Word: berge
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...worked through the logistical gambits of mounting the U.S. premiere of Alban Berg's atonal, macabre, erotic opera Lulu, Crosby collected a power ful king and queen: Conductor Robert Craft, a devotee of Berg, and brilliant and beautiful Coloratura Soprano Joan Carroll, who had sung the leading role 39 times before, yet never in English. But the chess game only began with the big names. Scene shifters had to be taught to handle six sets ranging from a wealthy home to a brothel; dressers had to learn how to zip Joan Carroll in and out of ten costume changes...
Lulu is indeed a spellbinder, a power ful, unrelenting tragedy of sex. Berg wrote the opera in the early '30s and shaped his libretto from two plays by the great German Dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), who was obsessed by the fury, the brevity and the desolation of the pursuit of sexual pleasure. As Wedekind's translator put it, "he dealt in 'the hellish drive out of which no joy remains alive.' " In both of his plays, Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box), Wedekind centered this hell...
...marks her for prey. Symbolically, she is destroyed by the moral cant of the bourgeois mind, which condemns in others the vices it refuses to acknowledge in itself. Lulu's actual death is horrifying; she is disemboweled by Jack the Ripper in a London garret. At this event, Berg's music erupts in an agonizing holocaust of atonal sound, the musical equivalent of the howl of the blinded Oedipus...
...altitude. The skeptics now trek west to see his dizzying success. The present season will see polished performances ranging from Don Giovanni and Madame Butterfly to Honegger's Joan of Arc, combined with a flair for the new. In the much-anticipated American premiere of the late Alban Berg's unfinished, powerful and grittily atonal opera Lulu, Soprano Joan Carroll will sing the dissolute heroine...
WILLIAM D. BERG...