Word: ch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when Lohengrin will wear a T shirt with his name on it. Wagner was a composer with a bold theatrical imagination; one might think that his instructions would occupy directors for centuries. Instead his works have revisionists been in attracting Europe; among them Gotz Friedrich, Harry Kupfer, and Patrice Chéreau, whose Ring cycle set in the industrial revolution remains the standard for irreverence...
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...
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...
...Chéreau began by shifting the action from the upholstered, hypocritical fin de siècle to the 1930s, in the shadow of Nazism. to the 1930s, in the shadow of Nazism. He and Designer Richard Peduzzi placed the singers amidst stark mausoleum-like sets in monochromatic blacks and grays, all vast, sterile spaces and icy slabs of marble. The results captured the harsh, merciless qualities of the opera perhaps too well. They were undeniably powerful, particularly in the hair-raising scene in which Lulu guns down Schon on an enormous staircase. They were also brutal and at times...
Erratic or not, Chéreau's solutions will set the standard of comparison for the many full-length productions that are sure to follow. The problematic third act has been from the start one of the opera world's chief prizes and puzzles. World War II brought an inhospitable climate for productions of Lulu, since the Nazis regarded it as entartete Kunst (decadent art), but thereafter it began to enter the international repertory. Approaches to other composers about finishing the third act had ended inconclusively. Opera managers vied for the chance to present the first complete performance...