Word: berges
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...girl, by all odds the most fatal femme fatale in all opera, is the heroine of Alban Berg's Lulu. Left uncompleted at Composer Berg's death in 1935, Lulu has one of the most difficult scores (twelve-tone) and the most sordid libretto ever written. It is a kind of nightmarish perversion of fin de siècle German romanticism; its subject matter includes sadism, narcissism, incest, homosexuality, masochism and murder. Counting its Zurich premiere in 1937, it has been staged only six times. The Frankfurt Opera is now giving Lulu its seventh production, and probably...
Contradictory Feminine. Berg based his tortured opera on two plays (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) by erotic, tormented Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). In German Playwright Wedekind's mind-and in Berg's-Lulu is an amalgam of all the contradictory feminine instincts: she is innocent and worldly, timid and rapacious, sentimental and heartless. Before the garishly painted curtain rises on a circus ring, a ringmaster invites the audience to witness the spectacle of the human circus, then calls: "Bring in our snake." In comes an assistant carrying Lulu, dressed in long black stockings...
...source of Lulu's deadly charm, and the audience is unable to sympathize with her or her victims. At several points, e.g., when an elderly butler confesses in an aside that he himself is smitten with Lulu, the spectators usually break into titters. Musically more advanced than Berg's only other opera, Wozzeck (TIME, March 16), Lulu has little of Wozzeck's compelling dramatic power. Remarkably, only 25 years after its premiere, the most experimental opera of one of the century's most experimental composers plays like a period piece...
...young and idealistic revolutionary hero in an unnamed country almost sells out to the terrorism of his hardheaded boss. But his old college prof comes along just in time to remind him that the tactics they planned in the classroom were cleaner and kinder. George Grizzard, Mark Richman, Nancy Berg and Frank Conroy work out the resulting conflict...