Word: berge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Here again Chéreau's treatment, often strikingly effective in its own terms, followed Berg's structure erratically. He identified two of Lulu's customers with her former lovers but not the third. Where Berg set Lulu's grisly end in an attic, Chéreau was led by his monumental staging scheme to place it in what looked like an abandoned subway station...
Previous productions broke off after Lulu, imprisoned for murdering Schon, escapes and takes up a fugitive life with Schon's son and other admirers. The third act reveals that Berg rounded off the story with telling symmetry. Lulu descends through a succession of men and social strata that mirror those she rose through in the first two acts. Accordingly, Berg's music for her decline is shot through with echoes, correspondences and recapitulations of earlier moments. When Lulu is reduced to streetwalking in London, Berg called for her three clients to be played by the same singers...
...other composers about finishing the third act had ended inconclusively. Opera managers vied for the chance to present the first complete performance; Liebermann made his first bid in 1950, when he was musical director of Radio Zurich. But they literally did not have a ghost of a chance. Berg's widow and musical executrix, Helene, claimed that her husband's spirit made nocturnal visitations to her in which he opposed completion. (Berg scholars have recently suggested another motive: resentment by Berg's widow of an autumnal love affair that may have partly inspired Lulu...
Early in the 1960s Berg's publishers, Universal Edition in Vienna, quietly commissioned Cerha to proceed with the orchestration anyway. After Helene Berg's death at 92 in 1976, a genteel scramble ensued. Liebermann had a secret advantage in Boulez, long the publishers' first choice to conduct the premiere...
Boulez's view of Lulu is close to Stravinsky's. "As Mahler did for the symphony, Berg simultaneously amplified and destroyed the traditional outline," Boulez says. "Today the relationship between music and theater requires different conditions, for which Berg set the precedent...