At the outset of these observations on the recent production of Lulu at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, I should make clear that my profession is the theater and I am a neophyte to the world of opera. As a matter of fact, I know very few theater professionals who feel comfortable in an opera house. There are notable and brilliant exceptions--including, of course, Sir Peter Hall (who directed Le Nozze di Figaro for an earlier Lyric Opera Production this season), and the current director of Lulu, Yuri Lyubimov. What makes us uncomfortable is the little matter of convention--that tacit acceptance by an audience of what is the illusion of truth. For us journeymen of the stage, realism is a convention that seeks to mirror the natural behavior of life. That is a narrow view, of course, but it accounts for our discomfort in the presence of theatrical conventions where majestic music and great voices have to be matched by great themes and majestic settings.
But despite such professional prejudices, inadequacies, and trepidations, I went to this Lulu with a pleasurable anticipation. I knew a little of Alban Berg's Wozzeck since I had recently staged the play and had listened to the opera. But I knew nothing of this mountain of an opera except the original plays by Franz Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora). Wedekind prefigured, if not fathered, German Expressionist drama. Expressionism was a reaction to Naturalism, giving its exponents the freedom to paint human issues on a large canvas. Its focus was on Sex and Money and Power and Death, and it could and did create characters who were types, even prototypes, rather than individuals.
Berg seized upon Wedekind's brilliant "Lulu" plays seeing in their bizarre sexual Grand Guignol world the schema of a majestic modern opera. Lulu is the Earth Spirit, the Nymph/Wife/Whore whose cold sexuality is death to all who couple with her. Yet she is not a Calypso or a Circe; she is, somehow, the innocent instrument of necessary deaths. Implicit in the plays is the idea of the nexus of Sex and Death.
'Monster Tragedy'
Berg called his work "A Monster Tragedy in Five Acts." In many extraordinary ways Berg surmounted the implicit difficulties of the Wedekind plays. If the subject is treated with the slightest faltering touch, it becomes merely sordid and, perhaps worse, foolish. A sexual being who runs through husbands who die by heart attack, suicide, and murder is potentially as ludicrous as she is lethal. But the opera, through its haunting, violent, and unsettling twelve-tone music, troubles the spirit and moves beyond the mere coupling of incompatible human beings into a world of inevitability and consequently of tragedy.
Lyubimov's production is astonishing; my anticipatory uneasiness was swept away in the opening seconds. Within the huge proscenium arch of the Lyric Opera was an immense gray metal square crossed with girders and latticed with panels. As the first notes hung in the air, a flight of metal bars was raised from the ground over the orchestra pit to form a huge cage that faced the audience. From a human-sized door at the base of the gray metal construct emerged an animal tamer, and as he sang and cracked his whip, the creatures of Berg's world began to people their dark menagerie. They seethed with a sullen, uncomprehending anger. Finally, from its resting place on a limb, a girder of the set, a serpent is carried aloft, writhing in the air. This is Lulu. It was
...
Read Full Article
|
