Word: reau
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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...
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...
...reau 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 faintly ludicrous...
Painful Fun. Chéreau obviously does not want to be confined to either a realistic Ring or a symbolic one. Says he: "I don't believe in pat solutions. What interests me in Wagner are the contradictions." So he has staged the Ring largely in the "modern dress" of 1876, the year of its first full performance. To that basic idea he has added touches of surrealistic humor. For example, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who gain the magic ring in Das Rheingold in payment for building Valhalla, lumber around on the sagging shoulders of two local weight...
...Physically nothing has changed in the Festspielhaus auditorium since Wagner designed it, and its acoustics are among the best in the world. The old man would probably relish the scene in 1976: the full house, the well-dressed crowd, the impresarios gathered from several continents. As for Chéreau and Boulez, Wagner would probably be one of the people who were both booing and clapping...