Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre, 24 February 2013
New English translation by David Pountney
Conductor: Lothar Koenigs
Director: David Pountney
Revival Director and Revival Choreographer: Elaine Tyler-Hall
Designer: Maria Bjørnson
Lighting Designer: Nick Chelton
Original Choreographer: Stuart Hopps
Cast includes: Jonathan Summers / Sophie Bevan / Julian Boyce / Michael Clifton-Thompson / Meriel Andrew / Sarah Castle / Laurence Cole / Richard Angas / Alan Oke / David Stout / Maddy Carver / Josh Olsen / Connor Dowling.
Janáček was reputedly delighted with the Brno premiére of his seventh opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, in November 1924. The following year, a subsequent, new production took place in Prague; a production about which he had reservations - and that was staged in a cultural environment much less sympathetic to his music - but which, nonetheless, led to the first broadcast of one his operas. By now, Janáček was already in his seventies but was experiencing a remarkable late creative surge, composing at a staggering rate to build upon the success and recognition he had only recently achieved for the first time in Prague, when a revised version of his third opera, Jenůfa, was staged there in 1916. That belated success had been hard won; critics such as the influential Zdeněk Nejedlý were vociferous in their disapproval of Janáček’s style and methods, condemning, amongst other things, what they saw as a lack of technique in his use of ‘speech melodies’ based on the Czech language to convey the inner worlds of operatic characters.
Nejedlý in particular continued his outspoken attacks, but it was not only Janáček’s detractors who were sometimes slow to grasp the genius of his musical-dramatic innovations; his close friend and German translator Max Brod was disturbed by the inclusion of animals and children in The Cunning Little Vixen and took it upon himself to adapt the work along more conservative lines. Finally, the huge success of a Komische Oper production by Walter Felsenstein in Berlin 1956 established Vixen as Janáček had conceived it; a work of profound, multi-layered symbolism as well as a delightfully optimistic, magic-realist tale.
Tonight’s vintage production by David Pountney (Revival Director/Choreographer Elaine Tyler-Hall) expressed symbolic scope and joyful celebration in equal measure, showing why this staging has become a much-loved classic around the world since its premiére at WNO in 1980 in collaboration with Scottish Opera. The energy and ebullience of Janáček’s score was vividly expressed by the alternate stridency and lyricism of Lothar Koenig’s orchestra and by Sophie Bevan’s beautifully observed Vixen; a role encapsulating a rich emotional world as well as Janáček’s deeper themes of life and death as a positive cycle, and how animals and human beings share an essentially amoral nature within that cycle.
These themes are timeless and the production itself has stood up extremely well to the passage of time, making a superb counterpart to Berg’s Lulu in this spring’s ‘free spirits’ season at WNO. In the substantial programme booklet, John Tyrell draws a fascinating analogy between Janáček’s Vixen and Shakespeare’s late tragicomedies and, indeed, there were shades of Ariel in the other-worldly, balletic Dragonfly (dancer, Connor Dowling), whilst the stage set and action at the same time recalled to mind the fantasy-realist Shakespearean adaptations commissioned by the BBC in the seventies and eighties. In that sense, Pountney’s production is also of its time - but it is none the worse for that; part of its enduring power stems from his adroit entwining of character and action with Janáček’s deeply evocative music in the most natural way, led by the score itself and bringing a sense of choreography to the entire drama as well as to the overt dance sequences.
For today’s audience, there was plenty of wit as well as wisdom to be found in Pountney’s new English translation of the libretto. Slapstick is an important part of this opera and Pountney embraces it with boyish enthusiasm, adding to Janáček’s ‘exit, pursued by a bear’ comedy a layer of up-to-date satirical sophistication; the Vixen, for example, is described as a ‘rabid feminist’ and the wonderfully comic Hens repeat brainlessly over and over her (manifestly not to be trusted) cry for them to be ‘li-be-ra-ted’ from slavish drudgery.
Despite the idyllic mise-en-scène and the many children hopping about in animal guise (clear voices and touching performances abounding in more ways than one), Pountney is entirely focused on Janáček’s unsentimental vision of the continuum of life and death; a vision in which neither anthropomorphism (beyond practical necessities of costume) nor serious political allegory in the sense of Animal Farm have a place. The curmudgeonly and repressed males (both human and animal, with the exception of the lyrical Fox, expressively sung by Sarah Castle in trouser-role) might seem to make for obvious critical targets on Janáček’s part but, evidently enlisting his own experience of approaching mortality, the composer manages to ensure not so much our sympathy for these characters as individuals, but a deeper understanding of the predicament they share, through his combination of tight dramatic manoeuvre and wittily succinct dialogue.
The hunt scene in Act III, in which the Vixen pursues and kills the Hare (Caitlin Parry-Jones), is simply enacted as a fundamental truth of nature - as is the ensuing death of the Vixen herself by the Poacher’s gun (eloquently handled by David Stout). This is a narrative development that Janáček added to the original tale; in the cartoon and subsequent short stories on which he based his libretto, the Vixen survives but, by managing to kill her off without undue tragedy, Janáček lifts the story onto an altogether more mythic plane and sets the scene for her human opposite, the Forester, who captured her as a cub, to give voice to a final and profoundly pantheist vision of the oneness of nature. On this occasion, a roughness of vocal tone from Forester Jonathan Summers made his final epiphany fall slightly flat, lending the text a didactic air in places; one wonders whether performing the opera straight through without the interval between Acts II and III might better preserve both spell and energy right through to the final celebration scene.
But it would take a miserable cynic indeed to give undue weight to any such marginal concerns. The depth and near perfection of Pountney’s production, the delightfulness of the performances all round - and the sheer uplifting generosity of this wonderful piece from a composer seemingly devoid of self-pity - can only be savoured and applauded.
Published in Wales Arts Review 2.8: http://www.walesartsreview.org/leos-janaceks-the-cunning-little-vixen/
About Me
- steph power
- Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
- composer, poet, critic, essayist
Monday, 1 April 2013
Saturday, 23 March 2013
Interview in Two Parts: David Pountney. 2: Leoš Janáček's 'The Cunning Little Vixen'
David Pountney, Artistic Director of Welsh National Opera, is internationally celebrated for his many, pioneering productions of operas by Janáček. Ahead of the opening night of The Cunning Little Vixen, in revival at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff as part of WNO’s ‘free spirits’ themed season, he spoke about the piece (part two of a two-part interview) and about Janáček’s extraordinary achievement as the most innovative composer of music-drama in the twentieth century.
SP: David, I believe you first produced The Cunning Little Vixen in 1980 as part of a large cycle of Janáček operas, staged in collaboration with Welsh National Opera when you were Director of Production at Scottish Opera?
DP: Yes, correct. We did five pieces; The Cunning Little Vixen, Kát’a Kabanová, the Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead and Jenůfa.
That was tremendously pioneering at the time and I wonder how it feels to you now, as Artistic Director of WNO, to be bringing Vixen back to the company?
Well I suppose it might seem like an act of vanity! But actually the point really was that, having been asked to do Lulu, I’ve always wanted to bring those two pieces together, so it seemed like the perfect moment to revive this, well, rather ancient production!
But do you find that each time it’s done, you come to the production with a combination of experience and fresh eyes so it becomes new - or renewed - in a tangible way?
Yes and also the Vixen has, as it so happens, matured into a classic - although it wasn’t necessarily perceived as such at the time as I recall. And, probably, we got better at doing it. It’s a complicated piece to mount and we put it on in quite unusual circumstances in Edinburgh - it was part of the Festival where preparation time is always very short because there are lots of other things going on. And the piece has matured in the ears and eyes of the audience I think; all these pieces seemed very strange and difficult at the time to many people and now the Vixen is evidently a kind of classic. And of course it’s been a very interesting perspective doing it alongside Lulu because everybody says, ‘oh it’s such a relief to come back to Vixen’!
Do they? That’s interesting!
Because it’s musically so much easier. Although people - I think particularly orchestral players - used always to regard Vixen as difficult because of the way Janáček writes. He’s not a very efficient writer – more to the point, I think he’s not really interested in efficiency.
No, and he writes difficult parts in extremes of register for the instruments.
Yes and he wrote things down in a way which could have been done more simply. But that’s all part of his energy and what he’s doing. I remember, one conductor said to me, well the whole point is that these scores should feel difficult to play; they’re not meant to be comfortable in the way that you might think of, say, Brahms’s symphonies as comfortable to play.
It seems ironic that Janáček’s been criticised for so-called ‘lack of technique’ and yet, in terms of dramatic vision, he achieves an extraordinary meld of music and drama. I think you once described Vixen as real Gesamtkunstwerk?
It’s the perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, yes. Because it’s the best piece of complex twentieth century dramaturgy in terms of the accuracy with which he uses all the different media of an opera composer; all the different forms are used with brilliant accuracy, exactly saying what they need to say in the right moment and with terrific concision. I think, dramaturgically, it’s a much better work than Lulu because he just focuses on what needs to be said, even when it’s pure comedy or slapstick - he’s always focuses on the point of the piece.
And tremendously innovative in terms of the genesis and the writing of the piece [which was based on a cartoon], incorporating elements of ballet, with children on-stage and choruses off-stage and so on?
Yes, and using this kind of collage technique where scenes are juxtaposed one against the other without necessarily being in a clear linear direction - every possibility of an opera composer’s toolkit is used with just terrific appropriateness.
As you say, Vixen’s become a much-loved part of the repertoire but it’s not a straightforward, pre-lapsarian, sentimental vision by any means is it? It’s multi-layered in its symbolism.
Very, very much so. It’s obviously a discussion about what is the role of nature, or of animal nature, within man - particularly sexuality, which is what makes it such an interesting comparison with Lulu. And it’s the way in which Janáček combines these themes. You have these animals who exist in actually quite a brutal, amoral universe in which they’re as much predators as victims - which is, of course, something that’s true about nature; something that’s frequently forgotten in our supermarket, clingfilm-wrapped world. But also he’s talking about the way in which the necessary limitations that human beings put on their animal feelings - and particularly their sexuality - to some extent atrophies into an inability to express those desires or those feelings, those necessities. So you also have a whole gallery of human characters who basically exhibit various traits of depression - and, of course, with great wit and intelligence he shows that the animals that have been domesticated also exhibit those same tendencies. So that, you know, we have these men who sit around in the pub fantasising about this woman who’s the sort of Lulu-Vixen equivalent.
Terynka?
Terynka - but we also have the fact that the dog is howling away because he doesn’t know what love is and has a frustrated love-life - with the Cock and the Hens also exhibiting some kind of gender-dysfunctional society. So, on the one hand, the human beings are criticized, or mocked even, for their repression and their up-tightness. But, on the other hand, in the guise of the Forester, we see a human character who is also granted a kind of amazing epiphany in the moment of his death. And, on top of that, there is a very optimistic, cyclical view of nature and rebirth - so it’s very, very complex. Written and composed, of course, by a man himself in his early seventies by this point, and clearly grappling with his own idea of mortality - as well as his own perhaps spasmodically functioning erotic life! It’s one of the most profound statements, I think, by any artist about the human condition in a huge range of ways.
It’s remarkable how Janáček manages to shift the dramatic focus so smoothly from Vixen Sharp Ears, once she’s been shot dead, onto the Forester and his final epiphany. So there’s no sense of negativity or loss when she dies; it’s about the totality of the cycle.
Yes, it’s a terrific trick to pull off isn’t it - to kill your main character in the first scene of the last act and give yourself time to really discuss the fact that life or death is not the most important thing but that actually it’s the continuum of nature which is important! A huge statement to make I think.
Throughout the opera, Sharp Ears basically gets away with taunting men about their sexuality - until the point at which she’s shot, when she goes a step too far perhaps?
Well I have analysed this point in the past and it’s quite clear why she’s shot, in the sense that she herself has been corrupted by her contact with human beings. Having received, as she says, her primary education at the hands of the Forester, she meets this figure the Poacher who is, in my view, a kind of satyr, being halfway between man and animal - which is why he’s able to kill her of course. When she meets him, she gets carried away by an entirely human preoccupation which is spouting a whole lot of bullshit about justice and cruelty to foxes. Whereas she should have remembered that when she spouted the same stuff to the Hens, it was a prelude to her murdering them! And so, what she forgets in this moment of being distracted into human moral bullshit, is the essential rule of self-preservation; she hangs around to harangue and politicise at the Poacher and therefore gets killed - well quite right too! That’ll teach her to get on her soapbox!
She gets on her soapbox quite a lot in the opera doesn’t she?
Mostly to entirely spurious ends. I mean, she harangues the poor Badger about his plutocrat accommodation and promptly uses that to evict him and move into his sett herself! So she’s absolutely shameless in that way and that’s why it isn’t a tragedy when she’s shot. It’s just part of the ongoing battle between different sections of the natural order, of which the men and women are also part.
Terynka never actually appears in the opera but the men spend lots of time sitting around wishing she was in their lives.
Another stroke of extraordinary originality! Terynka is a leading character, but she never appears! She is the fantasy figure that haunts all these men in their mid-life crises, their impotence. The piece is a paean to the urges of nature and how essential they are and as part of reproduction and all of that. So the Forester’s epiphany is in no way a resignation in any kind of bogus religious way of giving up on stuff.
No, it seems pantheist in a raw, primeval sense. And, again, optimistic but not sentimental!
Yes, I think the whole, last act is absolutely amazing compositionally. Because, first of all, you get Sharp Ears’s death and then Janáček composes a kind of elegy which manages to be very moving without being in the least bit sentimental. This builds into a celebration of life and death - and I think also of hunting; of one of the primary human instincts - or, of course, animal instincts. And the hunter and the hunted are there as two poles of that. Then this moment of joy rooted in the truth of nature morphs into an extraordinary final Inn scene, which is a scene of farewells and resignation, full of human repression. So we’ve had this wild man of the woods, the Poacher, who’s shot his gun off, with Sharp Ears lying dead as a result, and then we meet these morbid, repressed men sitting around regretting things they’ve not done or missed or women they haven’t slept with or whatever. Again, Janáček succeeds in taking this sort of banal and rather despicable, trivial scene and elevating it into an extraordinary musical expression of compassion for these rather pathetic human beings and the way they talk about the past and about who’s no longer in the parish. Just one word is used to describe the absent Parson when the Innkeeper’s wife says he’s ‘lonely’; just one word - and there’s a moment of silence where they look at his empty chair. It’s incredibly poignant and brilliantly done - and all in twelve bars or something! Then it erupts into this magnificent final epiphany for the Forester. It’s an amazing achievement to have packed in that amount of perfectly judged emotion and understanding about human nature and about nature itself.
You know, the more full of bullshit we become about animals the more significant the piece becomes. We used to have what I would describe as a great ritual about the truth of human beings and animals, which was our whole visual pageant of fox hunting. But we vandalised that in the most pathetic way for totally spurious reasons. Whether you like hunting or not is irrelevant; the fact is, it did express a truth that cannot be found on a supermarket shelf with a plastic-wrapped chicken - that we are in a cruel universe! Behaviour in nature is not perfect and is not politically correct - it’s not sanitised, it’s predatory, that’s the way it is. If you’re so fastidious that you can’t put up with those truths, then you try to suppress them and I think, you know, that’s dishonest.
For me, that deeper, amoral essence of human and animal nature comes across very powerfully in the opera and there’s certainly none of that ‘animals - good, humans - bad’ nonsense that you get when people sentimentalise about animals or nature generally. I wonder, too, if there’s something here about Janáček’s use of what’s been described as ‘speech melody’; whether his pithy use of simple, repeated phrases and musical ostinati coming out of the Czech language is also somehow part of his getting to the crux of things?
Well, I’ve often used this idea that the cellular development of Janáček’s music starts from these speech patterns - he really uses that to create the DNA of his characters; it’s as if he’s writing down a sort of DNA code of who these people actually are! The originality of his work as an opera composer is just staggering. If you take the first scene - even putting aside the way in which it moves in and out of ballet and so on as a way of laying out the opening of an opera - it’s incredibly astute dramaturgically. When the Forester comes on, he’s tired and hot and wants to lie down and have a nap, and he talks about how his rifle has become his sweetheart. So the whole idea of the atrophy of human erotic activity is right there in the very first few words of the opera. And the interesting thing is that the music doesn’t accompany the Forester at all! The music is furiously energetic, sparkling with detail like a sort of Bartókian insect world, describing the forest buzzing and heaving with life and energy. And here’s this guy who comes on and sort of says ‘oh my God, it’s hot and [yawns and stretches] I want to lie down and my missus won’t notice, she’s a good wife, and anyway my rifle’s really my sweetheart....[snores]’. And so he’s in a completely different tempo to the whole orchestra. If that was Berg, people would have written essays and chapters about it - but it’s just Janáček’s instinctive way of describing two things at once in the way he’s setting the scene!
Janáček has still not really been admitted to the ‘great pantheon’ of the modernists has he, despite his extraordinary innovations?
Well it’s taken Boulez many many years to get round to Janáček. Finally he has done some in the last few years!
It’s taken him a long while indeed and, from a music-history point of view, there’s still a lingering, ridiculous sort of idea that anybody outside a perceived central Austro-German strand is somehow peripheral to musical development.
Oh it’s a kind of racism. The Germans don’t think anybody Czech can be serious - that they’re sort of whimsical.
I think Sibelius suffers from this problem too.
Definitely. Certainly, in Vienna people still don’t take Sibelius seriously because Mahler didn’t.
No, and nor did Adorno. And, despite his tremendous creative developments it seems to me that Janáček’s worth is still in some ways not fully appreciated, operatically. I was wondering who, of contemporary composers - if anyone - might be said to be taking up his dramatic mantle in any way do you think?
Yes - I don’t know. I wouldn’t know who to point to. But we in the UK, as a peripheral operatic nation, have done much better by Janáček than many of the central operatic nations. I guess that we have an innate sympathy - though it is of course ridiculous to regard the Czechs as peripheral, when you think of the richness of their operatic repertoire - but in terms of this Germano-Austrian issue he is peripheral of course. I remember arguing that was one of the reasons why it was really necessary for John Tyrell to write his massive two-volume tome on Janáček. Because it was necessary to thump these great books onto the table and say ‘this is a composer who deserves this amount of space on your library shelves’!
So, in terms of putting Vixen alongside Lulu, that makes for a very interesting dialogue it seems to me.
Well that’s part of the point of twinning them and actually of asserting as I think I have - probably unwisely! - that of the two I think Janáček is by far the superior composer - in operatic terms at any rate.
Even with Wozzeck? I mean, putting aside Lulu perhaps?
Well, as you know I think Wozzeck is a kind of perfect opera so I mean obviously Berg is a very very good composer. But what Lulu exposes is that he is not a dramatist in the way that Janáček is. Because, faced with intractable material he doesn’t know how to sort it out, whereas look at what Janáček did, with Vixen coming from a cartoon and with House of the Dead being based on a great, rambling Dostoyevsky novel about people in a prison; how he just grips that and turns it into a musical-dramatic text.
Actually I have a sort of leap-frogging theory about Janáček’s operatic development. He wrote a series of what I call conventional works - conventional for Janáček anyway - with Jenůfa, Kát’a and Makropulos; although Makropulos has an odd content, it’s structure is a straightforward three-act play and it has a beginning and a middle and an end and tells a narrative story. Similarly, Kát’a is based on a play - it could be an Ibsen or other bourgeois play - and Jenůfa is also structured in a linear fashion and is a kind of final installation in the Czech tradition of operas about village life. But in between these operas come much stranger works, with Osud and The Excursions of Mr Brouček, which are hugely ambitious following Jenůfa. Osud still today is a hugely ambitious piece of dramaturgy, with flashbacks and a kind of collage drama pulling together choruses and a massive cast and little fragments - I mean it’s a film script really. And Brouček of course is a very complex double satire structure in which the satirising person, Mr. Brouček, is himself satirised. But Janáček encountered such trouble in composing and structuring these two pieces, let alone getting them performed and accepted, that he thinks, ‘oh crikey, I can’t go on like this’ - so then comes Kát’a, which was a retreat in dramaturgical terms. Then he thinks ‘ok now I’m ready to try again’ and then comes Vixen. Then he retreats again with Makropulos before having a last, final fling with House of the Dead. Well, I don’t suppose it worked out quite so neatly as that! - but you can see that sort of leap-frogging movement in his life.
Yes, that’s really interesting - you can see a real alternate leap and retrenchment there. And, in that way, Janáček’s hugely innovative drive just kept going right to the end.
You know, by the time he’d written House of the Dead, Janáček had pushed the genre as far as it was ever going to go in the twentieth century - there’s nothing in Benjamin Britten that’s as ambitious. So, apart from Shostakovich - the other person who pushed the genre in the same period with the Nose - nobody in the twentieth century went beyond what Janáček wrote; nobody.
David, thank you very much for speaking with me, it’s been a fascinating discussion.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.8: http://www.walesartsreview.org/interview-david-pountney-part-two/
SP: David, I believe you first produced The Cunning Little Vixen in 1980 as part of a large cycle of Janáček operas, staged in collaboration with Welsh National Opera when you were Director of Production at Scottish Opera?
DP: Yes, correct. We did five pieces; The Cunning Little Vixen, Kát’a Kabanová, the Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead and Jenůfa.
That was tremendously pioneering at the time and I wonder how it feels to you now, as Artistic Director of WNO, to be bringing Vixen back to the company?
Well I suppose it might seem like an act of vanity! But actually the point really was that, having been asked to do Lulu, I’ve always wanted to bring those two pieces together, so it seemed like the perfect moment to revive this, well, rather ancient production!
But do you find that each time it’s done, you come to the production with a combination of experience and fresh eyes so it becomes new - or renewed - in a tangible way?
Yes and also the Vixen has, as it so happens, matured into a classic - although it wasn’t necessarily perceived as such at the time as I recall. And, probably, we got better at doing it. It’s a complicated piece to mount and we put it on in quite unusual circumstances in Edinburgh - it was part of the Festival where preparation time is always very short because there are lots of other things going on. And the piece has matured in the ears and eyes of the audience I think; all these pieces seemed very strange and difficult at the time to many people and now the Vixen is evidently a kind of classic. And of course it’s been a very interesting perspective doing it alongside Lulu because everybody says, ‘oh it’s such a relief to come back to Vixen’!
Do they? That’s interesting!
Because it’s musically so much easier. Although people - I think particularly orchestral players - used always to regard Vixen as difficult because of the way Janáček writes. He’s not a very efficient writer – more to the point, I think he’s not really interested in efficiency.
No, and he writes difficult parts in extremes of register for the instruments.
Yes and he wrote things down in a way which could have been done more simply. But that’s all part of his energy and what he’s doing. I remember, one conductor said to me, well the whole point is that these scores should feel difficult to play; they’re not meant to be comfortable in the way that you might think of, say, Brahms’s symphonies as comfortable to play.
It seems ironic that Janáček’s been criticised for so-called ‘lack of technique’ and yet, in terms of dramatic vision, he achieves an extraordinary meld of music and drama. I think you once described Vixen as real Gesamtkunstwerk?
It’s the perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, yes. Because it’s the best piece of complex twentieth century dramaturgy in terms of the accuracy with which he uses all the different media of an opera composer; all the different forms are used with brilliant accuracy, exactly saying what they need to say in the right moment and with terrific concision. I think, dramaturgically, it’s a much better work than Lulu because he just focuses on what needs to be said, even when it’s pure comedy or slapstick - he’s always focuses on the point of the piece.
And tremendously innovative in terms of the genesis and the writing of the piece [which was based on a cartoon], incorporating elements of ballet, with children on-stage and choruses off-stage and so on?
Yes, and using this kind of collage technique where scenes are juxtaposed one against the other without necessarily being in a clear linear direction - every possibility of an opera composer’s toolkit is used with just terrific appropriateness.
As you say, Vixen’s become a much-loved part of the repertoire but it’s not a straightforward, pre-lapsarian, sentimental vision by any means is it? It’s multi-layered in its symbolism.
Very, very much so. It’s obviously a discussion about what is the role of nature, or of animal nature, within man - particularly sexuality, which is what makes it such an interesting comparison with Lulu. And it’s the way in which Janáček combines these themes. You have these animals who exist in actually quite a brutal, amoral universe in which they’re as much predators as victims - which is, of course, something that’s true about nature; something that’s frequently forgotten in our supermarket, clingfilm-wrapped world. But also he’s talking about the way in which the necessary limitations that human beings put on their animal feelings - and particularly their sexuality - to some extent atrophies into an inability to express those desires or those feelings, those necessities. So you also have a whole gallery of human characters who basically exhibit various traits of depression - and, of course, with great wit and intelligence he shows that the animals that have been domesticated also exhibit those same tendencies. So that, you know, we have these men who sit around in the pub fantasising about this woman who’s the sort of Lulu-Vixen equivalent.
Terynka?
Terynka - but we also have the fact that the dog is howling away because he doesn’t know what love is and has a frustrated love-life - with the Cock and the Hens also exhibiting some kind of gender-dysfunctional society. So, on the one hand, the human beings are criticized, or mocked even, for their repression and their up-tightness. But, on the other hand, in the guise of the Forester, we see a human character who is also granted a kind of amazing epiphany in the moment of his death. And, on top of that, there is a very optimistic, cyclical view of nature and rebirth - so it’s very, very complex. Written and composed, of course, by a man himself in his early seventies by this point, and clearly grappling with his own idea of mortality - as well as his own perhaps spasmodically functioning erotic life! It’s one of the most profound statements, I think, by any artist about the human condition in a huge range of ways.
It’s remarkable how Janáček manages to shift the dramatic focus so smoothly from Vixen Sharp Ears, once she’s been shot dead, onto the Forester and his final epiphany. So there’s no sense of negativity or loss when she dies; it’s about the totality of the cycle.
Yes, it’s a terrific trick to pull off isn’t it - to kill your main character in the first scene of the last act and give yourself time to really discuss the fact that life or death is not the most important thing but that actually it’s the continuum of nature which is important! A huge statement to make I think.
Throughout the opera, Sharp Ears basically gets away with taunting men about their sexuality - until the point at which she’s shot, when she goes a step too far perhaps?
Well I have analysed this point in the past and it’s quite clear why she’s shot, in the sense that she herself has been corrupted by her contact with human beings. Having received, as she says, her primary education at the hands of the Forester, she meets this figure the Poacher who is, in my view, a kind of satyr, being halfway between man and animal - which is why he’s able to kill her of course. When she meets him, she gets carried away by an entirely human preoccupation which is spouting a whole lot of bullshit about justice and cruelty to foxes. Whereas she should have remembered that when she spouted the same stuff to the Hens, it was a prelude to her murdering them! And so, what she forgets in this moment of being distracted into human moral bullshit, is the essential rule of self-preservation; she hangs around to harangue and politicise at the Poacher and therefore gets killed - well quite right too! That’ll teach her to get on her soapbox!
She gets on her soapbox quite a lot in the opera doesn’t she?
Mostly to entirely spurious ends. I mean, she harangues the poor Badger about his plutocrat accommodation and promptly uses that to evict him and move into his sett herself! So she’s absolutely shameless in that way and that’s why it isn’t a tragedy when she’s shot. It’s just part of the ongoing battle between different sections of the natural order, of which the men and women are also part.
Terynka never actually appears in the opera but the men spend lots of time sitting around wishing she was in their lives.
Another stroke of extraordinary originality! Terynka is a leading character, but she never appears! She is the fantasy figure that haunts all these men in their mid-life crises, their impotence. The piece is a paean to the urges of nature and how essential they are and as part of reproduction and all of that. So the Forester’s epiphany is in no way a resignation in any kind of bogus religious way of giving up on stuff.
No, it seems pantheist in a raw, primeval sense. And, again, optimistic but not sentimental!
Yes, I think the whole, last act is absolutely amazing compositionally. Because, first of all, you get Sharp Ears’s death and then Janáček composes a kind of elegy which manages to be very moving without being in the least bit sentimental. This builds into a celebration of life and death - and I think also of hunting; of one of the primary human instincts - or, of course, animal instincts. And the hunter and the hunted are there as two poles of that. Then this moment of joy rooted in the truth of nature morphs into an extraordinary final Inn scene, which is a scene of farewells and resignation, full of human repression. So we’ve had this wild man of the woods, the Poacher, who’s shot his gun off, with Sharp Ears lying dead as a result, and then we meet these morbid, repressed men sitting around regretting things they’ve not done or missed or women they haven’t slept with or whatever. Again, Janáček succeeds in taking this sort of banal and rather despicable, trivial scene and elevating it into an extraordinary musical expression of compassion for these rather pathetic human beings and the way they talk about the past and about who’s no longer in the parish. Just one word is used to describe the absent Parson when the Innkeeper’s wife says he’s ‘lonely’; just one word - and there’s a moment of silence where they look at his empty chair. It’s incredibly poignant and brilliantly done - and all in twelve bars or something! Then it erupts into this magnificent final epiphany for the Forester. It’s an amazing achievement to have packed in that amount of perfectly judged emotion and understanding about human nature and about nature itself.
You know, the more full of bullshit we become about animals the more significant the piece becomes. We used to have what I would describe as a great ritual about the truth of human beings and animals, which was our whole visual pageant of fox hunting. But we vandalised that in the most pathetic way for totally spurious reasons. Whether you like hunting or not is irrelevant; the fact is, it did express a truth that cannot be found on a supermarket shelf with a plastic-wrapped chicken - that we are in a cruel universe! Behaviour in nature is not perfect and is not politically correct - it’s not sanitised, it’s predatory, that’s the way it is. If you’re so fastidious that you can’t put up with those truths, then you try to suppress them and I think, you know, that’s dishonest.
For me, that deeper, amoral essence of human and animal nature comes across very powerfully in the opera and there’s certainly none of that ‘animals - good, humans - bad’ nonsense that you get when people sentimentalise about animals or nature generally. I wonder, too, if there’s something here about Janáček’s use of what’s been described as ‘speech melody’; whether his pithy use of simple, repeated phrases and musical ostinati coming out of the Czech language is also somehow part of his getting to the crux of things?
Well, I’ve often used this idea that the cellular development of Janáček’s music starts from these speech patterns - he really uses that to create the DNA of his characters; it’s as if he’s writing down a sort of DNA code of who these people actually are! The originality of his work as an opera composer is just staggering. If you take the first scene - even putting aside the way in which it moves in and out of ballet and so on as a way of laying out the opening of an opera - it’s incredibly astute dramaturgically. When the Forester comes on, he’s tired and hot and wants to lie down and have a nap, and he talks about how his rifle has become his sweetheart. So the whole idea of the atrophy of human erotic activity is right there in the very first few words of the opera. And the interesting thing is that the music doesn’t accompany the Forester at all! The music is furiously energetic, sparkling with detail like a sort of Bartókian insect world, describing the forest buzzing and heaving with life and energy. And here’s this guy who comes on and sort of says ‘oh my God, it’s hot and [yawns and stretches] I want to lie down and my missus won’t notice, she’s a good wife, and anyway my rifle’s really my sweetheart....[snores]’. And so he’s in a completely different tempo to the whole orchestra. If that was Berg, people would have written essays and chapters about it - but it’s just Janáček’s instinctive way of describing two things at once in the way he’s setting the scene!
Janáček has still not really been admitted to the ‘great pantheon’ of the modernists has he, despite his extraordinary innovations?
Well it’s taken Boulez many many years to get round to Janáček. Finally he has done some in the last few years!
It’s taken him a long while indeed and, from a music-history point of view, there’s still a lingering, ridiculous sort of idea that anybody outside a perceived central Austro-German strand is somehow peripheral to musical development.
Oh it’s a kind of racism. The Germans don’t think anybody Czech can be serious - that they’re sort of whimsical.
I think Sibelius suffers from this problem too.
Definitely. Certainly, in Vienna people still don’t take Sibelius seriously because Mahler didn’t.
No, and nor did Adorno. And, despite his tremendous creative developments it seems to me that Janáček’s worth is still in some ways not fully appreciated, operatically. I was wondering who, of contemporary composers - if anyone - might be said to be taking up his dramatic mantle in any way do you think?
Yes - I don’t know. I wouldn’t know who to point to. But we in the UK, as a peripheral operatic nation, have done much better by Janáček than many of the central operatic nations. I guess that we have an innate sympathy - though it is of course ridiculous to regard the Czechs as peripheral, when you think of the richness of their operatic repertoire - but in terms of this Germano-Austrian issue he is peripheral of course. I remember arguing that was one of the reasons why it was really necessary for John Tyrell to write his massive two-volume tome on Janáček. Because it was necessary to thump these great books onto the table and say ‘this is a composer who deserves this amount of space on your library shelves’!
So, in terms of putting Vixen alongside Lulu, that makes for a very interesting dialogue it seems to me.
Well that’s part of the point of twinning them and actually of asserting as I think I have - probably unwisely! - that of the two I think Janáček is by far the superior composer - in operatic terms at any rate.
Even with Wozzeck? I mean, putting aside Lulu perhaps?
Well, as you know I think Wozzeck is a kind of perfect opera so I mean obviously Berg is a very very good composer. But what Lulu exposes is that he is not a dramatist in the way that Janáček is. Because, faced with intractable material he doesn’t know how to sort it out, whereas look at what Janáček did, with Vixen coming from a cartoon and with House of the Dead being based on a great, rambling Dostoyevsky novel about people in a prison; how he just grips that and turns it into a musical-dramatic text.
Actually I have a sort of leap-frogging theory about Janáček’s operatic development. He wrote a series of what I call conventional works - conventional for Janáček anyway - with Jenůfa, Kát’a and Makropulos; although Makropulos has an odd content, it’s structure is a straightforward three-act play and it has a beginning and a middle and an end and tells a narrative story. Similarly, Kát’a is based on a play - it could be an Ibsen or other bourgeois play - and Jenůfa is also structured in a linear fashion and is a kind of final installation in the Czech tradition of operas about village life. But in between these operas come much stranger works, with Osud and The Excursions of Mr Brouček, which are hugely ambitious following Jenůfa. Osud still today is a hugely ambitious piece of dramaturgy, with flashbacks and a kind of collage drama pulling together choruses and a massive cast and little fragments - I mean it’s a film script really. And Brouček of course is a very complex double satire structure in which the satirising person, Mr. Brouček, is himself satirised. But Janáček encountered such trouble in composing and structuring these two pieces, let alone getting them performed and accepted, that he thinks, ‘oh crikey, I can’t go on like this’ - so then comes Kát’a, which was a retreat in dramaturgical terms. Then he thinks ‘ok now I’m ready to try again’ and then comes Vixen. Then he retreats again with Makropulos before having a last, final fling with House of the Dead. Well, I don’t suppose it worked out quite so neatly as that! - but you can see that sort of leap-frogging movement in his life.
Yes, that’s really interesting - you can see a real alternate leap and retrenchment there. And, in that way, Janáček’s hugely innovative drive just kept going right to the end.
You know, by the time he’d written House of the Dead, Janáček had pushed the genre as far as it was ever going to go in the twentieth century - there’s nothing in Benjamin Britten that’s as ambitious. So, apart from Shostakovich - the other person who pushed the genre in the same period with the Nose - nobody in the twentieth century went beyond what Janáček wrote; nobody.
David, thank you very much for speaking with me, it’s been a fascinating discussion.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.8: http://www.walesartsreview.org/interview-david-pountney-part-two/
Interview in Two Parts: David Pountney, Artistic Director of Welsh National Opera. 1: Alban Berg's 'Lulu'
David Pountney is an opera director and producer of international distinction and was appointed Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Welsh National Opera in September 2011. He won renown for his pioneering Janáček cycle in collaboration with Welsh National Opera as Director of Production for Scottish Opera (1975-80) and his subsequent staging of over twenty operas including Rusalka, Osud, The Midsummer Marriage, Doctor Faust and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for English National Opera, where he became Director of Productions in 1980. He has directed over ten world premieres, including three by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for which he also wrote the libretto, and has translated many operas into English from Russian, Czech, German and Italian. As a freelance Director from 1992 he has worked regularly in Zürich, at the Vienna State Opera, at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich as well as opera houses in America and Japan, and in the UK has a long-standing association with Opera North. He has won numerous international awards and is a CBE and a Chevalier in the French Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
In the first of two interviews, David spoke about Alban Berg’s Lulu, his significant first staging of the complete, three-act work in Wales, ahead of opening night at Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre.
SP: David, Lulu is your first new production for Welsh National Opera as Artistic Director. I was wondering what attracted you to the piece. What drew you to Lulu?
DP: Well Lulu is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century opera. First of all, it’s a fantastic play and a fantastic concept of a central character - which comes from Wedekind, obviously. Berg is one of the leading thinkers about opera of the twentieth century, so it’s amazing to have that combination with the invention of a really strikingly individual character. Actually, there are not many stories in the world - didn’t somebody say there are only seven basic plots?
Yes - the bases for myths.
But you know Lulu comes close to being the invention of a new character - although she obviously has very clear connections with Carmen and Don Giovanni; they’re all trying to do the same thing in a way. But no, it’s fascinating to have that combination of Berg’s re-thinking about musical language and his espousal of what was then very revolutionary dramatic ideas of Wedekind. So it’s a very exciting piece to do. Fun actually, a lot of fun.
Where do you feel that Lulu sits on that continuum between, say, post-Romantic tragedy, black comedy and quite serious social critique?
There is quite a lot of black comedy in the piece and I would say that it observes society in quite a cynical way, but without necessarily being a critique of it; at least, it doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve and there’s not much attempt to make you feel sorry for Lulu. Lulu is at the same time a victim and a perpetrator and that’s one of the interesting things about combining this opera with The Cunning Little Vixen this season. Because the vixen herself, like any predatory animal, is potentially a victim - of us, for example - and also a predator of all kinds of other, less powerful creatures. And Lulu inhabits very much the same kind of world.
I quite often see Lulu as a mirror for those characters around her. I don’t know if you agree with that? It’s as if she’s a huge character, and yet she’s not a character in her own right.
I think that’s absolutely correct, yes. To me she’s a spirit. The first play of Wedekind’s is called Earth Spirit and Lulu is not really a person - and that’s made clear in a way by the fact that nobody’s quite sure what her name is and nobody knows where she came from. There’s a lot of discussion about who her father might be.
Whether he’s Schigolch?
Yes, exactly. So she’s a mythic being really and I’ve made that quite clear in the production. And, as you absolutely rightly say, you learn what she is by watching everybody else go crazy around her. So I’m deliberately adopting a strategy in the production of not making her too extravagant. Sometimes people play Lulu by throwing their legs around and taking their clothes off; that, to my mind, is not what erotic power is - it’s much more to do with suggestion. Just simply the magnetism of somebody walking into the room and everybody thinking ‘I want to sleep with that person’. There are people who have that without flaunting it or doing anything or being overt about it.
In terms of the piece as a dramatic whole, it’s quite notorious really for being paradoxical, in that the dialogue, the plot and the intensely emotional music are quite often juxtaposed.
Well, Wedekind was deliberately protesting against the kind of bourgeois drama where everybody takes themselves terribly seriously.
The whole naturalist, realist movement?
Yes - and I think you can sense that. I think what really destroyed that - and the entire pretension of taking almost anything seriously - was the First World War, which was a gigantic catastrophe. All those things like patriotism and religion and politics - all those ground bases of society up to that point - were shown themselves to be involved in the First World War in a totally disgusting way. That created such a tide of reaction, and one of the things that reaction produced was Dada. The point about Dada is that it sees everything as absurd; and so Dada took everything that people had taken seriously - like religion and politics and belief in your country and morals - and revealed them to be, in a certain sense and in certain circumstances, absurd. Wedekind very much picks up on that idea - so that’s why you have in Lulu that amazing gallery of absurd figures.
- The ‘freaks’.
Freaks, caricatures. Because he’s saying it doesn’t matter who you are - a bit like Leporello’s catalogue. It doesn’t matter whether you’re thin, fat, tall or rich, poor, ugly, beautiful - Lulu’s erotic power possesses all those people equally. And that destroys the whole edifice of importance or class or respect; all those orders of society are completely subverted by this power which treats them all with equal indifference. I suppose, in that sense, Lulu has the same function as the famous play by Schnitzler, La Ronde, where, in a group of people, the prostitute sleeps with the soldier, the soldier sleeps with the countess, the countess sleeps with the farmer, the farmer sleeps with the tax collector, the tax collector sleeps with the prostitute and so on. By the end, everybody’s slept with everybody else by a distance of one or two or whatever. And it’s that same kind of feeling with Lulu; a leveling of all these things that have separated everybody into a kind of hierarchy.
And so, pulling apart the social hypocrisy.
Yes exactly. But, alongside that, there’s also another reason for the consistent element of humour, clowning, circus and cabaret; this world of popular entertainment is important in Lulu, partly because of that idea of not taking anything too seriously. Though it has to be said, the music takes itself very seriously!
It does!
And that’s another story in a way! But, picking up on the Dadaist tendency, that is something that’s reflected right across the art of that period. If one thinks of all those paintings of harlequins and circuses - of all those Picasso circus paintings and of Max Beckmann - and all the people who were fascinated, in that period, by popular art. That was very much a move away from seriousness, or pretentious seriousness.
The whole idea of the pierrot figure is present in Lulu with her portrait - which, in the score is described by Berg as a portrait of her dressed as a pierrot. Do you incorporate the portrait into your production?
I’ve done the portrait in quite a different sort of way. First of all, it’s a sculpture and, secondly, it’s based on - or really is a copy of - the work of a very eccentric artist called Hans Bellmer. Bellmer made all kinds of constructions of nearly always female limbs, so that he objectified the body, if you like, in a very provocative way. Because, again, he’s saying: these are just limbs. The whole idea of the portrait or the nude has been the embodiment of a sort of beauty; of nature, or the goddess within man, or whatever. But Bellmer deliberately subverts all that - also in a kind of Dadaist, rather absurdist way - by producing these kind of assemblies of parts; actually, he started out by working with doll parts and there’s a whole series called Bellmer’s Dolls. So he very neatly captures that feeling of an absurdist vision mixed with an element of perversion - which is undoubtedly also lurking there in the Lulu story. I mean, part of the Lulu story is a story about a young woman who’s been groomed for under-age sex - which, of course, strikes a very powerful chord with us today.
Yes, very much so - and which goes right back to the questioning of sexuality and identity that happened across fin de siècle Vienna, running right through to the Anschluss really.
Yes, absolutely.
In terms of Lulu as a second opera, do you see it as having moved on, as it were, in dramatic vision from Wozzeck - which, in some respects, is a much more straightforward depiction of someone who’s a victim of circumstance?
Strictly in terms of pure operatic achievement on a very high level, Lulu is a decline from Wozzeck - and there’s a very simple reason for that. The author of the Wozzeck play, Georg Büchner - who lived a great many years earlier - was an incredibly revolutionary writer. He devised a completely new way of structuring a play, with very short scenes making a kind of collage that add up to a story. And he constructed these short scenes out of amazingly economical, pithy sentences. This was the most perfect opera libretto that you could ever imagine, as one of the things that you most want from a libretto is for it to be incredibly concise - because music always multiplies the length of time it takes to say any sentence by four! So the Büchner was an amazing libretto, both in terms of its concision and in terms of its scenic structure, which allowed Berg to create a kind of string of pearls; short moments which absolutely define the progress of the story. But when he came to Wedekind, he was facing somebody who had really no structure at all.
Very sprawling actually.
Yes, Wedekind wrote two incredibly sprawling plays that are pretty much unperformable even today as they stand, in that everybody has to cut them in some way. And, you know, Berg did cut a great deal of the plays. But I think actually, in order to have achieved another opera as compelling as Wozzeck, he would have needed to cut another third of the text. And that’s one of the reasons why he didn’t finish Lulu. It’s tragic really. I always say that if he could have got on a train and taken a short trip to Brno and gone to Janáček and said ‘excuse me Leoš, how would you cut this play’, Janáček would have got his pen out and gone like this [makes large crossing-out motions].
Yes I can imagine that!
Then you’d end up with a few little lovely sentences here and there! You know, Berg was much too in awe of Wedekind, and too respectful of him. So, with each scene you think, ‘there are five sentences unnecessary in this scene’.
Of course, having said that, we are talking on a very high level and it’s still a fantastic piece. But it just doesn’t get to the very hard to reach level of absolute perfection that Wozzeck arrives at. Nonetheless, it is a fantastic experience to do and to watch and to listen to.
Somehow I think it’s flaws make it compelling in a way - that sense of wondering what Berg was striving for, which is so fascinating.
Well, Wedekind did create this character who is, in the last analysis, absolutely unknowable. Whereas in Wozzeck, you end up being very clear about who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator and about what’s gone wrong. Lulu is deeply ambiguous because it’s examining an aspect that is within all of us and which we all suppress - which we need to suppress because otherwise we’d all destroy each other! Hopefully, each of us finds one or two moments in our life when we can let that out; run rampage for a bit. But you couldn’t go on like that for very long.
No, society would fall apart!
Yes!
Coming back to the idea of cuts, I understand that you’ve chosen to use Eberhard Kloke’s new completion of the Third Act. Could you say something about that? What led you not to use the Cerha?
Well you know the Cerha is, from a scholastic point of view, utterly worthy, and done with indefatigable attention to detail. Cerha probably got as close as it was possible to get to exactly what appeared to be the case regarding the state in which Berg left the score when he died. But, particularly with a piece as dense and as complicated as Lulu, none of us can really know what Berg might have done had he gone on to revise it. And he did say himself that he needed to start again from the beginning and revise the whole piece - he was aware himself that it wasn’t perfect.
I think the fact is that the Paris scene - which is the main difference in Kloke’s revision - is, in its full-blown Cerha version, something which completely defeats the audience’s energy and ability to concentrate, and so to sustain their interest through to the magnificent final scene - which is one of the great scenes of all opera. So I think the Paris scene as Kloke has it is considerably shorter - or, at least, it opens options to making cuts, which we enthusiastically embraced! It’s just much more transparent and fluid and fast-moving and gets us through what is a kind of cabaret scene in itself, without overburdening that scene with too much detail and too much portentous significance so that we’re all ready - I think the final scene will make a much greater impact on the audience because they’re not being inundated with density and complexity beforehand. So I hope that it will really work in a positive way. I mean, nobody can say necessarily ‘yes, Mr Kloke’s version is much better as a scholar of Berg than Mr Cerha’s version’ but I’m not really bothered either way about that argument - I’m bothered about what makes it a good evening for the audience.
In terms of another aspect of where Lulu sits within early Twentieth Century opera, there’s recently been growing interest in composers like Franz Schreker and Zemlinsky and Korngold. Do you think that that interest, and the growing awareness of their work, opens up an avenue for reassessment of where an opera like Lulu might sit within that?
Well I suppose to some extent, the survival of certain masterpieces in each generation means that you lose the context in which they were created. Most of the time, that’s a pretty good thing because there are a certain number of first-class operas and a certain number of second-class operas - and you don’t really want to be bothered with the third-class operas! The second-class operas can often be extremely interesting. But always, you’re left with these tips of the iceberg that survive down into history and you don’t know - and probably don’t want to know - about all the stuff that’s sunk.
But there was a particularly artificial reason why we got cut off from the early twentieth century pieces - which was a staggeringly creative period. I mean, people tend to think the 19th Century with Verdi and Wagner was the great period but, if one looks at what was written in the twenties and thirties, it’s absolutely amazing what an inspirational outburst of creativity there was, centred mainly in Germany of course. And what really happened was that, first of all, the Nazis banned them all - which, in a way, wouldn’t in itself have mattered very much since the Nazis didn’t last very long. But then, in reaction to the Second World War, the whole modernist element of musical taste banned them again! So all the post-Romantic or late-Romantic composers first of all had to suffer Hitler - and then they had to suffer Boulez! - There was a very damaging kind of hardline view. And one only has to look at what happened to Goldschmidt at the BBC; he’d written one or two really splendid operas but he was relentlessly ignored by the BBC because it thought we didn’t want to go back into that late-Romantic quagmire, out of which people claimed - I think quite wrongly and unfairly - that the whole poison of Nazism had arisen.
So in a way those composers suffered doubly and so, yes, there is a good case for re-evaluating those pieces - and Lulu - within the whole period.
Thank you very much for your time David. I’m really looking forward to Lulu and to continuing our discussion with The Cunning Little Vixon.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.6: http://www.walesartsreview.org/an-interview-with-david-pountney-artistic-director-of-wno/
In the first of two interviews, David spoke about Alban Berg’s Lulu, his significant first staging of the complete, three-act work in Wales, ahead of opening night at Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre.
SP: David, Lulu is your first new production for Welsh National Opera as Artistic Director. I was wondering what attracted you to the piece. What drew you to Lulu?
DP: Well Lulu is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century opera. First of all, it’s a fantastic play and a fantastic concept of a central character - which comes from Wedekind, obviously. Berg is one of the leading thinkers about opera of the twentieth century, so it’s amazing to have that combination with the invention of a really strikingly individual character. Actually, there are not many stories in the world - didn’t somebody say there are only seven basic plots?
Yes - the bases for myths.
But you know Lulu comes close to being the invention of a new character - although she obviously has very clear connections with Carmen and Don Giovanni; they’re all trying to do the same thing in a way. But no, it’s fascinating to have that combination of Berg’s re-thinking about musical language and his espousal of what was then very revolutionary dramatic ideas of Wedekind. So it’s a very exciting piece to do. Fun actually, a lot of fun.
Where do you feel that Lulu sits on that continuum between, say, post-Romantic tragedy, black comedy and quite serious social critique?
There is quite a lot of black comedy in the piece and I would say that it observes society in quite a cynical way, but without necessarily being a critique of it; at least, it doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve and there’s not much attempt to make you feel sorry for Lulu. Lulu is at the same time a victim and a perpetrator and that’s one of the interesting things about combining this opera with The Cunning Little Vixen this season. Because the vixen herself, like any predatory animal, is potentially a victim - of us, for example - and also a predator of all kinds of other, less powerful creatures. And Lulu inhabits very much the same kind of world.
I quite often see Lulu as a mirror for those characters around her. I don’t know if you agree with that? It’s as if she’s a huge character, and yet she’s not a character in her own right.
I think that’s absolutely correct, yes. To me she’s a spirit. The first play of Wedekind’s is called Earth Spirit and Lulu is not really a person - and that’s made clear in a way by the fact that nobody’s quite sure what her name is and nobody knows where she came from. There’s a lot of discussion about who her father might be.
Whether he’s Schigolch?
Yes, exactly. So she’s a mythic being really and I’ve made that quite clear in the production. And, as you absolutely rightly say, you learn what she is by watching everybody else go crazy around her. So I’m deliberately adopting a strategy in the production of not making her too extravagant. Sometimes people play Lulu by throwing their legs around and taking their clothes off; that, to my mind, is not what erotic power is - it’s much more to do with suggestion. Just simply the magnetism of somebody walking into the room and everybody thinking ‘I want to sleep with that person’. There are people who have that without flaunting it or doing anything or being overt about it.
In terms of the piece as a dramatic whole, it’s quite notorious really for being paradoxical, in that the dialogue, the plot and the intensely emotional music are quite often juxtaposed.
Well, Wedekind was deliberately protesting against the kind of bourgeois drama where everybody takes themselves terribly seriously.
The whole naturalist, realist movement?
Yes - and I think you can sense that. I think what really destroyed that - and the entire pretension of taking almost anything seriously - was the First World War, which was a gigantic catastrophe. All those things like patriotism and religion and politics - all those ground bases of society up to that point - were shown themselves to be involved in the First World War in a totally disgusting way. That created such a tide of reaction, and one of the things that reaction produced was Dada. The point about Dada is that it sees everything as absurd; and so Dada took everything that people had taken seriously - like religion and politics and belief in your country and morals - and revealed them to be, in a certain sense and in certain circumstances, absurd. Wedekind very much picks up on that idea - so that’s why you have in Lulu that amazing gallery of absurd figures.
- The ‘freaks’.
Freaks, caricatures. Because he’s saying it doesn’t matter who you are - a bit like Leporello’s catalogue. It doesn’t matter whether you’re thin, fat, tall or rich, poor, ugly, beautiful - Lulu’s erotic power possesses all those people equally. And that destroys the whole edifice of importance or class or respect; all those orders of society are completely subverted by this power which treats them all with equal indifference. I suppose, in that sense, Lulu has the same function as the famous play by Schnitzler, La Ronde, where, in a group of people, the prostitute sleeps with the soldier, the soldier sleeps with the countess, the countess sleeps with the farmer, the farmer sleeps with the tax collector, the tax collector sleeps with the prostitute and so on. By the end, everybody’s slept with everybody else by a distance of one or two or whatever. And it’s that same kind of feeling with Lulu; a leveling of all these things that have separated everybody into a kind of hierarchy.
And so, pulling apart the social hypocrisy.
Yes exactly. But, alongside that, there’s also another reason for the consistent element of humour, clowning, circus and cabaret; this world of popular entertainment is important in Lulu, partly because of that idea of not taking anything too seriously. Though it has to be said, the music takes itself very seriously!
It does!
And that’s another story in a way! But, picking up on the Dadaist tendency, that is something that’s reflected right across the art of that period. If one thinks of all those paintings of harlequins and circuses - of all those Picasso circus paintings and of Max Beckmann - and all the people who were fascinated, in that period, by popular art. That was very much a move away from seriousness, or pretentious seriousness.
The whole idea of the pierrot figure is present in Lulu with her portrait - which, in the score is described by Berg as a portrait of her dressed as a pierrot. Do you incorporate the portrait into your production?
I’ve done the portrait in quite a different sort of way. First of all, it’s a sculpture and, secondly, it’s based on - or really is a copy of - the work of a very eccentric artist called Hans Bellmer. Bellmer made all kinds of constructions of nearly always female limbs, so that he objectified the body, if you like, in a very provocative way. Because, again, he’s saying: these are just limbs. The whole idea of the portrait or the nude has been the embodiment of a sort of beauty; of nature, or the goddess within man, or whatever. But Bellmer deliberately subverts all that - also in a kind of Dadaist, rather absurdist way - by producing these kind of assemblies of parts; actually, he started out by working with doll parts and there’s a whole series called Bellmer’s Dolls. So he very neatly captures that feeling of an absurdist vision mixed with an element of perversion - which is undoubtedly also lurking there in the Lulu story. I mean, part of the Lulu story is a story about a young woman who’s been groomed for under-age sex - which, of course, strikes a very powerful chord with us today.
Yes, very much so - and which goes right back to the questioning of sexuality and identity that happened across fin de siècle Vienna, running right through to the Anschluss really.
Yes, absolutely.
In terms of Lulu as a second opera, do you see it as having moved on, as it were, in dramatic vision from Wozzeck - which, in some respects, is a much more straightforward depiction of someone who’s a victim of circumstance?
Strictly in terms of pure operatic achievement on a very high level, Lulu is a decline from Wozzeck - and there’s a very simple reason for that. The author of the Wozzeck play, Georg Büchner - who lived a great many years earlier - was an incredibly revolutionary writer. He devised a completely new way of structuring a play, with very short scenes making a kind of collage that add up to a story. And he constructed these short scenes out of amazingly economical, pithy sentences. This was the most perfect opera libretto that you could ever imagine, as one of the things that you most want from a libretto is for it to be incredibly concise - because music always multiplies the length of time it takes to say any sentence by four! So the Büchner was an amazing libretto, both in terms of its concision and in terms of its scenic structure, which allowed Berg to create a kind of string of pearls; short moments which absolutely define the progress of the story. But when he came to Wedekind, he was facing somebody who had really no structure at all.
Very sprawling actually.
Yes, Wedekind wrote two incredibly sprawling plays that are pretty much unperformable even today as they stand, in that everybody has to cut them in some way. And, you know, Berg did cut a great deal of the plays. But I think actually, in order to have achieved another opera as compelling as Wozzeck, he would have needed to cut another third of the text. And that’s one of the reasons why he didn’t finish Lulu. It’s tragic really. I always say that if he could have got on a train and taken a short trip to Brno and gone to Janáček and said ‘excuse me Leoš, how would you cut this play’, Janáček would have got his pen out and gone like this [makes large crossing-out motions].
Yes I can imagine that!
Then you’d end up with a few little lovely sentences here and there! You know, Berg was much too in awe of Wedekind, and too respectful of him. So, with each scene you think, ‘there are five sentences unnecessary in this scene’.
Of course, having said that, we are talking on a very high level and it’s still a fantastic piece. But it just doesn’t get to the very hard to reach level of absolute perfection that Wozzeck arrives at. Nonetheless, it is a fantastic experience to do and to watch and to listen to.
Somehow I think it’s flaws make it compelling in a way - that sense of wondering what Berg was striving for, which is so fascinating.
Well, Wedekind did create this character who is, in the last analysis, absolutely unknowable. Whereas in Wozzeck, you end up being very clear about who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator and about what’s gone wrong. Lulu is deeply ambiguous because it’s examining an aspect that is within all of us and which we all suppress - which we need to suppress because otherwise we’d all destroy each other! Hopefully, each of us finds one or two moments in our life when we can let that out; run rampage for a bit. But you couldn’t go on like that for very long.
No, society would fall apart!
Yes!
Coming back to the idea of cuts, I understand that you’ve chosen to use Eberhard Kloke’s new completion of the Third Act. Could you say something about that? What led you not to use the Cerha?
Well you know the Cerha is, from a scholastic point of view, utterly worthy, and done with indefatigable attention to detail. Cerha probably got as close as it was possible to get to exactly what appeared to be the case regarding the state in which Berg left the score when he died. But, particularly with a piece as dense and as complicated as Lulu, none of us can really know what Berg might have done had he gone on to revise it. And he did say himself that he needed to start again from the beginning and revise the whole piece - he was aware himself that it wasn’t perfect.
I think the fact is that the Paris scene - which is the main difference in Kloke’s revision - is, in its full-blown Cerha version, something which completely defeats the audience’s energy and ability to concentrate, and so to sustain their interest through to the magnificent final scene - which is one of the great scenes of all opera. So I think the Paris scene as Kloke has it is considerably shorter - or, at least, it opens options to making cuts, which we enthusiastically embraced! It’s just much more transparent and fluid and fast-moving and gets us through what is a kind of cabaret scene in itself, without overburdening that scene with too much detail and too much portentous significance so that we’re all ready - I think the final scene will make a much greater impact on the audience because they’re not being inundated with density and complexity beforehand. So I hope that it will really work in a positive way. I mean, nobody can say necessarily ‘yes, Mr Kloke’s version is much better as a scholar of Berg than Mr Cerha’s version’ but I’m not really bothered either way about that argument - I’m bothered about what makes it a good evening for the audience.
In terms of another aspect of where Lulu sits within early Twentieth Century opera, there’s recently been growing interest in composers like Franz Schreker and Zemlinsky and Korngold. Do you think that that interest, and the growing awareness of their work, opens up an avenue for reassessment of where an opera like Lulu might sit within that?
Well I suppose to some extent, the survival of certain masterpieces in each generation means that you lose the context in which they were created. Most of the time, that’s a pretty good thing because there are a certain number of first-class operas and a certain number of second-class operas - and you don’t really want to be bothered with the third-class operas! The second-class operas can often be extremely interesting. But always, you’re left with these tips of the iceberg that survive down into history and you don’t know - and probably don’t want to know - about all the stuff that’s sunk.
But there was a particularly artificial reason why we got cut off from the early twentieth century pieces - which was a staggeringly creative period. I mean, people tend to think the 19th Century with Verdi and Wagner was the great period but, if one looks at what was written in the twenties and thirties, it’s absolutely amazing what an inspirational outburst of creativity there was, centred mainly in Germany of course. And what really happened was that, first of all, the Nazis banned them all - which, in a way, wouldn’t in itself have mattered very much since the Nazis didn’t last very long. But then, in reaction to the Second World War, the whole modernist element of musical taste banned them again! So all the post-Romantic or late-Romantic composers first of all had to suffer Hitler - and then they had to suffer Boulez! - There was a very damaging kind of hardline view. And one only has to look at what happened to Goldschmidt at the BBC; he’d written one or two really splendid operas but he was relentlessly ignored by the BBC because it thought we didn’t want to go back into that late-Romantic quagmire, out of which people claimed - I think quite wrongly and unfairly - that the whole poison of Nazism had arisen.
So in a way those composers suffered doubly and so, yes, there is a good case for re-evaluating those pieces - and Lulu - within the whole period.
Thank you very much for your time David. I’m really looking forward to Lulu and to continuing our discussion with The Cunning Little Vixon.
Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.6: http://www.walesartsreview.org/an-interview-with-david-pountney-artistic-director-of-wno/
Sunday, 10 March 2013
Interview: Soprano Marie Arnet
Soprano Marie Arnet was born in Sweden and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at the National Opera Studio. Her repertoire spans ancient and modern. Recent operatic appearances have included Eurydice in Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, and Pamina and Despina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Così fan tutte respectively, as well as Harey in the world première of Detlev Glanert’s Solaris at the Bregenz Festival. Amongst many other roles, she has also appeared as Mélisande in Debussy’s Pelleas and Mélisande and Sophie in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and is now winning critical acclaim for her performance as the central character in Alban Berg’s Lulu in a significant new staging for Welsh National Opera by Artistic Director David Pountney, conducted by Lothar Koenigs.
Lulu is one of the most challenging roles in the entire operatic repertoire and Marie spoke with Steph Power about that and about the ambiguous nature of Lulu herself the day before opening night at the Wales Millennium Centre.
SP Marie, you’ve sung lots of Mozart, you’ve sung Eurydice recently and also Sophie in Strauss’s Rosenkavalier - as well as Debussy’s Mélisande - but I believe this is your first tackling of a Berg part. How are you finding it?
MA Well it’s been probably the most difficult thing I’ve done so far! You always say that when you start learning a part but I had such little time to learn Lulu [two and a half months! - S] and I have cursed poor Alban Berg so many times for making it so difficult! Having said that, when you arrive at the end result of course you know it is the work of a genius. But he is a control freak and everything - even the pistol shots - have to be done in tempo. He even wrote a complete set of diagrams showing where people are supposed to be on stage at particular moments - it’s in the score - it had to be structured how he wanted! It’s so perfectly done that you can see why, but it does leave you feeling slightly straitjacketed at times.
Do you think that feeling relaxes as you get into the production?
I think it already has, yes. You learn to live with it and to trust that there’s a reason why he did it that way. It’s a bit like working with a director; you may not initially agree with his ideas but if you trust him - or her - you will go with it because you know there’s a reason. And so I do trust Alban Berg in that sense and yes, it just takes a bit of time to let it sink in I think.
Technically it’s a tremendously varied role isn’t it, with lots of different weights of voice needed.
Yes - I mean, who did he write that for?! I also think there is a problem in that Berg didn’t finish the opera, because I think if he had had time to finish it, he would have revised it. Not necessarily the tessitura but the whole structure of the opera because it feels imbalanced - Act 1 is no longer than Act 2 but it feels longer and slightly schizophrenic - as opposed to Act 3 which almost feels like a different opera. I mean you recognise the music but vocally it’s in a completely different tessitura and it feels like a different part.
The ending of Lulu is controversial; Friedrich Cerha made the completion that’s been standard until recently and WNO opted to use Eberhard Kloke’s new version of Act 3 for this production. But vocally, that first scene of Act 3, the Paris scene, has always been tremendously difficult because of the thickness of the textures and the chaotic ensembles I believe?
Yes it’s absolutely mad - a cacophony of voices really! But also I think Berg would have revised the first two acts to match Act 3 had he lived. I mean Acts 1 and 2 are perfect in their own right, but I think if he had finished Act 3, he would have looked over the whole thing. Because, if you think about how he intended the opera to be a mirror piece, at the moment it’s going to here [makes a peak] then somehow it drizzles down at the end. Act 3 should in a sense balance Act 1, but it really doesn’t. Not musically, not vocally, it’s just not the same and has a different drama.
All the big set pieces, if you like, for Lulu’s character are in the first half of the opera.
Yes, the most difficult is Act 1.
That’s where you have Meines Mannes, which is spoken. That in itself is interesting because that’s the first time we hear Lulu actually say who she might be.
Yes, she gives a glimpse of herself and the relationships she might have. It’s weird - every time she’s with Dr Schön, they argue. They never have a scene where you see the loving connection; she says at the point she kills him that he’s the only person she’s ever loved, but you wonder what kind of a relationship they have. You only see the arguments - and actually all the romantic stuff is with Alwa. All their music together is really lush and romantic - although I don’t think she’s in love with Alwa! - but with Schön, they’re fighting all the time. She’s very ironic, very sarcastic with him.
Do you think Lulu means to shoot Schön?
Well, in this production, no. I think Lulu lives from her instincts and I think it’s a question of survival - if it’s him or her then it will have to be him. But I don’t think it’s something that she’s planned - the shooting comes out of him being really threatening towards her and, boom, there she goes.
To some, Lulu’s a myth, or perhaps a symbol of womanhood, and all agree she’s extremely complex. How do you see her as a character?
I think we all have a bit of Lulu in us. I think she’s a mirror - and not just for women but for men as well. Through her people see themselves - whether they like it or not - and then act from that. In a way, in her company you will be what you decide to be. But perhaps Lulu also shows you what she decides you should see of yourself; and if that’s something you don’t like, then you’ll take it out on the mirror as it were - you’ll smash the mirror.
We also view Lulu very much through the other characters’ eyes. Do you think that affects the way that the audience reacts to her?
Do you know, it’s so weird with this role, because I have no idea about the way I come across! With most roles you know whether you’re playing the bad or the good girl and you know where you belong in the drama. With this role I have no idea! Is the audience going to think Lulu’s a complete bitch? Are they going to feel for her, are they going to think she’s just cold or are they going to think that there’s something in there that could be human - I have no idea!
She’s totally ambiguous isn’t she?
Yes!
And not just going from one pole to the other, but inhabiting the extremes at the same time.
Yes! That’s why I can understand that people think she’s more of a myth than an actual human being - because it’s so complex. For me, she reminds me of Mélisande; like Mélisande, you’re not quite sure where she’s coming from, you’re not quite sure what she’s been through. When I started looking at the role, I had all sorts of images of Lulu; what she’s been through, why she is the way she is. Then I arrived here and the production didn’t reflect that at all - but actually, that can be another world of Lulu. She can be so many people depending on what situation you put her in. So I don’t know whether it’s up to the audience then to decide for themselves - I don’t think Lulu herself can show you who she is.
In terms of the vocal part, do you find it very wordy?
Oh God it drives me insane! All the romantic, Alwa scenes are very lush; fantastic scenes, Straussian in their tessitura, lovely. All the scenes with Dr Schön are vocally quite difficult you know, sitting high and then low - it’s an argument so she’s in the extremes. And you have also Schigolch, where Lulu’s part moves in semi-tones - impossible to find the pitch! - and quite a lot of text. And then there are some scenes, like the scene with the Marquise, which just go on and on and on! The problem is it’s so well constructed with the mirror symmetry that you can’t make many cuts. But much of the dialogue doesn’t do anything for the drama! - There’s no, why are they here? Why do they want to say this at this point?
Do you feel that that’s somehow part and parcel of how Berg conceived the vocal writing, working together with the orchestra?
Maybe. But sometimes you’ll find every single note playing in the orchestra, except your own! That means you’ll hear all the notes around yours, so trying to find your own note in that is hard! I think he does write well for the voice, so I would say that although it’s not easy to sing, it’s less hard than you might think at first. But I wonder if Berg was more focused on the orchestra - the sound, the images and the colours.
Berg’s pupil Theodor Adorno saw Lulu as being an instrument herself, like a flute. His theory was that Berg had, in a way, given Lulu a part like an instrument in order to show that she was literally an instrument of the people around her. What do you make of that?
That’s interesting, that makes sense. Because you could do anything with an instrument like that -and it would fit into the way the music is different, depending on what person she’s with; like with Schigolch, in semi-tones always going chromatically quite fast. Yes I can see that.
Schigolch’s music seems to permeate the whole opera.
Yes - and seems to start in the middle of nowhere pitch-wise and end up in the middle of nowhere and you’ve no idea whether you’re in the right place or not! It’s actually more difficult to sing those kinds of semi-tones than it is to sing in leaps between pitches.
Is there any particular part of it that you really enjoy vocally?
All the Alwa music! I find that gorgeous and it just sits well in the voice - it’s just in the right place.
People often refer to the coloratura in the Lied der Lulu but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of it.
No there isn’t really any coloratura. There’s some ‘twiddling’ but I wouldn’t call that coloratura. The way Berg’s written it, because it’s so incredibly fast, I think it has to be seen more as ornamentation than coloratura. It’s so quick that you can’t actually hear every single note - my metronome has been my best friend for the past three months!
It’s very intriguing that we don’t actually see Lulu’s murder do we - so we don’t see her beginning and we don’t actually see her end - we hear the shriek but we don’t actually see it.
He couldn’t bear to kill her off!
That on the one hand, and on the other she’s killed off when she should be in her prime.
Yes and in a way he’s doing her a favour! - She’s almost asking for it, to end it now because of her circumstances by then.
People make quite a lot of her rise and fall socially but I’ve often seen the ending of Lulu as bringing out what’s always been there from the beginning; she’s treated like a whore right from the beginning!
Again, I think you’ll find that, in the production, it feels like we’re actually going back to her first meeting with Dr Schön; that last scene re-running the first meeting between them. So I think that’s a very beautiful image because then you understand the situation she’s in; how she got there.
Right, so her story comes full circle.
Yes, it’s like a horror version of Pygmalion. In Act 1, Schön tells the Painter that he found Lulu selling flowers in the street, and I always think of Eliza who gets picked up in the same way. Obviously Lulu’s story doesn’t end positively, but I think she has the same ambitions - but, somehow, she overdoes things because, once she gets to the top, she’s so desperate to hold on to that status. You know if you’re born into money you never have to prove that you belong in that society but if you come from underneath, you’re always going to have to prove your worth. And she goes too far.
How do you see Lulu as an opera for today. Is it still relevant?
Yes, and I think it can be seen by anybody, but you have to be prepared to be challenged - that goes for everyone. Everyone in this show is challenged by it - the orchestra, the conductor, the singers, the stage crew - we’re all challenged. It’s not an easy opera on any level. There’s no point where you can relax. It’s full-on all the time - and it must be tiring for the audience too because there are so many questions, so much you can ask yourself. But then, that’s interesting as well! If you go home from a show and have all the answers, then what’s the point really? Though I don’t know if that’s what people seem to want - the whole package with the answers!
Quite often I think they do!
They want the easy way I think! In terms of the story, is it relevant today? It is, in that it’s about humanity, it’s all about how we see ourselves and how we relate to ourselves. Actually, because I had to think about the character and where she was coming from, I’ve been thinking a lot about women and about how women are viewed and are treated in society - because the subject is quite raw at the moment. It still happens - that little girl who was shot in the head because she said we want education for women.
Which is what Geschwitz pleads for at the end of the opera -
Yes. We sat discussing this and someone said, what are they so afraid of these men? What is it in women that is so dangerous that you have to quiet them by violence and by oppression? What’s so dangerous? What can we do? It’s the same thing - what can Lulu do when she seems to drive men so crazy that they behave like they do in this opera? And what drives men to rape or to buy prostitutes? So, yes, in that sense the opera is still valid today with those questions. They’re very very hard questions!
And she’s very young isn’t she?
Yes and a lot of young girls are being abused and used still today. And it’s quite frightening and it’s stuff that you don’t want to think about and actually this opera has really brought up some of those subjects and, you know, it’s really uncomfortable. I was raised in Sweden - you know we’re supposed to be the equal society - so I’d never questioned the fact that I can do what I want, never doubted my freedom - but what would you do if you were in Lulu’s situation?
Lulu literally gets squeezed into that corner doesn’t she - where she has no choice. She’s pushed and pushed.
Then she has a gun in her hand - what’s she going to do? Is she going to kill herself? I don’t think so. What’s the choice? She has to kill Schön. And in that sense I think the opera - if you dare to look that far, if you dig deep down below the surface - the subject is raw, really raw, still today.
Marie thank you very much for talking with me and best of luck for the performances.
Posted by WALES ARTS REVIEW 2.7:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wnos-lulu-in-conversation-with-soprano-marie-arnet/
Lulu is one of the most challenging roles in the entire operatic repertoire and Marie spoke with Steph Power about that and about the ambiguous nature of Lulu herself the day before opening night at the Wales Millennium Centre.
SP Marie, you’ve sung lots of Mozart, you’ve sung Eurydice recently and also Sophie in Strauss’s Rosenkavalier - as well as Debussy’s Mélisande - but I believe this is your first tackling of a Berg part. How are you finding it?
MA Well it’s been probably the most difficult thing I’ve done so far! You always say that when you start learning a part but I had such little time to learn Lulu [two and a half months! - S] and I have cursed poor Alban Berg so many times for making it so difficult! Having said that, when you arrive at the end result of course you know it is the work of a genius. But he is a control freak and everything - even the pistol shots - have to be done in tempo. He even wrote a complete set of diagrams showing where people are supposed to be on stage at particular moments - it’s in the score - it had to be structured how he wanted! It’s so perfectly done that you can see why, but it does leave you feeling slightly straitjacketed at times.
Do you think that feeling relaxes as you get into the production?
I think it already has, yes. You learn to live with it and to trust that there’s a reason why he did it that way. It’s a bit like working with a director; you may not initially agree with his ideas but if you trust him - or her - you will go with it because you know there’s a reason. And so I do trust Alban Berg in that sense and yes, it just takes a bit of time to let it sink in I think.
Technically it’s a tremendously varied role isn’t it, with lots of different weights of voice needed.
Yes - I mean, who did he write that for?! I also think there is a problem in that Berg didn’t finish the opera, because I think if he had had time to finish it, he would have revised it. Not necessarily the tessitura but the whole structure of the opera because it feels imbalanced - Act 1 is no longer than Act 2 but it feels longer and slightly schizophrenic - as opposed to Act 3 which almost feels like a different opera. I mean you recognise the music but vocally it’s in a completely different tessitura and it feels like a different part.
The ending of Lulu is controversial; Friedrich Cerha made the completion that’s been standard until recently and WNO opted to use Eberhard Kloke’s new version of Act 3 for this production. But vocally, that first scene of Act 3, the Paris scene, has always been tremendously difficult because of the thickness of the textures and the chaotic ensembles I believe?
Yes it’s absolutely mad - a cacophony of voices really! But also I think Berg would have revised the first two acts to match Act 3 had he lived. I mean Acts 1 and 2 are perfect in their own right, but I think if he had finished Act 3, he would have looked over the whole thing. Because, if you think about how he intended the opera to be a mirror piece, at the moment it’s going to here [makes a peak] then somehow it drizzles down at the end. Act 3 should in a sense balance Act 1, but it really doesn’t. Not musically, not vocally, it’s just not the same and has a different drama.
All the big set pieces, if you like, for Lulu’s character are in the first half of the opera.
Yes, the most difficult is Act 1.
That’s where you have Meines Mannes, which is spoken. That in itself is interesting because that’s the first time we hear Lulu actually say who she might be.
Yes, she gives a glimpse of herself and the relationships she might have. It’s weird - every time she’s with Dr Schön, they argue. They never have a scene where you see the loving connection; she says at the point she kills him that he’s the only person she’s ever loved, but you wonder what kind of a relationship they have. You only see the arguments - and actually all the romantic stuff is with Alwa. All their music together is really lush and romantic - although I don’t think she’s in love with Alwa! - but with Schön, they’re fighting all the time. She’s very ironic, very sarcastic with him.
Do you think Lulu means to shoot Schön?
Well, in this production, no. I think Lulu lives from her instincts and I think it’s a question of survival - if it’s him or her then it will have to be him. But I don’t think it’s something that she’s planned - the shooting comes out of him being really threatening towards her and, boom, there she goes.
To some, Lulu’s a myth, or perhaps a symbol of womanhood, and all agree she’s extremely complex. How do you see her as a character?
I think we all have a bit of Lulu in us. I think she’s a mirror - and not just for women but for men as well. Through her people see themselves - whether they like it or not - and then act from that. In a way, in her company you will be what you decide to be. But perhaps Lulu also shows you what she decides you should see of yourself; and if that’s something you don’t like, then you’ll take it out on the mirror as it were - you’ll smash the mirror.
We also view Lulu very much through the other characters’ eyes. Do you think that affects the way that the audience reacts to her?
Do you know, it’s so weird with this role, because I have no idea about the way I come across! With most roles you know whether you’re playing the bad or the good girl and you know where you belong in the drama. With this role I have no idea! Is the audience going to think Lulu’s a complete bitch? Are they going to feel for her, are they going to think she’s just cold or are they going to think that there’s something in there that could be human - I have no idea!
She’s totally ambiguous isn’t she?
Yes!
And not just going from one pole to the other, but inhabiting the extremes at the same time.
Yes! That’s why I can understand that people think she’s more of a myth than an actual human being - because it’s so complex. For me, she reminds me of Mélisande; like Mélisande, you’re not quite sure where she’s coming from, you’re not quite sure what she’s been through. When I started looking at the role, I had all sorts of images of Lulu; what she’s been through, why she is the way she is. Then I arrived here and the production didn’t reflect that at all - but actually, that can be another world of Lulu. She can be so many people depending on what situation you put her in. So I don’t know whether it’s up to the audience then to decide for themselves - I don’t think Lulu herself can show you who she is.
In terms of the vocal part, do you find it very wordy?
Oh God it drives me insane! All the romantic, Alwa scenes are very lush; fantastic scenes, Straussian in their tessitura, lovely. All the scenes with Dr Schön are vocally quite difficult you know, sitting high and then low - it’s an argument so she’s in the extremes. And you have also Schigolch, where Lulu’s part moves in semi-tones - impossible to find the pitch! - and quite a lot of text. And then there are some scenes, like the scene with the Marquise, which just go on and on and on! The problem is it’s so well constructed with the mirror symmetry that you can’t make many cuts. But much of the dialogue doesn’t do anything for the drama! - There’s no, why are they here? Why do they want to say this at this point?
Do you feel that that’s somehow part and parcel of how Berg conceived the vocal writing, working together with the orchestra?
Maybe. But sometimes you’ll find every single note playing in the orchestra, except your own! That means you’ll hear all the notes around yours, so trying to find your own note in that is hard! I think he does write well for the voice, so I would say that although it’s not easy to sing, it’s less hard than you might think at first. But I wonder if Berg was more focused on the orchestra - the sound, the images and the colours.
Berg’s pupil Theodor Adorno saw Lulu as being an instrument herself, like a flute. His theory was that Berg had, in a way, given Lulu a part like an instrument in order to show that she was literally an instrument of the people around her. What do you make of that?
That’s interesting, that makes sense. Because you could do anything with an instrument like that -and it would fit into the way the music is different, depending on what person she’s with; like with Schigolch, in semi-tones always going chromatically quite fast. Yes I can see that.
Schigolch’s music seems to permeate the whole opera.
Yes - and seems to start in the middle of nowhere pitch-wise and end up in the middle of nowhere and you’ve no idea whether you’re in the right place or not! It’s actually more difficult to sing those kinds of semi-tones than it is to sing in leaps between pitches.
Is there any particular part of it that you really enjoy vocally?
All the Alwa music! I find that gorgeous and it just sits well in the voice - it’s just in the right place.
People often refer to the coloratura in the Lied der Lulu but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of it.
No there isn’t really any coloratura. There’s some ‘twiddling’ but I wouldn’t call that coloratura. The way Berg’s written it, because it’s so incredibly fast, I think it has to be seen more as ornamentation than coloratura. It’s so quick that you can’t actually hear every single note - my metronome has been my best friend for the past three months!
It’s very intriguing that we don’t actually see Lulu’s murder do we - so we don’t see her beginning and we don’t actually see her end - we hear the shriek but we don’t actually see it.
He couldn’t bear to kill her off!
That on the one hand, and on the other she’s killed off when she should be in her prime.
Yes and in a way he’s doing her a favour! - She’s almost asking for it, to end it now because of her circumstances by then.
People make quite a lot of her rise and fall socially but I’ve often seen the ending of Lulu as bringing out what’s always been there from the beginning; she’s treated like a whore right from the beginning!
Again, I think you’ll find that, in the production, it feels like we’re actually going back to her first meeting with Dr Schön; that last scene re-running the first meeting between them. So I think that’s a very beautiful image because then you understand the situation she’s in; how she got there.
Right, so her story comes full circle.
Yes, it’s like a horror version of Pygmalion. In Act 1, Schön tells the Painter that he found Lulu selling flowers in the street, and I always think of Eliza who gets picked up in the same way. Obviously Lulu’s story doesn’t end positively, but I think she has the same ambitions - but, somehow, she overdoes things because, once she gets to the top, she’s so desperate to hold on to that status. You know if you’re born into money you never have to prove that you belong in that society but if you come from underneath, you’re always going to have to prove your worth. And she goes too far.
How do you see Lulu as an opera for today. Is it still relevant?
Yes, and I think it can be seen by anybody, but you have to be prepared to be challenged - that goes for everyone. Everyone in this show is challenged by it - the orchestra, the conductor, the singers, the stage crew - we’re all challenged. It’s not an easy opera on any level. There’s no point where you can relax. It’s full-on all the time - and it must be tiring for the audience too because there are so many questions, so much you can ask yourself. But then, that’s interesting as well! If you go home from a show and have all the answers, then what’s the point really? Though I don’t know if that’s what people seem to want - the whole package with the answers!
Quite often I think they do!
They want the easy way I think! In terms of the story, is it relevant today? It is, in that it’s about humanity, it’s all about how we see ourselves and how we relate to ourselves. Actually, because I had to think about the character and where she was coming from, I’ve been thinking a lot about women and about how women are viewed and are treated in society - because the subject is quite raw at the moment. It still happens - that little girl who was shot in the head because she said we want education for women.
Which is what Geschwitz pleads for at the end of the opera -
Yes. We sat discussing this and someone said, what are they so afraid of these men? What is it in women that is so dangerous that you have to quiet them by violence and by oppression? What’s so dangerous? What can we do? It’s the same thing - what can Lulu do when she seems to drive men so crazy that they behave like they do in this opera? And what drives men to rape or to buy prostitutes? So, yes, in that sense the opera is still valid today with those questions. They’re very very hard questions!
And she’s very young isn’t she?
Yes and a lot of young girls are being abused and used still today. And it’s quite frightening and it’s stuff that you don’t want to think about and actually this opera has really brought up some of those subjects and, you know, it’s really uncomfortable. I was raised in Sweden - you know we’re supposed to be the equal society - so I’d never questioned the fact that I can do what I want, never doubted my freedom - but what would you do if you were in Lulu’s situation?
Lulu literally gets squeezed into that corner doesn’t she - where she has no choice. She’s pushed and pushed.
Then she has a gun in her hand - what’s she going to do? Is she going to kill herself? I don’t think so. What’s the choice? She has to kill Schön. And in that sense I think the opera - if you dare to look that far, if you dig deep down below the surface - the subject is raw, really raw, still today.
Marie thank you very much for talking with me and best of luck for the performances.
Posted by WALES ARTS REVIEW 2.7:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wnos-lulu-in-conversation-with-soprano-marie-arnet/
Interview: Conductor Lothar Koenigs
Conductor Lothar Koenigs was born in Aachen and studied piano and conducting in Cologne. From 1999 – 2003 he was Music Director in Osnabrück, Germany. Since 2003 his guest engagements have included the Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera New York, Munich, Dresden, La Scala, Hamburg, Brussels and Lyon in a wide repertoire ranging from Mozart to Berg, with a particular emphasis on the operas of Wagner, Strauss and Janáček. He worked for the first time with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera in January 2005, and was appointed to the position of Music Director in 2008, with effect from the beginning of the 2009/10 season. In 2010 he conducted the company’s highly acclaimed new production of Die Meistersinger which he also led in a televised concert at the 2010 BBC Proms.
He spoke with Steph Power about his passion for German opera, WNO and Alban Berg’s Lulu between the opening and second nights of the significant new production at the Wales Millennium Centre.
SP Lothar, you joined Welsh National Opera as Music Director in 2009 and I believe the first production you conducted as Music Director was Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Now you are conducting a new production of his complete Lulu.
LK Yes, and WNO was the first company I think to perform Lulu in the UK.
Yes, the British première of the two-act version in 1971.
I think the company always had an edge and renown to be very curious and adventurous in doing new things - if you think who has been here over the years, with Peter Stein and so on. I’m really happy we have Lulu directed by David Pountney, following a wonderful production of Wozzeck a few years ago by Richard Jones. And we will follow Lulu with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron in 2014 in the summer. You know I think it would be a sin not to programme these pieces when you have such a great company, such a chorus. Of course, extra people will be needed for the large chorus of Moses und Aron, but we have such a strong foundation here - it’s a dream for me to do these pieces with this company. I hope that people do realise that there is something really going on here, that we invite all the people of Wales to celebrate this!
Is your aim partly to bring us the heart of German and Austrian opera?
Yes, of course it’s very close to me, and I’m conducting many other composers, including Janáček too - I love Janáček. But of course I became Music Director to conduct Meistersinger, Tristan, Lohengrin, Lulu and Wozzeck and hopefully some more Strauss - and so this is very exciting.
And Henze too?
Yes, and I think this is a very nice opportunity as our seasons now have themes; it will be very exciting to have Manon Lescaut by Puccini alongside its opposite, Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude - because somehow they have the same story. Maybe Henze looks at it with more modern eyes and so the theme gives them both a great context.
So you are setting up a dialogue between the two operas in each case?
Yes and also with the concerts, which are part of our themed seasons. So we will have Lohengrin to celebrate Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary in 2013 and we also have a view on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring which was premièred a hundred years ago - I think it’s fantastic! I’m not wanting to ‘educate’ people you know, I just want to show the richness of this music and this period. After Wagner, you have Mahler, Zemlinsky, the Second Viennese School, Stravinsky, Bartók - and the same explosion in art and literature - it’s endlessly fascinating.
I was wondering, with Lulu in particular, what you find to be the biggest challenge of the score - or perhaps the unique challenge of the score - from the conductor’s point of view?
For me the biggest problem is the third act, which Berg wasn’t able to complete before he died. What do you think about this version by Kloke that we are using may I ask?
I like your cuts to the Paris scene, which I’ve always felt Berg would have revised - I just can’t see how he would have left it as quite such an ensemble of perplexity, with so much going on and such thick textures. He was too much of a dramatist at heart I think to leave it like that, ultimately. But with the final scene, I’m not so sure as you omitted the Quartett. I’m going to have to see it again!
Yes we did but, you know Berg never wrote the Quartett, he just wrote Alwa’s line. All the other vocal lines there are by Cerha.
Yes, Cerha did embellish what Berg wrote there.
You know with both versions, I don’t want to judge. I think Cerha worked for twelve years on the third act and did a brilliant job. People complain about the Paris scene, but we have to realise that the first almost 300 bars are original Berg - so if the music is not so good it’s not Cerha’s fault, it’s Berg’s! But you know you said you’re sure he would have revised it; I’m sure he would have revised the first and second acts as well. Because you know, the theatre scene in Act 1, especially at the end with Schön and Lulu - it never stops! If you look at how perfect Wozzeck is, where no one note is too much - and Berg wrote a letter to Webern saying not only about the third act but that ‘I think I should start again from the beginning’.
He did, yes. And certainly, looking at Wozzeck as you say and also the Lyric Suite and the Violin Concerto - the way he worked, so meticulous, so detailed, and his obsession with tightness of structure - these pieces were so perfectly constructed that for Berg not to have gone back over Lulu wouldn’t make sense.
Yes exactly, I agree. So I’m sure he would have revised Lulu. And do you know, with this new version of the third act, I am sure this is not the end of the matter! Somehow this also doesn’t work - but just to do two acts and to miss the music of Geschwitz at the end! We can’t miss this music - we can’t miss the Negro or Jack the Ripper!
I agree! But how to do the third act? It’s a dilemma.
A dilemma, yes, but there were big voices like Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern - all of them said it was possible to finish the piece although they didn’t want to do it themselves. And we, as Berg admirers, we have to accept that the Paris picture music is not his best! I think in the end, to compose an almost three hour piece on one twelve-tone note row, it’s really staggering. And it’s good to know about this serial aspect too. But I think as the performer, you put the serialism away and just make the music - I think it is important for the audience to know that they can expect an overwhelming, sensual evening, with the music as well as with the show. I have to confess I would never sit at home listening to Lulu on CD. And it’s fantastic to read the score and marvel at what Berg did but I think at the end you have to go to the theatre. It needs the stage you know, the same with Wozzeck - and even more so with Moses und Aron.
Yes, Berg didn’t just write the music - let alone some exercise in serialism - he wrote an extraordinary piece of music-theatre which has to be seen! What is it like to conduct such an intensely emotional piece?
I think Berg’s music is so human; you suffer so much with this as well during Lulu! You know, it’s hard - but on the other hand it’s so natural. And, talking of technical difficulty, everyone was panicking about how difficult it would be, but now they’ve discovered it’s completely natural to play!
Is that because Berg writes so well for the instruments and voices?
Perfectly yes - it’s just a matter of becoming familiar with his sound-world I think. That’s where one should really forget about it’s being twelve-tone music because at the end it’s very Romantic music. He was so smart with his tone rows but - the Interlude before the theatre scene after the Monoritmica - I mean, it’s really late Mahler! But it’s so brilliantly done, if people can just be open to it, and I think anyway the approach to Berg’s scores is always very Romantic.
It strikes me that you have a particular sensitivity to the extraordinary colours of Berg’s sound-world; in bringing those through with the orchestra.
Oh thank you. Well you know the musicians as well, they have to listen to each other and then they understand; if you don’t play this music kind of very pure, it’s the worst music in the world but if you can bring these colours and voices out - suddenly it’s a universe! I strongly believe in this. In Wozzeck, Berg uses the whole orchestra I think just two or three times, but for the rest, it’s almost chamber music. It’s a little different in Lulu but still the players really have to listen to each other. He used Schoenberg’s score markings of Haupstimme and Nebenstimme to indicate main voice and accompanying voice, but I think this was to help at the time when he wrote the piece as it was all so new. Today I think it’s very obvious what’s the main voice or what’s accompanying voice and I think we just have to trust the score. And on the one hand, Berg was such a control freak - he even composes how exactly Schön has to write down what Lulu sings at ‘Sehr geehrtes Fräulein’! It’s ridiculous but also charming!
He notates in detail so many aspects of the action - every asthmatic breath of Schigolch!
Yes it’s all written down. And, on the other hand, we are working on The Cunning Little Vixen, this chaotic score of Janáček’s! If you look at how Janáček puts things together, you realise he often uses different notation for the same tempo or rhythm and so you somehow have to help the score. But I think with Janáček, you listen for three to five seconds to his music and you know it’s Janáček! This is his genius and his music is so honest. And of course, if I think of Strauss, he was just brilliant in his scores - the instrumentation, everything is perfect - but it doesn’t speak to my heart in the same way. With Janáček, each note, even if it’s a screaming high violin or piccolo, it speaks so directly to the heart.
But with Berg, in terms of control and detail, he even adopted what Schoenberg did in Pierrot lunaire in asking for Sprechstimme for the voice at times, meaning half-sung or ‘sung speech’. But, I have to say, I don’t believe in it. You know I think half singing, even with the way the notes are written, it doesn’t work somehow.
In Pierrot it’s different in a way because the Sprechstimme suits the poems and Schoenberg’s setting, especially with the smaller ensemble, but, yes, difficult in a big score like Lulu - is it intended to be an effect do you think?
Yes an effect perhaps. Still it’s not satisfying you know - at the end, you either sing the pitch or you don’t sing the pitch! But maybe this comes from the way actors spoke at the time - at least in Germany - the way they declaimed everything. But I’m not 100% convinced by it.
It’s always intrigued me that Meines Mannes is spoken. This is the first time we hear Lulu show who she might be but she doesn’t sing, she speaks.
Well I think maybe the spoken dialogue is another aspect of the way Berg uses colour overall. But also, if you think of the first dialogue between the Painter and Lulu, there, they just talk in an everyday manner about ‘oh die post ist da’ and so on. So I think this is part of Berg’s wanting somehow to include what was new at the time - like with the film interlude you know.
So the dialogue is intended to be very naturalistic as if from the theatre?
Yes, very matter of fact.
I was intrigued by the Wanderer image in the production, alluding to Wagner’s Siegfried, and which puts Schigolch into the dramatic centre in a way I haven’t seen done before.
Yes, this image has a very personal source. And, at the end, we don’t know who Schigolch is. What’s his relationship with Lulu? Is he her father? Did they have an affair? Was she abused by him? We don’t know - and the same with Schön. What is their history, Lulu and Schön? Again, we don’t know - but to think of Wotan and Brünnhilde, yes, it’s very clever. And also in the production, during the Filmmusik when Lulu has been taken away, the other characters become old - this refers to Freia! So when Lulu is gone -
- Ah, of course, yes, everybody ages! Because Lulu is the spirit of eternal youth - in a way, like Freia, she keeps everybody young.
Yes! We had been struggling to make sense of the less interesting music that comes after the Filmmusik and before Lulu returns from prison. Then we realised that, when Lulu comes back with her fantastic ‘O Freiheit’, everything changes - that’s the release! In a sense, that’s when we get the music back; only with her return.
Speaking of personal sources and references, with the many subtexts that Berg composed into his scores about himself and the people in his life, I was wondering whether that informed your preparation of Lulu or whether you put all of that aside?
Well of course I read a lot about it, but I have to say when you do this piece you can put a lot aside - but you shouldn’t put away Hannah Fuchs [with whom Berg had an affair - S]. I think he was so attached to her and Lulu somehow - and it’s there, like it’s in the Lyric Suite. I think you can’t put Hannah Fuchs aside even if Helene [Berg’s wife - S] always ignored this!
And, again, with the Violin Concerto, of course he was mourning the death of Manon Gropius [the eighteen year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius], but he also broke off writing this passionate score of Lulu, with all that meant to him, to compose the Concerto.
Yes I agree and you know it’s really sad that even biographies from the seventies or eighties just ignore Hannah Fuchs. She’s not really mentioned you know. The same with his child, with Albine [who Berg fathered with a serving girl when aged 17 - S]. I think we just have to accept that maybe he suffered a lot that he didn’t have children with Helene - but we don’t know!
There’s such a huge story there with Hannah and others - and it’s all in Lulu.
Yes and I think also - this is not just my opinion but others have also said this - that Lulu was the last Romantic opera. You know, I really can’t think of another Romantic opera that’s been written after that. No. That’s it - Lulu was the last.
That’s quite some thought - very poignant. Lothar, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Posted by WALES ARTS REVIEW 2.7:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wnos-lulu-in-conversation-with-music-director-lothar-koenigs/
He spoke with Steph Power about his passion for German opera, WNO and Alban Berg’s Lulu between the opening and second nights of the significant new production at the Wales Millennium Centre.
SP Lothar, you joined Welsh National Opera as Music Director in 2009 and I believe the first production you conducted as Music Director was Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Now you are conducting a new production of his complete Lulu.
LK Yes, and WNO was the first company I think to perform Lulu in the UK.
Yes, the British première of the two-act version in 1971.
I think the company always had an edge and renown to be very curious and adventurous in doing new things - if you think who has been here over the years, with Peter Stein and so on. I’m really happy we have Lulu directed by David Pountney, following a wonderful production of Wozzeck a few years ago by Richard Jones. And we will follow Lulu with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron in 2014 in the summer. You know I think it would be a sin not to programme these pieces when you have such a great company, such a chorus. Of course, extra people will be needed for the large chorus of Moses und Aron, but we have such a strong foundation here - it’s a dream for me to do these pieces with this company. I hope that people do realise that there is something really going on here, that we invite all the people of Wales to celebrate this!
Is your aim partly to bring us the heart of German and Austrian opera?
Yes, of course it’s very close to me, and I’m conducting many other composers, including Janáček too - I love Janáček. But of course I became Music Director to conduct Meistersinger, Tristan, Lohengrin, Lulu and Wozzeck and hopefully some more Strauss - and so this is very exciting.
And Henze too?
Yes, and I think this is a very nice opportunity as our seasons now have themes; it will be very exciting to have Manon Lescaut by Puccini alongside its opposite, Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude - because somehow they have the same story. Maybe Henze looks at it with more modern eyes and so the theme gives them both a great context.
So you are setting up a dialogue between the two operas in each case?
Yes and also with the concerts, which are part of our themed seasons. So we will have Lohengrin to celebrate Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary in 2013 and we also have a view on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring which was premièred a hundred years ago - I think it’s fantastic! I’m not wanting to ‘educate’ people you know, I just want to show the richness of this music and this period. After Wagner, you have Mahler, Zemlinsky, the Second Viennese School, Stravinsky, Bartók - and the same explosion in art and literature - it’s endlessly fascinating.
I was wondering, with Lulu in particular, what you find to be the biggest challenge of the score - or perhaps the unique challenge of the score - from the conductor’s point of view?
For me the biggest problem is the third act, which Berg wasn’t able to complete before he died. What do you think about this version by Kloke that we are using may I ask?
I like your cuts to the Paris scene, which I’ve always felt Berg would have revised - I just can’t see how he would have left it as quite such an ensemble of perplexity, with so much going on and such thick textures. He was too much of a dramatist at heart I think to leave it like that, ultimately. But with the final scene, I’m not so sure as you omitted the Quartett. I’m going to have to see it again!
Yes we did but, you know Berg never wrote the Quartett, he just wrote Alwa’s line. All the other vocal lines there are by Cerha.
Yes, Cerha did embellish what Berg wrote there.
You know with both versions, I don’t want to judge. I think Cerha worked for twelve years on the third act and did a brilliant job. People complain about the Paris scene, but we have to realise that the first almost 300 bars are original Berg - so if the music is not so good it’s not Cerha’s fault, it’s Berg’s! But you know you said you’re sure he would have revised it; I’m sure he would have revised the first and second acts as well. Because you know, the theatre scene in Act 1, especially at the end with Schön and Lulu - it never stops! If you look at how perfect Wozzeck is, where no one note is too much - and Berg wrote a letter to Webern saying not only about the third act but that ‘I think I should start again from the beginning’.
He did, yes. And certainly, looking at Wozzeck as you say and also the Lyric Suite and the Violin Concerto - the way he worked, so meticulous, so detailed, and his obsession with tightness of structure - these pieces were so perfectly constructed that for Berg not to have gone back over Lulu wouldn’t make sense.
Yes exactly, I agree. So I’m sure he would have revised Lulu. And do you know, with this new version of the third act, I am sure this is not the end of the matter! Somehow this also doesn’t work - but just to do two acts and to miss the music of Geschwitz at the end! We can’t miss this music - we can’t miss the Negro or Jack the Ripper!
I agree! But how to do the third act? It’s a dilemma.
A dilemma, yes, but there were big voices like Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern - all of them said it was possible to finish the piece although they didn’t want to do it themselves. And we, as Berg admirers, we have to accept that the Paris picture music is not his best! I think in the end, to compose an almost three hour piece on one twelve-tone note row, it’s really staggering. And it’s good to know about this serial aspect too. But I think as the performer, you put the serialism away and just make the music - I think it is important for the audience to know that they can expect an overwhelming, sensual evening, with the music as well as with the show. I have to confess I would never sit at home listening to Lulu on CD. And it’s fantastic to read the score and marvel at what Berg did but I think at the end you have to go to the theatre. It needs the stage you know, the same with Wozzeck - and even more so with Moses und Aron.
Yes, Berg didn’t just write the music - let alone some exercise in serialism - he wrote an extraordinary piece of music-theatre which has to be seen! What is it like to conduct such an intensely emotional piece?
I think Berg’s music is so human; you suffer so much with this as well during Lulu! You know, it’s hard - but on the other hand it’s so natural. And, talking of technical difficulty, everyone was panicking about how difficult it would be, but now they’ve discovered it’s completely natural to play!
Is that because Berg writes so well for the instruments and voices?
Perfectly yes - it’s just a matter of becoming familiar with his sound-world I think. That’s where one should really forget about it’s being twelve-tone music because at the end it’s very Romantic music. He was so smart with his tone rows but - the Interlude before the theatre scene after the Monoritmica - I mean, it’s really late Mahler! But it’s so brilliantly done, if people can just be open to it, and I think anyway the approach to Berg’s scores is always very Romantic.
It strikes me that you have a particular sensitivity to the extraordinary colours of Berg’s sound-world; in bringing those through with the orchestra.
Oh thank you. Well you know the musicians as well, they have to listen to each other and then they understand; if you don’t play this music kind of very pure, it’s the worst music in the world but if you can bring these colours and voices out - suddenly it’s a universe! I strongly believe in this. In Wozzeck, Berg uses the whole orchestra I think just two or three times, but for the rest, it’s almost chamber music. It’s a little different in Lulu but still the players really have to listen to each other. He used Schoenberg’s score markings of Haupstimme and Nebenstimme to indicate main voice and accompanying voice, but I think this was to help at the time when he wrote the piece as it was all so new. Today I think it’s very obvious what’s the main voice or what’s accompanying voice and I think we just have to trust the score. And on the one hand, Berg was such a control freak - he even composes how exactly Schön has to write down what Lulu sings at ‘Sehr geehrtes Fräulein’! It’s ridiculous but also charming!
He notates in detail so many aspects of the action - every asthmatic breath of Schigolch!
Yes it’s all written down. And, on the other hand, we are working on The Cunning Little Vixen, this chaotic score of Janáček’s! If you look at how Janáček puts things together, you realise he often uses different notation for the same tempo or rhythm and so you somehow have to help the score. But I think with Janáček, you listen for three to five seconds to his music and you know it’s Janáček! This is his genius and his music is so honest. And of course, if I think of Strauss, he was just brilliant in his scores - the instrumentation, everything is perfect - but it doesn’t speak to my heart in the same way. With Janáček, each note, even if it’s a screaming high violin or piccolo, it speaks so directly to the heart.
But with Berg, in terms of control and detail, he even adopted what Schoenberg did in Pierrot lunaire in asking for Sprechstimme for the voice at times, meaning half-sung or ‘sung speech’. But, I have to say, I don’t believe in it. You know I think half singing, even with the way the notes are written, it doesn’t work somehow.
In Pierrot it’s different in a way because the Sprechstimme suits the poems and Schoenberg’s setting, especially with the smaller ensemble, but, yes, difficult in a big score like Lulu - is it intended to be an effect do you think?
Yes an effect perhaps. Still it’s not satisfying you know - at the end, you either sing the pitch or you don’t sing the pitch! But maybe this comes from the way actors spoke at the time - at least in Germany - the way they declaimed everything. But I’m not 100% convinced by it.
It’s always intrigued me that Meines Mannes is spoken. This is the first time we hear Lulu show who she might be but she doesn’t sing, she speaks.
Well I think maybe the spoken dialogue is another aspect of the way Berg uses colour overall. But also, if you think of the first dialogue between the Painter and Lulu, there, they just talk in an everyday manner about ‘oh die post ist da’ and so on. So I think this is part of Berg’s wanting somehow to include what was new at the time - like with the film interlude you know.
So the dialogue is intended to be very naturalistic as if from the theatre?
Yes, very matter of fact.
I was intrigued by the Wanderer image in the production, alluding to Wagner’s Siegfried, and which puts Schigolch into the dramatic centre in a way I haven’t seen done before.
Yes, this image has a very personal source. And, at the end, we don’t know who Schigolch is. What’s his relationship with Lulu? Is he her father? Did they have an affair? Was she abused by him? We don’t know - and the same with Schön. What is their history, Lulu and Schön? Again, we don’t know - but to think of Wotan and Brünnhilde, yes, it’s very clever. And also in the production, during the Filmmusik when Lulu has been taken away, the other characters become old - this refers to Freia! So when Lulu is gone -
- Ah, of course, yes, everybody ages! Because Lulu is the spirit of eternal youth - in a way, like Freia, she keeps everybody young.
Yes! We had been struggling to make sense of the less interesting music that comes after the Filmmusik and before Lulu returns from prison. Then we realised that, when Lulu comes back with her fantastic ‘O Freiheit’, everything changes - that’s the release! In a sense, that’s when we get the music back; only with her return.
Speaking of personal sources and references, with the many subtexts that Berg composed into his scores about himself and the people in his life, I was wondering whether that informed your preparation of Lulu or whether you put all of that aside?
Well of course I read a lot about it, but I have to say when you do this piece you can put a lot aside - but you shouldn’t put away Hannah Fuchs [with whom Berg had an affair - S]. I think he was so attached to her and Lulu somehow - and it’s there, like it’s in the Lyric Suite. I think you can’t put Hannah Fuchs aside even if Helene [Berg’s wife - S] always ignored this!
And, again, with the Violin Concerto, of course he was mourning the death of Manon Gropius [the eighteen year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius], but he also broke off writing this passionate score of Lulu, with all that meant to him, to compose the Concerto.
Yes I agree and you know it’s really sad that even biographies from the seventies or eighties just ignore Hannah Fuchs. She’s not really mentioned you know. The same with his child, with Albine [who Berg fathered with a serving girl when aged 17 - S]. I think we just have to accept that maybe he suffered a lot that he didn’t have children with Helene - but we don’t know!
There’s such a huge story there with Hannah and others - and it’s all in Lulu.
Yes and I think also - this is not just my opinion but others have also said this - that Lulu was the last Romantic opera. You know, I really can’t think of another Romantic opera that’s been written after that. No. That’s it - Lulu was the last.
That’s quite some thought - very poignant. Lothar, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Posted by WALES ARTS REVIEW 2.7:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wnos-lulu-in-conversation-with-music-director-lothar-koenigs/
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Concert Review: Orchestra of Welsh National Opera: St David's Hall, Cardiff 18th January 2013
Alexander Zemlinsky: Maeterlinck Lieder
Alban Berg: Violin Concerto
Alma Mahler: Four Songs for Middle Voice
Gustav Mahler: Adagio from the 10th Symphony
Conductor: Lothar Koenigs
Mezzo: Maria Riccarda Wesseling / Violin: David Adams / Narrator: Tamsin Greig
Alban Berg was reputedly shy, sensitive and private, sharing with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, a superstitious nature and an obsession with number symbolism. His music is full of hidden codes that are rarely discernible to the ear, but which, upon exploration, yield fascinating insights into a tumultuous personal and inner life beneath the smooth, bourgeois surface; often - as with the unusually direct and emotionally raw Violin Concerto heard in this Welsh National Opera concert - taking the form of complex numerological references embedded within the structure of the music. Coming ahead of a significant new WNO production of Berg’s second opera Lulu, this programme was itself saturated with personal allusions both direct and indirect; exploring an intricate web of relationships revolving around the figure of its theme, the real-life femme fatale Alma Mahler née Schindler.
Mother of Manon Gropius - the young dedicatee of Berg’s Violin Concerto - and lover, wife and muse to a succession of key artists of the period, Alma was central to cultural life in fin de siècle Vienna - but never as a composer in her own right. Her first marriage, in 1902 to Gustav Mahler, was monstrously conditional upon her giving up composing, but she bowed to his request. Mahler later regretted his selfishness and, stunned by the discovery of Alma’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius in 1910 (second husband-to-be and father of Manon), set about belatedly publishing Alma’s songs which, as this rare and welcome performance of the Four Songs for Middle Voice attested, were very well crafted; perhaps the least successful being the patchy and overlong Ertelied. But together, the songs reveal a confident, mature harmonic invention and - notwithstanding some rude comments to the contrary by Alma’s erstwhile teacher and lover, Alexander Zemlinsky - a promisingly sympathetic vocal writing, performed here with sensitivity by mezzo-soprano Maria Riccarda Wesseling.
Alas for Alma, erotic compulsion held sway over a creative drive which was, in any case, doomed to proscription by a misogynist intellectual culture. The excerpts from her diaries of 1898-1902, interspersed as readings between pieces by the witty and adroit narrator Tamsin Greig, revealed thwarted ambition - but also fickleness and the desire to manipulate which later drove her suppression of Gustav’s incomplete 10th Symphony upon his death in 1911. The juxtaposition here of her songs with his heart-rending Adagio - both works distressingly eloquent of unrealised potential in wholly different ways - was all the more poignant for the Adagio being executed with an understated but quietly palpable despair by conductor Lothar Koenigs and orchestra.
The pieces here span over a third of a century from the two earliest of Alma’s songs (composed around 1901 and published in 1915) to the Violin Concerto; to compose which Berg put aside work on Lulu for a requiem to Manon, who died tragically in 1935 from polio aged just eighteen. In keeping with the personal focus on Alma - and regardless of Berg’s use of serial techniques in the Concerto - the works are all late flowerings of Viennese Romanticism rather than examples of the more abrasive modernism that burst forth across the arts around the turn of the century, and with which Vienna became synonymous.
It is only relatively recently that late-Romantic composers such as Zemlinsky (who, ironically perhaps, later became Schoenberg’s brother-in-law) have at last begun to attract serious consideration as denoting an important and ongoing strand in twentieth century music. The roots of Alma’s burgeoning post-Wagnerian style were clearly evident in Zemlinsky’s Maeterlinck Lieder, which are among his best works and some of the better known to date. They were performed with sincerity and conviction - but without the over-seriousness that can sometimes serve to stultify this repertoire. The orchestral colours were finely drawn and, despite Wesseling’s occasional dip below audibility, largely supported the voice in revealing a beguiling, dream-laden sound-world.
Colour and a delicate, chamber-like sonority were again to the fore in Berg’s extraordinary Violin Concerto - one of the few works to have entered the mainstream canon from the ‘Second Viennese School’ (a designation still used but increasingly unhelpful). Soloist David Adams brought poise and dignity to a work drenched in sorrow - and which, of course, turned out to be Berg’s own requiem; written at uncharacteristic speed as Berg lay ill before succumbing himself to death at just 50 years old - a premature age itself painfully reminiscent of Mahler’s own death thirty-four years before.
Alma Mahler was a close friend of the Bergs, and of Alban’s wife Helene in particular, and it was to Alma that Helene later hinted that she had known of Alban’s long-standing affair with Hannah Fuchs-Robettin. As references to Hannah continue to be decoded in the Concerto, as in Lulu and other of his pieces, the mystery surrounding aspects of Berg’s private life endures - as it does with Alma Mahler, who remains a highly ambiguous figure. However, it is most unlikely that - as recently and provocatively claimed by scholar Leon Botstein - Alma herself was the model for Berg’s central character Lulu in the opera which lay all but complete upon his death. Berg did not hide his disapproval of Alma’s open sexual licence and would no doubt have noted the irony of his widow’s later castigation for witholding the third act of Lulu from the world in a way so redolent of Alma’s suppression of Gustav’s 10th before her.
There is no doubt that Alma re-designed the image of Gustav to suit her own purpose after his death and it has taken years to unravel the sometimes blatant misrepresentation. But perhaps, ultimately, she may only be deemed ‘guilty’ of being a lone alpha female struggling for recognition in a dysfunctional society of alpha males; objectified, worshipped and reviled, as so many women continue to be who openly express their sexuality. Tonight we were gifted a glimpse into the tangled web, not only of Alma’s world, but into the complex and wounded heart of early twentieth century Vienna - the beating of which continues to resound today.
Posted by Wales Arts Review Vol 2 No 6 on 8.2.13:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wno-orchestra-at-st-davids-hall-cardiff-18th-january-2013/
Alban Berg: Violin Concerto
Alma Mahler: Four Songs for Middle Voice
Gustav Mahler: Adagio from the 10th Symphony
Conductor: Lothar Koenigs
Mezzo: Maria Riccarda Wesseling / Violin: David Adams / Narrator: Tamsin Greig
Alban Berg was reputedly shy, sensitive and private, sharing with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, a superstitious nature and an obsession with number symbolism. His music is full of hidden codes that are rarely discernible to the ear, but which, upon exploration, yield fascinating insights into a tumultuous personal and inner life beneath the smooth, bourgeois surface; often - as with the unusually direct and emotionally raw Violin Concerto heard in this Welsh National Opera concert - taking the form of complex numerological references embedded within the structure of the music. Coming ahead of a significant new WNO production of Berg’s second opera Lulu, this programme was itself saturated with personal allusions both direct and indirect; exploring an intricate web of relationships revolving around the figure of its theme, the real-life femme fatale Alma Mahler née Schindler.
Mother of Manon Gropius - the young dedicatee of Berg’s Violin Concerto - and lover, wife and muse to a succession of key artists of the period, Alma was central to cultural life in fin de siècle Vienna - but never as a composer in her own right. Her first marriage, in 1902 to Gustav Mahler, was monstrously conditional upon her giving up composing, but she bowed to his request. Mahler later regretted his selfishness and, stunned by the discovery of Alma’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius in 1910 (second husband-to-be and father of Manon), set about belatedly publishing Alma’s songs which, as this rare and welcome performance of the Four Songs for Middle Voice attested, were very well crafted; perhaps the least successful being the patchy and overlong Ertelied. But together, the songs reveal a confident, mature harmonic invention and - notwithstanding some rude comments to the contrary by Alma’s erstwhile teacher and lover, Alexander Zemlinsky - a promisingly sympathetic vocal writing, performed here with sensitivity by mezzo-soprano Maria Riccarda Wesseling.
Alas for Alma, erotic compulsion held sway over a creative drive which was, in any case, doomed to proscription by a misogynist intellectual culture. The excerpts from her diaries of 1898-1902, interspersed as readings between pieces by the witty and adroit narrator Tamsin Greig, revealed thwarted ambition - but also fickleness and the desire to manipulate which later drove her suppression of Gustav’s incomplete 10th Symphony upon his death in 1911. The juxtaposition here of her songs with his heart-rending Adagio - both works distressingly eloquent of unrealised potential in wholly different ways - was all the more poignant for the Adagio being executed with an understated but quietly palpable despair by conductor Lothar Koenigs and orchestra.
The pieces here span over a third of a century from the two earliest of Alma’s songs (composed around 1901 and published in 1915) to the Violin Concerto; to compose which Berg put aside work on Lulu for a requiem to Manon, who died tragically in 1935 from polio aged just eighteen. In keeping with the personal focus on Alma - and regardless of Berg’s use of serial techniques in the Concerto - the works are all late flowerings of Viennese Romanticism rather than examples of the more abrasive modernism that burst forth across the arts around the turn of the century, and with which Vienna became synonymous.
It is only relatively recently that late-Romantic composers such as Zemlinsky (who, ironically perhaps, later became Schoenberg’s brother-in-law) have at last begun to attract serious consideration as denoting an important and ongoing strand in twentieth century music. The roots of Alma’s burgeoning post-Wagnerian style were clearly evident in Zemlinsky’s Maeterlinck Lieder, which are among his best works and some of the better known to date. They were performed with sincerity and conviction - but without the over-seriousness that can sometimes serve to stultify this repertoire. The orchestral colours were finely drawn and, despite Wesseling’s occasional dip below audibility, largely supported the voice in revealing a beguiling, dream-laden sound-world.
Colour and a delicate, chamber-like sonority were again to the fore in Berg’s extraordinary Violin Concerto - one of the few works to have entered the mainstream canon from the ‘Second Viennese School’ (a designation still used but increasingly unhelpful). Soloist David Adams brought poise and dignity to a work drenched in sorrow - and which, of course, turned out to be Berg’s own requiem; written at uncharacteristic speed as Berg lay ill before succumbing himself to death at just 50 years old - a premature age itself painfully reminiscent of Mahler’s own death thirty-four years before.
Alma Mahler was a close friend of the Bergs, and of Alban’s wife Helene in particular, and it was to Alma that Helene later hinted that she had known of Alban’s long-standing affair with Hannah Fuchs-Robettin. As references to Hannah continue to be decoded in the Concerto, as in Lulu and other of his pieces, the mystery surrounding aspects of Berg’s private life endures - as it does with Alma Mahler, who remains a highly ambiguous figure. However, it is most unlikely that - as recently and provocatively claimed by scholar Leon Botstein - Alma herself was the model for Berg’s central character Lulu in the opera which lay all but complete upon his death. Berg did not hide his disapproval of Alma’s open sexual licence and would no doubt have noted the irony of his widow’s later castigation for witholding the third act of Lulu from the world in a way so redolent of Alma’s suppression of Gustav’s 10th before her.
There is no doubt that Alma re-designed the image of Gustav to suit her own purpose after his death and it has taken years to unravel the sometimes blatant misrepresentation. But perhaps, ultimately, she may only be deemed ‘guilty’ of being a lone alpha female struggling for recognition in a dysfunctional society of alpha males; objectified, worshipped and reviled, as so many women continue to be who openly express their sexuality. Tonight we were gifted a glimpse into the tangled web, not only of Alma’s world, but into the complex and wounded heart of early twentieth century Vienna - the beating of which continues to resound today.
Posted by Wales Arts Review Vol 2 No 6 on 8.2.13:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wno-orchestra-at-st-davids-hall-cardiff-18th-january-2013/
Friday, 1 February 2013
Alban Berg’s LULU: Decadence, Decay and Myths of Freedom
The following essay was published by Wales Arts Review 25.1.13 with a banner by illustrator and design editor Dean Lewis as a preview to Welsh National Opera's forthcoming new production by newly-appointed CEO and artistic director David Pountney.
http://www.walesartsreview.org/alban-bergs-lulu-decadence-decay-and-myths-of-freedom/
An obsession with sexuality - and womens’ sexuality in particular - dominated the arts and high culture of fin de siècle Vienna into which the composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) was born. On the surface, social interaction for wealthy Viennese obeyed strict, mannered codes of behaviour but, underneath, the clash of rigid aristocratic tradition with bourgeois opulence made for a dangerously hedonistic cocktail. With the gradual collapse of political liberalism and a simultaneous awakening to social issues and injustice, many artists and cultural commentators set out to expose the decadence and moral hypocrisy of the ruling classes - to whom many, like Berg, ironically belonged. Thus ensued a modernist whirlwind in Vienna; a backlash to the corrupt status quo encompassing a new and radical questioning across the arts and sciences about the nature of the human psyche and the core significance of so-called animal instincts - questioning which was as often triggered by deeply personal trauma as by wider cultural crisis.
Creative life in Vienna was characterised by a striking cohesiveness across the spectrum as artists mingled with cultured professionals in the many coffee-houses and salons, stimulating a shared preoccupation with the problem of the individual in a degenerating society. In the visual arts, a sense of looming catastrophe drove the Expressionism of painters such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (also credited with the first Expressionist play, Murderer, Hope of Women). Both artists drew upon desire - and not a little fear - to depict women as powerful creatures of raw sexuality which, according to Kokoschka, amounted to ‘the female principle’. This conflation of women with sex became prevalent amongst the Viennese intelligentsia as women began slowly to gain social emancipation, challenging the existing patriarchal order. Hence the ambivalence of Schiele’s mentor Gustav Klimt, whose intense sensualism and obsession with sex and death reached apotheosis in the Beethoven Frieze; on the one hand, his myriad women subjects were worshipped as symbols of erotic power, but, on the other, as Angelica Bäumer has noted, they were ‘stylised into figures of fantasy divorced from harsh reality’. Such ambivalence would be taken to devastating extremes and lethal conclusion in Berg’s Lulu.
Berg was keenly aware of developments in the visual arts (his revered - if intimidating -teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, was an accomplished painter as well as an epoch-making composer). But he was particularly drawn to literature and read widely from an early age, becoming passionate about the writings of social critics as diverse as Gerhart Hauptmann, the earlier Georg Büchner and, crucially, Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). Berg’s first opera Wozzeck (1914-22) drew upon Büchner’s controversial play Woyzeck (1837, unfinished at his death), a ‘working-class tragedy’ much admired by later Expressionist writers and depicting the mental fragmentation of its central character; a soldier dehumanised by military life and the experiments of cruel medical doctors. His second opera Lulu was an altogether more problematic and complex proposition.
Starting work on his new libretto at a time well into the Weimar period (1919-33), in which dark political shadows were lengthening from neighbouring Germany, it was Wedekind to whom Berg eventually turned; a culmination of life-long respect for a playwright whose withering political scorn and brutal (sur)realism were often subject to censorship. In 1905, Berg had attended the first, private performance of Wedekind’s banned play Pandora’s Box (1904), in which Wedekind himself appeared as the character Jack. It turned out to be Berg’s first encounter with a vehement supporter of Wedekind, the political satirist Karl Kraus, whose introductory speech had an equally profound impact on him, and which sparked the formation of a close friendship based on a shared cultural outlook (with Berg taking a keen interest in Kraus’s highly influential, boldly critical newspaper Die Fackel - The Torch).
Two years after this inspirational performance, Berg wrote to Frida Semler in 1907 that Wedekind was:
‘the really new direction ... at last we have realised that sensuality is not a weakness but an immense strength. Only through an understanding of the sensual, through a profound insight into the depths - or rather, perhaps, the heights - of mankind can one arrive at a true idea of the human psyche’.
Many years later, Berg set about compressing the twin, consecutive dramas Earth Spirit (1895) and that same, formative Pandora’s Box into two halves of one seamless libretto - managing to retain all Wedekind’s major characters and plot devices and, crucially, remaining true to Wedekind’s conception of his central character Lulu, despite needing to cut four-fifths of the dialogue. The enormous care Berg took in adhering to the spirit of the original plays is of key significance regarding his dramatic intentions with the opera, as Lulu is by no means a straightforward social tragedy but a heavily ironic, complex critique of the culture of decadence and illusory social freedom which - notwithstanding the primary and utter catastrophe of increasingly rampant Nazism - was still relevant in the 1930s and remains so today.
The plot charts the social rise and fall of Lulu, a figure of immense desirability and mysterious origin and, hence, a magnet for the sexual obsession of all who come into contact with her. Most who do so end up dead through a series of farcical but tragic events and she herself is eventually murdered by Jack the Ripper. The first half of the opera, as in Earth Spirit, charts Lulu’s apparent rise as she outlives two husbands finally to marry Dr Schön, her long-term lover/‘protector’. The second half, based on Pandora’s Box, depicts her downfall, following her incarceration for the apparently accidental murder of Schön during a jealous confrontation. She escapes from prison with the help of an entourage of besotted misfits including the Countess Geschwitz, Schön’s son the composer Alwa, the tramp Schigolch and others, running the gauntlet of would-be blackmailers and pimps only to end up as a prostitute in London where she meets her sordid death.
A key component of Berg’s dramatic design is his employment of symmetry, through which he not only tightens Wedekind’s narrative structure, but maximises the social critique with a particularly savage, ironic twist. For, in Berg’s libretto - but not in the original Wedekind - Lulu’s three husbands are directly mirrored by her subsequent three clients through role doublings involving the reiteration of both dramatic and musical material. Thus, the Doctor returns as the Professor with the same musical motifs; similarly, the Painter returns as the Negro and - crucially for the dramatic dènouement - Dr Schön returns as Jack the Ripper, thus exposing the toxicity of Lulu’s primary, troubled relationship and taking it to an extreme, fatal conclusion. This is no simple case of male revenge on Lulu the femme fatale for supposedly ‘luring’ men to their destruction, but a direct correlation by Berg of the social elite with a dark, amoral underworld; not least through the Jekyll and Hyde conflation of successful, wealthy businessman with psychopathic sex-murderer, leaving no doubt regarding Berg’s desire brutally to rip aside the illusion of his society’s respectable veneer.
That the outwardly mild, shy and bourgeois Berg should have set out to deliver such devastating critique of his own privileged class may seem at first surprising. But he himself had fallen foul of hypocritical convention, attempting suicide at the age of eighteen after fathering an illegitimate child with a local serving girl. His sister Smaragda was openly lesbian, embarking on a relationship with a prostitute upon deserting a disastrous marriage, and he held views on homosexuality that were very liberal for the time (nevertheless seeing it as a ‘condition’ necessitating sympathetic understanding). In common with Berg’s entire output, Lulu is saturated with personal references, many of which remain fully to be explored, but which hint at the tremendous difficulties in Berg’s life beneath the happily married surface (he had a frustrating affair with Hanna Fuchs for years). But certainly, Geschwitz, Lulu and others have personal resonance (the Painter’s suicide perhaps echoing that of the artist Richard Gerstl, lover of Schoenberg’s first wife Mathilda), whilst the composer Alwa is often taken to represent Berg himself.
In any case, at the dramatic dead centre of the opera (so to speak) lies another key to Berg’s dramatic purpose. In the Wedekind, Lulu’s incarceration occurs off-stage, ‘between’ the two plays. But Berg chose to depict her trial, imprisonment and escape by means of a silent-film interlude, probably inspired by GW Pabst’s 1929 silent movie Pandora’s Box starring the celebrated Louise Brooks (though we don’t know for sure and the original 1937 Lulu film no longer exists). Berg’s film is underpinned by an orchestral accompaniment comprising a sophisticated musical palindrome in which the music pauses on a held chord before quite literally running backwards note for note as Lulu “escapes” - straight (back) into the beginning of Act III with a recapitulation of the opera’s introductory music. Thus, the sense of overall déjà vu and cyclical entrapment could hardly be more painfully ironic as Lulu re-emerges on stage after her prison breakout to deliver her famous ‘Freedom’ aria.
Indeed, the very notion of freedom is, on many levels, shown to be a chimera in this opera. By the time Berg started work on Lulu, Sigmund Freud’s epoch-making psychological theories had long since shattered the façade of bourgeois respectability, demonstrating how subject are we all beneath the layers of so-called civilisation to the drives of our unconscious and the psychological imprints of past experience. But these two Wedekind plays are not intended to be Freudian in any sense of exploring psychological motivation, unconscious or otherwise (although of course the plays are open to Freudian interpretation like any drama and, indeed, the opera itself has often been directly interpreted thus - not always helpfully). The original Lulu dramas were submitted for publication before Freud’s revolutionary work The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, emerging later only due to censorship problems. Moreover, Kraus was noted for his vehement opposition to psychoanalysis whilst Berg himself, despite briefly consulting both Freud and Alfred Adler, later described psychoanalysis as a ‘confidence trick’.
Wedekind’s preoccupation was with the socially excluded to whom the bourgeoisie habitually turned for entertainment; underworld figures such as the prostitutes, pimps, circus performers, cabaret artists, crooks and con-men that he himself mixed with. But his social outcasts are not presented as victims or suffering individuals per se with whom we are meant to sympathise. On the contrary, they are displayed as crude caricatures through dialogue in which they talk not to - or even at - but past each other. They are simultaneous puppets and manipulators in a ‘menagerie’ of celebrated, debauched outsiders; their activities depicted in grotesque and savage parody in order to ridicule the hypocritical vanity of their wealthy clients. In the opera, Berg essentially sets out to do the same, utilising Wedekind’s brutal dialogue, black humour and farcical plot devices, but setting these deliberately and paradoxically against a sumptuous and highly-charged post-Romantic musical language to added - and devastating - emotional effect.
The opera is full of situations in which the crude, cold dialogue seems bizarrely at odds with the intensely emotional music and often horrifying but absurd action. Just one example can be found in Act II Scene 2, when Lulu has escaped from prison, still wearing Geschwitz’s clothes and suffering visibly from cholera. Alwa is preparing to make love to her with ecstatic declarations of desire - despite her having murdered his father in that very place - crying ‘Oh ... oh ... I‘ll write a dithyramb to your glory’, to which she coolly and farcically replies, ‘I’m just annoyed by this hideous footwear’. At other times, the high seriousness of her predicament is seemingly swept aside by the buffoonery of other characters, as in Act II Scene I, in which her fraught appeal to Schön - the Lied der Lulu - takes place against a background chaos of sundry admirers attempting to hide. So who, exactly, is Lulu? What is her significance and what is she supposed to represent, if anything?
Lulu is neither a straightforward character nor a simple caricature. Indeed, she barely exists as a character in her own right, having no life of her own beyond her existence as a mirror for others. She is intended as a symbol of womanhood and her story is an exploration of what this means in a sex-obsessed, corrupt bourgeois world. By taking her name as the title of his opera - or, at least, one of the many names by which she is called in the text - Berg focuses attention on her from the start. The opening of both opera and play presents the dramatis personae as a circus of ravening beasts into which Lulu is introduced as that classic creature of temptation, the serpent. Wild and untamable, she is an ambivalent and lethal mix of apparently adult sexual allure and child-like innocence; on the one hand, beautiful, pure and available - the ultimate object of desire - and, on the other hand, corrupted, evil and unattainable - refusing to be possessed even as she appears to respond to others’ demands. In other words, she is entirely a product of male fantasy, into which trap the lesbian Geschwitz also falls.
However, the symbolism does not stop there. According to the narrative, Lulu is far from being a mature, adult woman in age but is shockingly young - around fifteen years old in fact. Treated like a whore from the beginning, her story is, in essence, that of an abused child, whose eventual ‘fall’ into actual prostitution is no more than a realisation of her true plight all along, coming full and appalling circle. Having ‘rescued’ her from the streets as a young urchin, Schön has raised her alongside his son Alwa but cannot shake off the fascination she exerts despite marrying her off, firstly to the Doctor and then to the Painter. Schön apparently excepted, Lulu shows not the slightest concern towards any of her suitors but simply plays with them, or goes along with their desire like a ‘seductive’ child. So, whilst on one level she may appear as both victim and tormentor - the architect of her own and others’ destruction - at a deeper level, she is entirely a product of the corruption around her; a target for others’ lust, rage and frustration and blamed for their delusions and weaknesses in ways that are even more shocking given her age.
Only at the simplest level is it possible to read Lulu as a so-called ‘free spirit’ for, ultimately, she is as trapped as are those besotted with her in a hell of their own making. Central to the themes of voyeurism, objectification of the ‘other’ and visibly-realised degradation, is the portrait of Lulu which the Painter makes in the first scene and which remains a constant presence throughout her rise and fall (an oblique nod, perhaps, to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, 1890-1). Lulu herself is often appraised alongside this much admired, static representation; indeed, the Painter, who Lulu describes as ‘blind’, clearly confuses the captured pose with the real ‘woman’. He is not the only one. Geschwitz also becomes fixated, eventually taking the portrait to London, only to direct her final, heart-rendingly ironic Liebestod to it before she too follows Lulu into oblivion at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
The Schön/Jack characterisation is clearly instrumental to the drama. His twin characters embody the violent abuse of power, paradoxically rendered powerless by the very creature of his own decadent design and whose ultimate recourse is to rape and destroy that which he cannot control. But it is, perhaps, the mysterious and often overlooked Schigolch who represents the rotten core lurking at the heart of the drama - of which he is the sole survivor. Indeed, the score itself suggests his fundamental significance: in writing the music for the opera, Berg utilised a highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg’s (in)famous ‘serial’ methods to generate webs of inter-related motifs and character-associated ‘tropes’ so complex as to have occupied music analysts for years in the unravelling. Put simply, each character and some objects (like the portrait) has a unique motif associated with them specifically, in ways not unlike Wagnerian Leitmotiv. But Schigolch’s trope alone permeates the entire opera as an architectural device embedded within the musical structure, and closely related to Berg’s overall ‘basic series’; in the words of George Perle, Schigolch’s music is, therefore, ‘a representation not only of Lulu’s origins but also of the ultimate source of the tone material itself’ .
Schigolch appears as a blackly comic, wheezing beggar, who has clearly known Lulu for years. He is variously said to have been her lover and pimp, which latter role he reprises before her London demise. But, crucially, he is also said to be Lulu’s father; revealing the dark heart of incestuous abuse beyond even the implied incest of the Schön-Lulu and Alwa-Lulu couplings. Hence, the opera holds up a truly shocking mirror of Berg’s society which, to our shame - and as demonstrated by countless contemporary cases of abuse, grooming and the sex trafficking of children and adults - is still relevant today.
With Lulu, Berg composed arguably the most significant operatic masterpiece of the twentieth century. It’s complex ambition, scale and sheer musical virtuosity rank it as an achievement of the highest order - let alone Berg’s achievement in compressing Wedekind’s sprawling dramas into one, brilliantly cohesive libretto. However, it is not without its flaws - and the fact that most analytic and historiographic attention has focused on the musical score and aspects of related biography rather than the work as a music-dramatic whole says a great deal about the opera’s problematic nature; for the many, deeply paradoxical layers, often appearing to set dialogue, plot and music against each other, seem at times to have left commentators grappling for ways to unravel the opera as social critique as well as post-Romantic tragedy. Berg left very little room for redemption at the opera’s close and this may, perhaps, put off those determined to find human positives in a frankly gut-wrenching piece. I am glad to say that none of this has deterred Welsh National Opera from mounting Lulu at last.
Suggested further reading:
Angelica Bäumer: Gustav Klimt - Women (London, 1986)
Mosco Carner: Alban Berg - the Man and the Work (London, 1975)
Christopher Hailey, Ed: Alban Berg and his World (USA, 2010)
George Perle: The Operas of Alban Berg - Volume 2, Lulu (USA, 1985)
Carl E Schorske: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna - Politics and Culture (USA, 1961)
http://www.walesartsreview.org/alban-bergs-lulu-decadence-decay-and-myths-of-freedom/
An obsession with sexuality - and womens’ sexuality in particular - dominated the arts and high culture of fin de siècle Vienna into which the composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) was born. On the surface, social interaction for wealthy Viennese obeyed strict, mannered codes of behaviour but, underneath, the clash of rigid aristocratic tradition with bourgeois opulence made for a dangerously hedonistic cocktail. With the gradual collapse of political liberalism and a simultaneous awakening to social issues and injustice, many artists and cultural commentators set out to expose the decadence and moral hypocrisy of the ruling classes - to whom many, like Berg, ironically belonged. Thus ensued a modernist whirlwind in Vienna; a backlash to the corrupt status quo encompassing a new and radical questioning across the arts and sciences about the nature of the human psyche and the core significance of so-called animal instincts - questioning which was as often triggered by deeply personal trauma as by wider cultural crisis.
Creative life in Vienna was characterised by a striking cohesiveness across the spectrum as artists mingled with cultured professionals in the many coffee-houses and salons, stimulating a shared preoccupation with the problem of the individual in a degenerating society. In the visual arts, a sense of looming catastrophe drove the Expressionism of painters such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (also credited with the first Expressionist play, Murderer, Hope of Women). Both artists drew upon desire - and not a little fear - to depict women as powerful creatures of raw sexuality which, according to Kokoschka, amounted to ‘the female principle’. This conflation of women with sex became prevalent amongst the Viennese intelligentsia as women began slowly to gain social emancipation, challenging the existing patriarchal order. Hence the ambivalence of Schiele’s mentor Gustav Klimt, whose intense sensualism and obsession with sex and death reached apotheosis in the Beethoven Frieze; on the one hand, his myriad women subjects were worshipped as symbols of erotic power, but, on the other, as Angelica Bäumer has noted, they were ‘stylised into figures of fantasy divorced from harsh reality’. Such ambivalence would be taken to devastating extremes and lethal conclusion in Berg’s Lulu.
Berg was keenly aware of developments in the visual arts (his revered - if intimidating -teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, was an accomplished painter as well as an epoch-making composer). But he was particularly drawn to literature and read widely from an early age, becoming passionate about the writings of social critics as diverse as Gerhart Hauptmann, the earlier Georg Büchner and, crucially, Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). Berg’s first opera Wozzeck (1914-22) drew upon Büchner’s controversial play Woyzeck (1837, unfinished at his death), a ‘working-class tragedy’ much admired by later Expressionist writers and depicting the mental fragmentation of its central character; a soldier dehumanised by military life and the experiments of cruel medical doctors. His second opera Lulu was an altogether more problematic and complex proposition.
Starting work on his new libretto at a time well into the Weimar period (1919-33), in which dark political shadows were lengthening from neighbouring Germany, it was Wedekind to whom Berg eventually turned; a culmination of life-long respect for a playwright whose withering political scorn and brutal (sur)realism were often subject to censorship. In 1905, Berg had attended the first, private performance of Wedekind’s banned play Pandora’s Box (1904), in which Wedekind himself appeared as the character Jack. It turned out to be Berg’s first encounter with a vehement supporter of Wedekind, the political satirist Karl Kraus, whose introductory speech had an equally profound impact on him, and which sparked the formation of a close friendship based on a shared cultural outlook (with Berg taking a keen interest in Kraus’s highly influential, boldly critical newspaper Die Fackel - The Torch).
Two years after this inspirational performance, Berg wrote to Frida Semler in 1907 that Wedekind was:
‘the really new direction ... at last we have realised that sensuality is not a weakness but an immense strength. Only through an understanding of the sensual, through a profound insight into the depths - or rather, perhaps, the heights - of mankind can one arrive at a true idea of the human psyche’.
Many years later, Berg set about compressing the twin, consecutive dramas Earth Spirit (1895) and that same, formative Pandora’s Box into two halves of one seamless libretto - managing to retain all Wedekind’s major characters and plot devices and, crucially, remaining true to Wedekind’s conception of his central character Lulu, despite needing to cut four-fifths of the dialogue. The enormous care Berg took in adhering to the spirit of the original plays is of key significance regarding his dramatic intentions with the opera, as Lulu is by no means a straightforward social tragedy but a heavily ironic, complex critique of the culture of decadence and illusory social freedom which - notwithstanding the primary and utter catastrophe of increasingly rampant Nazism - was still relevant in the 1930s and remains so today.
The plot charts the social rise and fall of Lulu, a figure of immense desirability and mysterious origin and, hence, a magnet for the sexual obsession of all who come into contact with her. Most who do so end up dead through a series of farcical but tragic events and she herself is eventually murdered by Jack the Ripper. The first half of the opera, as in Earth Spirit, charts Lulu’s apparent rise as she outlives two husbands finally to marry Dr Schön, her long-term lover/‘protector’. The second half, based on Pandora’s Box, depicts her downfall, following her incarceration for the apparently accidental murder of Schön during a jealous confrontation. She escapes from prison with the help of an entourage of besotted misfits including the Countess Geschwitz, Schön’s son the composer Alwa, the tramp Schigolch and others, running the gauntlet of would-be blackmailers and pimps only to end up as a prostitute in London where she meets her sordid death.
A key component of Berg’s dramatic design is his employment of symmetry, through which he not only tightens Wedekind’s narrative structure, but maximises the social critique with a particularly savage, ironic twist. For, in Berg’s libretto - but not in the original Wedekind - Lulu’s three husbands are directly mirrored by her subsequent three clients through role doublings involving the reiteration of both dramatic and musical material. Thus, the Doctor returns as the Professor with the same musical motifs; similarly, the Painter returns as the Negro and - crucially for the dramatic dènouement - Dr Schön returns as Jack the Ripper, thus exposing the toxicity of Lulu’s primary, troubled relationship and taking it to an extreme, fatal conclusion. This is no simple case of male revenge on Lulu the femme fatale for supposedly ‘luring’ men to their destruction, but a direct correlation by Berg of the social elite with a dark, amoral underworld; not least through the Jekyll and Hyde conflation of successful, wealthy businessman with psychopathic sex-murderer, leaving no doubt regarding Berg’s desire brutally to rip aside the illusion of his society’s respectable veneer.
That the outwardly mild, shy and bourgeois Berg should have set out to deliver such devastating critique of his own privileged class may seem at first surprising. But he himself had fallen foul of hypocritical convention, attempting suicide at the age of eighteen after fathering an illegitimate child with a local serving girl. His sister Smaragda was openly lesbian, embarking on a relationship with a prostitute upon deserting a disastrous marriage, and he held views on homosexuality that were very liberal for the time (nevertheless seeing it as a ‘condition’ necessitating sympathetic understanding). In common with Berg’s entire output, Lulu is saturated with personal references, many of which remain fully to be explored, but which hint at the tremendous difficulties in Berg’s life beneath the happily married surface (he had a frustrating affair with Hanna Fuchs for years). But certainly, Geschwitz, Lulu and others have personal resonance (the Painter’s suicide perhaps echoing that of the artist Richard Gerstl, lover of Schoenberg’s first wife Mathilda), whilst the composer Alwa is often taken to represent Berg himself.
In any case, at the dramatic dead centre of the opera (so to speak) lies another key to Berg’s dramatic purpose. In the Wedekind, Lulu’s incarceration occurs off-stage, ‘between’ the two plays. But Berg chose to depict her trial, imprisonment and escape by means of a silent-film interlude, probably inspired by GW Pabst’s 1929 silent movie Pandora’s Box starring the celebrated Louise Brooks (though we don’t know for sure and the original 1937 Lulu film no longer exists). Berg’s film is underpinned by an orchestral accompaniment comprising a sophisticated musical palindrome in which the music pauses on a held chord before quite literally running backwards note for note as Lulu “escapes” - straight (back) into the beginning of Act III with a recapitulation of the opera’s introductory music. Thus, the sense of overall déjà vu and cyclical entrapment could hardly be more painfully ironic as Lulu re-emerges on stage after her prison breakout to deliver her famous ‘Freedom’ aria.
Indeed, the very notion of freedom is, on many levels, shown to be a chimera in this opera. By the time Berg started work on Lulu, Sigmund Freud’s epoch-making psychological theories had long since shattered the façade of bourgeois respectability, demonstrating how subject are we all beneath the layers of so-called civilisation to the drives of our unconscious and the psychological imprints of past experience. But these two Wedekind plays are not intended to be Freudian in any sense of exploring psychological motivation, unconscious or otherwise (although of course the plays are open to Freudian interpretation like any drama and, indeed, the opera itself has often been directly interpreted thus - not always helpfully). The original Lulu dramas were submitted for publication before Freud’s revolutionary work The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, emerging later only due to censorship problems. Moreover, Kraus was noted for his vehement opposition to psychoanalysis whilst Berg himself, despite briefly consulting both Freud and Alfred Adler, later described psychoanalysis as a ‘confidence trick’.
Wedekind’s preoccupation was with the socially excluded to whom the bourgeoisie habitually turned for entertainment; underworld figures such as the prostitutes, pimps, circus performers, cabaret artists, crooks and con-men that he himself mixed with. But his social outcasts are not presented as victims or suffering individuals per se with whom we are meant to sympathise. On the contrary, they are displayed as crude caricatures through dialogue in which they talk not to - or even at - but past each other. They are simultaneous puppets and manipulators in a ‘menagerie’ of celebrated, debauched outsiders; their activities depicted in grotesque and savage parody in order to ridicule the hypocritical vanity of their wealthy clients. In the opera, Berg essentially sets out to do the same, utilising Wedekind’s brutal dialogue, black humour and farcical plot devices, but setting these deliberately and paradoxically against a sumptuous and highly-charged post-Romantic musical language to added - and devastating - emotional effect.
The opera is full of situations in which the crude, cold dialogue seems bizarrely at odds with the intensely emotional music and often horrifying but absurd action. Just one example can be found in Act II Scene 2, when Lulu has escaped from prison, still wearing Geschwitz’s clothes and suffering visibly from cholera. Alwa is preparing to make love to her with ecstatic declarations of desire - despite her having murdered his father in that very place - crying ‘Oh ... oh ... I‘ll write a dithyramb to your glory’, to which she coolly and farcically replies, ‘I’m just annoyed by this hideous footwear’. At other times, the high seriousness of her predicament is seemingly swept aside by the buffoonery of other characters, as in Act II Scene I, in which her fraught appeal to Schön - the Lied der Lulu - takes place against a background chaos of sundry admirers attempting to hide. So who, exactly, is Lulu? What is her significance and what is she supposed to represent, if anything?
Lulu is neither a straightforward character nor a simple caricature. Indeed, she barely exists as a character in her own right, having no life of her own beyond her existence as a mirror for others. She is intended as a symbol of womanhood and her story is an exploration of what this means in a sex-obsessed, corrupt bourgeois world. By taking her name as the title of his opera - or, at least, one of the many names by which she is called in the text - Berg focuses attention on her from the start. The opening of both opera and play presents the dramatis personae as a circus of ravening beasts into which Lulu is introduced as that classic creature of temptation, the serpent. Wild and untamable, she is an ambivalent and lethal mix of apparently adult sexual allure and child-like innocence; on the one hand, beautiful, pure and available - the ultimate object of desire - and, on the other hand, corrupted, evil and unattainable - refusing to be possessed even as she appears to respond to others’ demands. In other words, she is entirely a product of male fantasy, into which trap the lesbian Geschwitz also falls.
However, the symbolism does not stop there. According to the narrative, Lulu is far from being a mature, adult woman in age but is shockingly young - around fifteen years old in fact. Treated like a whore from the beginning, her story is, in essence, that of an abused child, whose eventual ‘fall’ into actual prostitution is no more than a realisation of her true plight all along, coming full and appalling circle. Having ‘rescued’ her from the streets as a young urchin, Schön has raised her alongside his son Alwa but cannot shake off the fascination she exerts despite marrying her off, firstly to the Doctor and then to the Painter. Schön apparently excepted, Lulu shows not the slightest concern towards any of her suitors but simply plays with them, or goes along with their desire like a ‘seductive’ child. So, whilst on one level she may appear as both victim and tormentor - the architect of her own and others’ destruction - at a deeper level, she is entirely a product of the corruption around her; a target for others’ lust, rage and frustration and blamed for their delusions and weaknesses in ways that are even more shocking given her age.
Only at the simplest level is it possible to read Lulu as a so-called ‘free spirit’ for, ultimately, she is as trapped as are those besotted with her in a hell of their own making. Central to the themes of voyeurism, objectification of the ‘other’ and visibly-realised degradation, is the portrait of Lulu which the Painter makes in the first scene and which remains a constant presence throughout her rise and fall (an oblique nod, perhaps, to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, 1890-1). Lulu herself is often appraised alongside this much admired, static representation; indeed, the Painter, who Lulu describes as ‘blind’, clearly confuses the captured pose with the real ‘woman’. He is not the only one. Geschwitz also becomes fixated, eventually taking the portrait to London, only to direct her final, heart-rendingly ironic Liebestod to it before she too follows Lulu into oblivion at the hands of Jack the Ripper.
The Schön/Jack characterisation is clearly instrumental to the drama. His twin characters embody the violent abuse of power, paradoxically rendered powerless by the very creature of his own decadent design and whose ultimate recourse is to rape and destroy that which he cannot control. But it is, perhaps, the mysterious and often overlooked Schigolch who represents the rotten core lurking at the heart of the drama - of which he is the sole survivor. Indeed, the score itself suggests his fundamental significance: in writing the music for the opera, Berg utilised a highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg’s (in)famous ‘serial’ methods to generate webs of inter-related motifs and character-associated ‘tropes’ so complex as to have occupied music analysts for years in the unravelling. Put simply, each character and some objects (like the portrait) has a unique motif associated with them specifically, in ways not unlike Wagnerian Leitmotiv. But Schigolch’s trope alone permeates the entire opera as an architectural device embedded within the musical structure, and closely related to Berg’s overall ‘basic series’; in the words of George Perle, Schigolch’s music is, therefore, ‘a representation not only of Lulu’s origins but also of the ultimate source of the tone material itself’ .
Schigolch appears as a blackly comic, wheezing beggar, who has clearly known Lulu for years. He is variously said to have been her lover and pimp, which latter role he reprises before her London demise. But, crucially, he is also said to be Lulu’s father; revealing the dark heart of incestuous abuse beyond even the implied incest of the Schön-Lulu and Alwa-Lulu couplings. Hence, the opera holds up a truly shocking mirror of Berg’s society which, to our shame - and as demonstrated by countless contemporary cases of abuse, grooming and the sex trafficking of children and adults - is still relevant today.
With Lulu, Berg composed arguably the most significant operatic masterpiece of the twentieth century. It’s complex ambition, scale and sheer musical virtuosity rank it as an achievement of the highest order - let alone Berg’s achievement in compressing Wedekind’s sprawling dramas into one, brilliantly cohesive libretto. However, it is not without its flaws - and the fact that most analytic and historiographic attention has focused on the musical score and aspects of related biography rather than the work as a music-dramatic whole says a great deal about the opera’s problematic nature; for the many, deeply paradoxical layers, often appearing to set dialogue, plot and music against each other, seem at times to have left commentators grappling for ways to unravel the opera as social critique as well as post-Romantic tragedy. Berg left very little room for redemption at the opera’s close and this may, perhaps, put off those determined to find human positives in a frankly gut-wrenching piece. I am glad to say that none of this has deterred Welsh National Opera from mounting Lulu at last.
Suggested further reading:
Angelica Bäumer: Gustav Klimt - Women (London, 1986)
Mosco Carner: Alban Berg - the Man and the Work (London, 1975)
Christopher Hailey, Ed: Alban Berg and his World (USA, 2010)
George Perle: The Operas of Alban Berg - Volume 2, Lulu (USA, 1985)
Carl E Schorske: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna - Politics and Culture (USA, 1961)
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