.Alban Berg: Lulu, Welsh National Opera, Milton Keynes, 26 March 2013
Alban Berg wrote two highly original operas each based on the life and ultimate fate of the eponymous characters Wozzeck and Lulu. The former, based on a true story as related in the German author Georg Büchner’s 1836 play Woyzeck, was conceived in 1914, completed in 1921 but not performed until 1925. It tells the story of a poor soldier driven to murder by the discipline, bullying and jealousy of his army life. Lulu, on the other hand, concerns the destructive effect on the men and woman in her sex life of the voracious seductress and her eventual downfall. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind from around 1900, Lulu occupied Berg from 1928 to his death in 1935, leaving Act III unfinished. In 1934 he wrote a Lulu Suite based on themes from the opera. The first two Acts received a first performance in 1937 in Zurich. Berg’s widow prevented any attempt at completion during her life and there seems to be some dispute as to which constituted the first complete performance. The first recorded performance in the UK was by Hamburg Opera in 1962, but it seems the first British production had to wait until 1971 when Welsh National Opera performed a version with the third act arranged from the music of the Suite by the Producer Michael Geliot. Lulu wax played by Carol Farley a former Miss Junior America... In his book Welsh National Opera published in 1986, Richard Fawkes quotes the critic William Mann who :thought she looked the part she can sing the part, too, but at present strains her higher tones into anti-sexual screaming; some men’s switch-on perhaps but not mine. At this distance I cannot recall my own experience remembering only being very impressed at the time. It is disappointing that the programme of the current production does not record that of 1971 which was an important watershed in the Company’s history.
The present version has a new realisation of the third act by Eberhard Kloke, longer than the earlier one and providing a more rounded shape to the opera. Listing only Lulu’s main affaires among the many sequential but overlapping the plot runs something as follows: Taken off the streets to be his mistress, Dr Schön has married her off to a Professor of medicine Dr Goll who dies of a heart attack on catching her with her lover the Artist, who subsequently marries her but commits suicide on learning of her relationship with Schön. On the death of his wife Schön marries Lulu, who continues to behave promiscuously, her lovers including Schön’s son Alwa and the lesbian Countess Geschwitz. During an argument, Lulu shoots Schön, is arrested and incarcerated in a cholera infested jail. From there she escapes with the help of Geschwitz and takes up with Alwa in Paris. Losing all their money in a financial crash, Lulu and her remaining entourage move to London where she and Geschwitz go back on the streets to earn money until both are despatched by Jack the Ripper, here in the guise of a resurrected Schön, as the opera ends. In a Prologue the characters are presented as the animal inhabitants of a menagerie, which prepares us for the decadence of what follow
A bus-load of some twenty Oxford Friends of WNO arrived in good time for some refreshment and a glance at the programme to deplore the change in format, the first since 1971! For ease of access we had chosen to sit in the stalls rather than the circle which proved to be a mistake. The curtain went up on a fixed set of steel scaffolding, ladders and poles representing in the Prologue the menagerie into which the characters are introduced wearing animal heads and serving as the setting for the remaining scenes. The Director, David Pountney himself, WNO’s Chief Executive and Artistic Director, just about got away with this though more realistic scenery would have enhanced the drama by showing the .bourgeois background to the goings-on. Bringing the action forward to 1930 (the programme claimed) made it too late for Jack and too early for the Yorkshire Ripper. The staging was extremely fussy with characters climbing about all over the stage, with sudden changes of colour, switches from sung to spoken words – Wedekind and Berg were almost crushed under the weight. With most of the cast dressed mostly in white it was difficult to tell who was who, particularly in the first act. The audience emerged bewildered and confused but exhilarated at the first interval. When not too distracted we were able to enjoy the superb playing of the orchestra under Lothar Koenigs and the singing, particularly Peter Hoare as Alwa and Ashley Holland as Dr Schön and Mark Le Brocq as the Artist. Natasha Petrinski played Countess Geschwitz without the forceful personality which would have turned Lulu on. The show belonged to Mary Arnet who held the whole performance together. Rarely off the stage, it was hard to tear one’s eyes away from her sinuous movements inside her contour- revealing dresses, finally, at the end of Act II, baring all for Alwa (and us) to demonstrate that her figure was unimpaired by her experiences in prison and in hospital. She can sing, too. The problem was that we were distracted from following what was going on and with whom on stage by trying to read the surtitles very high up for those in the stalls.
On the journey back to Oxford, still bemused, there was some perfunctory discussion, everyone having their own pro- or anti-, post- or pseudo- feminist interpretation of what it was all about.
29 March 2013
Alban Berg wrote two highly original operas each based on the life and ultimate fate of the eponymous characters Wozzeck and Lulu. The former, based on a true story as related in the German author Georg Büchner’s 1836 play Woyzeck, was conceived in 1914, completed in 1921 but not performed until 1925. It tells the story of a poor soldier driven to murder by the discipline, bullying and jealousy of his army life. Lulu, on the other hand, concerns the destructive effect on the men and woman in her sex life of the voracious seductress and her eventual downfall. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind from around 1900, Lulu occupied Berg from 1928 to his death in 1935, leaving Act III unfinished. In 1934 he wrote a Lulu Suite based on themes from the opera. The first two Acts received a first performance in 1937 in Zurich. Berg’s widow prevented any attempt at completion during her life and there seems to be some dispute as to which constituted the first complete performance. The first recorded performance in the UK was by Hamburg Opera in 1962, but it seems the first British production had to wait until 1971 when Welsh National Opera performed a version with the third act arranged from the music of the Suite by the Producer Michael Geliot. Lulu wax played by Carol Farley a former Miss Junior America... In his book Welsh National Opera published in 1986, Richard Fawkes quotes the critic William Mann who :thought she looked the part she can sing the part, too, but at present strains her higher tones into anti-sexual screaming; some men’s switch-on perhaps but not mine. At this distance I cannot recall my own experience remembering only being very impressed at the time. It is disappointing that the programme of the current production does not record that of 1971 which was an important watershed in the Company’s history.
The present version has a new realisation of the third act by Eberhard Kloke, longer than the earlier one and providing a more rounded shape to the opera. Listing only Lulu’s main affaires among the many sequential but overlapping the plot runs something as follows: Taken off the streets to be his mistress, Dr Schön has married her off to a Professor of medicine Dr Goll who dies of a heart attack on catching her with her lover the Artist, who subsequently marries her but commits suicide on learning of her relationship with Schön. On the death of his wife Schön marries Lulu, who continues to behave promiscuously, her lovers including Schön’s son Alwa and the lesbian Countess Geschwitz. During an argument, Lulu shoots Schön, is arrested and incarcerated in a cholera infested jail. From there she escapes with the help of Geschwitz and takes up with Alwa in Paris. Losing all their money in a financial crash, Lulu and her remaining entourage move to London where she and Geschwitz go back on the streets to earn money until both are despatched by Jack the Ripper, here in the guise of a resurrected Schön, as the opera ends. In a Prologue the characters are presented as the animal inhabitants of a menagerie, which prepares us for the decadence of what follow
A bus-load of some twenty Oxford Friends of WNO arrived in good time for some refreshment and a glance at the programme to deplore the change in format, the first since 1971! For ease of access we had chosen to sit in the stalls rather than the circle which proved to be a mistake. The curtain went up on a fixed set of steel scaffolding, ladders and poles representing in the Prologue the menagerie into which the characters are introduced wearing animal heads and serving as the setting for the remaining scenes. The Director, David Pountney himself, WNO’s Chief Executive and Artistic Director, just about got away with this though more realistic scenery would have enhanced the drama by showing the .bourgeois background to the goings-on. Bringing the action forward to 1930 (the programme claimed) made it too late for Jack and too early for the Yorkshire Ripper. The staging was extremely fussy with characters climbing about all over the stage, with sudden changes of colour, switches from sung to spoken words – Wedekind and Berg were almost crushed under the weight. With most of the cast dressed mostly in white it was difficult to tell who was who, particularly in the first act. The audience emerged bewildered and confused but exhilarated at the first interval. When not too distracted we were able to enjoy the superb playing of the orchestra under Lothar Koenigs and the singing, particularly Peter Hoare as Alwa and Ashley Holland as Dr Schön and Mark Le Brocq as the Artist. Natasha Petrinski played Countess Geschwitz without the forceful personality which would have turned Lulu on. The show belonged to Mary Arnet who held the whole performance together. Rarely off the stage, it was hard to tear one’s eyes away from her sinuous movements inside her contour- revealing dresses, finally, at the end of Act II, baring all for Alwa (and us) to demonstrate that her figure was unimpaired by her experiences in prison and in hospital. She can sing, too. The problem was that we were distracted from following what was going on and with whom on stage by trying to read the surtitles very high up for those in the stalls.
On the journey back to Oxford, still bemused, there was some perfunctory discussion, everyone having their own pro- or anti-, post- or pseudo- feminist interpretation of what it was all about.
29 March 2013