a bourgeois gavotte (newly popular in late 19th century Vienna)
for Schön’s aspirations to respectable marriage, an English waltz for Lulu’s stage
dancing, ragtime, a tango, a “Procurer’s Song” that Wedekind himself composed for the
play, set into the opera by Berg, and English barrel-organ music for the final scene in the
London slums. All these are indicated through a tonally distorting lens that removes the
“culinary” (in the Brechtian sense) or entertainment value that such references provide
in earlier operas. The flow of musical styles, motivic references, and musical indicators
of stage action proceeds seamlessly and often with breath-taking speed, but if you focus
on dialogue and stage action, the orchestral score almost ceases to receive separate
attention, so effectively is it in fulfilling its narrative role. The ensembles are stunning in
their dense complexity but that translates immediately into dramatic tension that can
be almost unbearable without losing clarity. The use of voice is similarly varied, from
speaking through “Sprechstimme” (varieties of half-spoken, half-sung delivery) and
recitative to full-blown lyrical singing; the transitions are again so seamless that each
form of enunciation seems a natural part of the dramatic moment.

All this was conveyed with apparent ease and natural flow by Fabio Luisi, who had
stepped in only weeks before to take over for the ailing James Levine, for whom this
production had been originally designed. Luisi demonstrated thorough familiarity with
the score, maintaining the almost breakneck pacing of events while benefitting from the
superbly rich, balanced, rhythmically alert playing of the Met orchestra. The audience,
which remained attentively absorbed throughout (no walkouts for this German
expressionist music) rewarded the orchestra with a vigorous ovation. But the end was
not the usual paroxysm of operatic star worship that characterizes the lusty cries of
“Bravo,” the bows of divas, and the throwing of flowers. There was too much to think
about, to remember, and to process; the story was not truly over. Issues of meaning
and intention must be pondered by each listener, and the layered richness of the score
must be further plumbed. It is to be hoped that the Metropolitan will not wait long to
bring this work back to its stage; more than some other frequently heard repertory
works, there is a need for audiences to have repeated access to “Lulu.”
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© 2024 by Larry Wallach.

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