Lulu Is the Toast of Paris

By Christopher Porterfield

After 43 years a modern masterpiece is finally complete

Three of opera's "great progressivists," Igor Stravinsky once declared, were Gluck, Wagner--and the Viennese modernist Alban Berg. Stravinsky was not being merely provocative. As the years go by, Berg's claim to belong in such illustrious company looks more and more secure. It rests on two complex, powerful works, Wozzeck and Lulu, that in effect brought opera into the 20th century. Lulu, in particular, packed traditional operatic emotion and drama into the most advanced of forms, the twelve-tone system devised by Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.

Indeed Lulu, the tragedy of a dancer whose almost mythic embodiment of the erotic principle wreaks universal destruction and death, seemed to be the one modern opera that had everything: electrifying theatricality, sex, moral seriousness, virtuoso scoring--everything, that is, except a third act. When he died in 1935, Berg had completed the third act particella, or short score; but he left the orchestration incomplete and the act was never published. Ever since, opera companies have had to present Lulu in two acts, with a makeshift third act tacked on.

But now in Paris, the opera world's most tantalizing other shoe has finally dropped. The Paris Opera presented the first-ever full-length Lulu, third act and all. To Rolf Liebermann, the Paris Opera's general director, it was the culmination of a 30-year quest. To Conductor Pierre Boulez, it was belated "justice to a work that has been mutilated." To the black-tie audience of statesmen, artistic leaders, 200 music critics and assorted opera buffs, it was a triumph and, to some, a perplexity.

The triumph of the production was that it laid out the full span of Berg's intricate, marvelous score, seamlessly completed by Viennese Composer Friedrich Cerha. It was given an exhilarating performance by Boulez, with notably precise, transparent playing by the Paris Opera orchestra.

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. Schoen, 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's father, a former lover or perhaps a symbol of death.

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 Chereau, 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.

Chereau began by shifting the action from the upholstered, hypocritical fin de siecle 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, 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 who previously played her victims. The last of these, corresponding to the murdered Schoen, is Jack the Ripper, who kills Lulu.

Here again Chereau'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, Chereau was led by his monumental staging scheme to place it in what looked like an abandoned subway station.

Erratic or not, Chereau'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; Liebermann made his first bid in 1950, when he was musical director of Radio Zurich. But they literally did not have a ghost of a chance. Berg's widow and musical executrix, Helene, claimed that her husband's spirit made nocturnal visitations to her in which he opposed completion. (Berg scholars have recently suggested another motive: resentment by Berg's widow of an autumnal love affair that may have partly inspired Lulu.)

Early in the 1960s Berg's publishers, Universal Edition in Vienna, quietly commissioned Cerha to proceed with the orchestration anyway. After Helene Berg's death at 92 in 1976, a genteel scramble ensued. Liebermann had a secret advantage in Boulez, long the publishers' first choice to conduct the premiere.

Boulez's view of Lulu is close to Stravinsky's. "As Mahler did for the symphony, Berg simultaneously amplified and destroyed the traditional outline," Boulez says. "Today the relationship between music and theater requires different conditions, for which Berg set the precedent."

Certainly no composer more closely tied each note to an onstage gesture, nor spun out a more painstakingly detailed and significant structure. It is a miraculous kind of mathematical puzzle. The whole of Lulu is based on a single twelve-tone row, which is Lulu's theme. All of the opera's other themes, accompaniments and leitmotifs are derived from endlessly ingenious extrapolations, inversions, retrogrades and other variations of the original row. These in turn are rigorously organized in a series of traditional forms. There is an extensive sonata structure in Lulu's scenes with Schoen; a rondo for Lulu's more ambiguous encounter with Schoen's son; a canon in which one voice following another imitates the painter's pursuit of Lulu; and so on.

The practiced listener cannot take in all these subtleties. But anyone can feel them -- and feel is the word. Faithful as he was to the atonal vision of his mentor Schoenberg, Berg never left behind the yearning romanticism of Mahler and Wagner. Lulu retains a spontaneous, passionate life of its own. In projecting that passionate life musically, if not always dramatically, the Paris production presented a modern masterpiece on its rightful scale.

-- Christopher Porterfield

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.