Word: berge
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Alban Berg died 17 years ago, but no U.S. opera company has yet found the means or the courage to mount his second opera. So Lulu, an even bloodier yarn than Berg's Wozzeck, is having its American premiere in the latest fashion this week-on records...
...Berg worked out the libretto of Lulu from two plays by the German actor-writer Frank Wedekind. It is a thing of violence and sensuality, set out in the glares and black shadows of fin de siecle romanticism. Singing in clipped, high-tension German, lustful Lulu causes one violent death after another among her helpless lovers. Then the pace slackens and she moves sonorously toward her own destruction hy Jack the Ripper...
Uphill Fight. I.S.C.M. did that, and more. In its annual festivals, it helped spread the news (and the international reputations) of such men as Twelve-Ton-ists Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, France's Darius Milbaud and Olivier Messiaen, Italy's Luigi Dallapiccola, the U.S.'s Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland...
...Symphony and Soprano Dorothy Dow to record it. Erwartung's one-act story is somber, not to say macabre: a woman sings her innermost thoughts as she goes to a woodland tryst, stumbles over the dead body of her lover. The score sounds something like that of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, it is introverted and complex, but it succeeds in expressing terror and, surprisingly, tenderness. Soprano Dow, who comes from Texas, may not have so much Weltschmerz in her polished voice as Schoenberg had in mind, but she sings with great accuracy and lyrical ease. The orchestral part...
...Composer Berg's white-haired widow Helene sat in La Scala's royal box, approved : "Everything was right." Said Milan's Il Popolo: "This performance will remain in La Scala's history...