Word: berge
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three of opera's "great progressivists," Igor Stravinsky once declared, were Gluck, Wagner-and the Viennese modernist Alban Berg. Stravinsky was not being merely provocative. As the years go by, Berg's claim to belong in such illustrious company looks more and more secure. It rests on two complex, powerful works, Wozzeck and Lulu, that in effect brought opera into the 20th century. Lulu, in particular, packed traditional operatic emotion and drama into the most advanced of forms, the twelve-tone system devised by Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg...
Indeed Lulu, the tragedy of a dancer whose almost mythic embodiment of the erotic principle wreaks universal destruction and death, seemed to be the one modern opera that had everything: electrifying theatricality, sex, moral seriousness, virtuoso scoring-everything, that is, except a third act. When he died in 1935, Berg had completed the third act particella, or short score; but he left the orchestration incomplete and the act was never published. Ever since, opera companies have had to present Lulu in two acts, with a makeshift third act tacked...
...triumph of the production was that it laid out the full span of Berg's intricate, marvelous score, seamlessly completed by Viennese Composer Friedrich Cerha. It was given an exhilarating performance by Boulez, with notably precise, transparent playing by the Paris Opera orchestra...
Soprano Teresa Stratas had to rely more on temperament and stagecraft than on an overtaxed voice, especially in the punishing higher reaches of Berg's writing. But her Lulu was sexy and mercurial, as much the victim as the exploiter of her powers. She was superbly matched by Baritone Franz Mazura's richly shaded portrayal of the newspaper magnate Dr. Schön, Lulu's patron and eventual husband. The rest of the cast was excellent too: Tenor Robert Tear as a naive painter undone by Lulu, and Bass-Baritone Toni Blankenheim as the mysterious Schigolch, Lulu...
...Berg's libretto, brilliantly compressed by the composer from two works by the German playwright Frank Wedekind, fared less well, and therein lay the perplexity. The production was staged by French Director Patrice Chéreau, 34, who has built a controversial career on the apparent principle that anything worth doing is worth doing outrageously. His avant-garde Ring cycle for the 1976 Bayreuth Festival drew boos and hisses as well as cheers, and is still hotly debated inter nationally by Wagnerians...