Word: lulu
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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...
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...
...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 faintly ludicrous, like some bad dream by Albert Speer...
Previous productions broke off after Lulu, imprisoned for murdering Schon, escapes and takes up a fugitive life with Schon's son and other admirers. The third act reveals that Berg rounded off the story with telling symmetry. Lulu descends through a succession of men and social strata that mirror those she rose through in the first two acts. Accordingly, Berg's music for her decline is shot through with echoes, correspondences and recapitulations of earlier moments. When Lulu is reduced to streetwalking in London, Berg called for her three clients to be played by the same singers...
...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; Liebermann made his first bid in 1950, when...