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Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
composer, poet, critic, essayist

Friday 20 February 2015

Berg's 'Lulu': Welsh National Opera 2013

The following was first published in Planet Magazine, Issue 210, Summer 2013. The production (together with 'Lohengrin' and 'Paul Bunyan') earned Welsh National Opera a richly-deserved Royal Philharmonic Society Opera and Music Theatre Award that year. Very sadly, both singer Richard Angas and designer Johan Engels have since passed away: huge losses to the opera world.



Royal Philharmonic Society [RPS] Opera and Music Theatre Award - See more at: http://www.wno.org.uk/news/wno-wins-royal-philharmonic-society-music-award-opera-and-music-theatre#sthash.jK1CFJlc.dpufv
Royal Philharmonic Society [RPS] Opera and Music Theatre Award - See more at: http://www.wno.org.uk/news/wno-wins-royal-philharmonic-society-music-award-opera-and-music-theatre#sthash.jK1CFJlc.dpuf
Royal Philharmonic Society [RPS] Opera and Music Theatre Award - See more at: http://www.wno.org.uk/news/wno-wins-royal-philharmonic-society-music-award-opera-and-music-theatre#sthash.jK1CFJlc.dpuf
Royal Philharmonic Society [RPS] Opera and Music Theatre Award - See more at: http://www.wno.org.uk/news/wno-wins-royal-philharmonic-society-music-award-opera-and-music-theatre#sthash.jK1CFJlc.dpuf
Royal Philharmonic Society [RPS] Opera and Music Theatre Award - See more at: http://www.wno.org.uk/news/wno-wins-royal-philharmonic-society-music-award-opera-and-music-theatre#sthash.jK1CFJlc.dpuf
'Lulu' by Alban Berg
Third Act completion by Eberhard Kloke
Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 8 February 2013

Conductor: Lothar Koenigs
Director: David Pountney

Set Designer: Johan Engels
Costume Designer: Marie Jeanne Lecca
Lighting Designer: Mark Jonathan

Cast: Marie Arnet / Natascha Petrinsky / Patricia Orr / Ashley Holland / Peter Hoare / Richard Angas / Mark le Brocq / Alan Oke / Nicholas Folwell / Julian Close



Alban Berg’s Lulu is one of the most significant operatic masterpieces in the entire genre; a hugely ambitious, complex work of ravishing beauty, absurd black humour and utterly bleak tragedy. The opera is as notorious for its paradoxes and flaws as for its technical challenges, and the fact that Act III lay unfinished at Berg’s premature death in 1935; the music having been composed but with much still to be orchestrated. Friedrich Cerha made a completion from Berg’s manuscripts, but it was not until 1979 that the entire work was premièred after the death of Berg’s widow Helene, who withheld the third act when Arnold Schoenberg and others turned down the task - and perhaps, too, nervous that publication might expose her husband’s affair with Hannah Fuchs-Robettin, as Berg’s scores were known to be saturated with personal, coded references.

Prior to the 1979 unveiling, Lulu had been performed as a two-act ‘torso’ and it was in this truncated form that Welsh National Opera were obliged to stage their British première in 1971. But it is only now that WNO audiences have been able to experience the piece in its astonishing entirety; here in a new completion by Eberhard Kloke, allowing cuts which, thankfully, eliminate much of the overwhelming clutter from the confused Paris scene, but which also, less convincingly, omit the Quartett from the final, London scene.

No matter - the production is enthralling and spectacular; indeed, David Pountney’s Lulu is visionary in a way few can claim to be right through to that stupendous final scene, which remains shatteringly intense and at which more than one audience-member audibly exclaimed. Lulu’s story is not so much told as exposed, layer by layer, in a way completely befitting of her ambiguous status; for she is at once a mythical spirit and an abused woman-child, whose magnetic eroticism creates torment and chaos for everyone around her. As she spirals headlong, downwards towards her murder at the hands of Jack the Ripper, the bourgeois society which created her is simultaneously dismembered; its decadence and hypocrisy ultimately imploding with catastrophic results. This production is all the more harrowing for its relative lack of outright sex and violence. Rather, Pountney opts for a more powerfully suggestive portrayal, utilising a combination of surreal imagery, jazz-age burlesque, slapstick and a sort of perverse kitsch redolent of the sumptuous debauched world of Berg’s rarely performed Viennese precursor Franz Schreker, in operas such as Die Gezeichneten.

The stage set is marvellously designed, lit and costumed. Johan Engels’s chromium framework provides both a cage for the human ‘menagerie’ - sometimes replete with garish animal heads - and a gibbet for the corpses of Lulu’s husbands, which get hoisted up to dangle Bacon-esque over ensuing proceedings in more senses than one. However, far from entrapping the characters as Berg’s over-prescribed score directions can do in less imaginative stagings, this production gives the altogether excellent cast a terrific platform from which to make the roles their own, with the help of a superb orchestra under conductor Lothar Koenigs, who renders Berg’s colours and Romantic lyricism with searing intensity.

Marie Arnet’s Lulu is visually and musically stunning and is brought to life with a remarkably natural - and unbearably apt - combination of passion and detachment. Her eventual mutilation is foreshadowed from the start through the presence of a macabre but grimly humorous sculpture in place of the portrait in Berg’s score, showing Lulu as a surreal, disjointed doll; a motif extended to an enormous bed made of body parts - the inference being that this, too, is Lulu - upon which is enacted scenes of murder, seduction and betrayal alongside sheer buffoonery. The chaos and claustrophobia is contrasted with Pountney’s use of an alienating, mimetic device whereby parts of Berg’s dialogue are delivered naturalistically by actors via pre-recorded tape. Some structural clarity regarding Berg’s mirror symmetry is sacrificed thereby as with, for example, a key repeated phrase, ‘that was hard work’. This phrase is pre-recorded in Act 1, after Schön tells the Painter of his and Lulu’s affair, but sung on-stage in Act III, after Schön’s alter-ego Jack murders Lulu, thus detracting from the correlation. But overall, the device is striking and, paradoxically, helps to ground the production in the ‘real’, thereby adding to the emotional impact.

Berg’s predilection for allusions to people and musical works beyond the piece at hand is honoured in this production in many ways, including various filmic references in place of Berg’s actual film sequence, from Hitchcock (Lulu’s murder) to silent film (various mimed roles). A major Wagnerian trope also acknowledges Schigolch - Lulu’s supposed father/lover and, certainly, her pimp - as the rotten core of the drama; an aspect of Berg’s musical and dramatic design that is often overlooked (indeed, whilst parallels between the composer Alwa and Berg himself are much discussed, no commentator to my knowledge has noted the significance of Schigolch’s wheezing asthma as a condition Berg himself suffered from). Crucially, Schigolch alone survives the carnage. Like Lulu, his origins and identity remain a mystery, but Pountney has him double as Berg’s Animal Trainer and master of proceedings dressed as Siegfried’s Wanderer (wonderfully performed by Richard Angas); the further analogy with Wotan in deep, riddle-setting disguise also cleverly suggesting Lulu’s own mythical kinship with Brünnhilde and - as we see with Lulu’s suitors, who age in her absence whilst she is in gaol - Freia, Goddess of Eternal Youth.

Pountney’s Lulu might reference the Twilight of the Gods but for WNO and lovers of innovative, deeply penetrating opera, it heralds both a British landmark and the start of a new and exciting programme that will see no less than eight new productions staged as part of themed seasons in 2013-14 alone (Summer 2013 sees Wagner’s Lohengrin twinned for his 200th anniversary with the late Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream). Wales, it seems, is throwing down the gauntlet to other opera companies within the UK and on the international scene. Perhaps those doom-sayers who predict the death of opera as an art form might just be a little premature.

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