Word: lulu
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Alban Berg died 17 years ago, but no U.S. opera company has yet found the means or the courage to mount his second opera. So Lulu, an even bloodier yarn than Berg's Wozzeck, is having its American premiere in the latest fashion this week-on records...
Berg worked out the libretto of Lulu from two plays by the German actor-writer Frank Wedekind. It is a thing of violence and sensuality, set out in the glares and black shadows of fin de siecle romanticism. Singing in clipped, high-tension German, lustful Lulu causes one violent death after another among her helpless lovers. Then the pace slackens and she moves sonorously toward her own destruction hy Jack the Ripper...
...first, Lulu is pretty tough listening. The singers have few tunes and the orchestra squirms morbidly, almost as if improvising without a director. But the listener who sits through the first half gets his reward. In the calmer second half, the music becomes almost songful, with a kind of lyrical lassitude that might have been shown by a latter-day Wagner. When it is all over, the wildly scattered scenes fall together and make dramatic sense...
Among Berg's most ear-catching passages and devices: a chiming bell that interrupts erotic episodes, a long, slithering solo by Lulu herself (Soprano Ilona Steingruber), realistic effects of screams and falling bodies. The fine performance by the Vienna Symphony (conducted by the late Herbert Hafner) and singers of the Vienna State Opera was recorded for Columbia last spring. The arrival of Lulu on records is the equal of many a live premiere...
Cadet James Reid Brazell, 17, said, "Thanks to TIME, I won all the arguments I got into." Others said: "TIME certainly did a job on bureaucracy. That story about slippery floors in the Pentagon was a lulu." "Congress didn't get anything important done-a do-nothing Congress." "That Red youth rally in Berlin-those people were really hopped...