Word: berges
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David Gross berg Houston...
...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...
...practiced listener cannot take in all these subtleties. But anyone can feel them - and feel is the word. Faithful as he was to the atonal vision of his mentor Schoenberg, Berg never left behind the yearning romanticism of Mahler and Wagner. Lulu retains a spontaneous, passionate life of its own. In projecting that passionate life musically, if not always dramatically, the Paris production presented a modern masterpiece on its rightful scale...