
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.
