Word: lulu
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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...
...subsequent acts her painter-lover cuts his throat when he learns of Lulu's sordid past. Then an elderly lecher marries her; when he discovers her trysting with his son, he offers her a gun to commit suicide and is promptly shot dead himself. Lulu is smuggled out of prison by another of her lovers, Countess Geschwitz, who fools the authorities by changing clothes with Lulu and taking her place ("Now," muses the ungrateful Lulu, "the poor monster sits in prison instead of me"). Lulu decamps to Paris, philanders with gamblers, procurers and swindlers. The end comes...
Lyrical Lassitude. The Frankfurt production is properly corrosive. Designer Teo Otto uses a garish circus scene throughout the opera, changes scenes merely by changing the props. In the Paris sequence, Otto projects Lulu's progress on a huge screen, in drawings recalling Toulouse-Lautrec; the last one shows Lulu standing naked with black handprints all over her body. Conductor Georg Solti leads his cast and huge orchestra with deft skill, and at each performance Soprano Helga Pilarczyk scores triumphs in the fiendishly difficult title role...
...score of Lulu is still formidable, impressive and amazingly exact in indicating the composer's intentions. The orchestra squirms morbidly in the first half, almost as if playing without direction, but the second half achieves a kind of romantic, lyrical lassitude. The opera bristles with an immense variety of forms: a sonata represents the elderly lecher, a rondo suggests his son, ragtime gives way to an English waltz...