Berg Lulu – Chéreau stagecraft

At last, after all these years of knowing Berg’s Lulu from the acclaimed audio recording conducted by Pierre Boulez, I’ve managed to see the 1979 production on film. It was directed by Patrice Chéreau with whom Boulez created The Ring Cycle for Wieland Wagner which so transformed Bayreuth and Wagner performance practice. After 40 years, that Ring (readily available on DVD) isn’t shocking at all, but quite apposite to the music and symbolism.

Although I saw the original Chéreau Lulu first time out, I can’t remember much because I was so shaken by the plot and music. Nothing scary about the staging though, which seemed pretty conventional even for the time. Perhaps this was necessary as this was the first time the opera had been heard in its full three-act glory and it was a lot for audiences to take on board.

Teresa Stratas looks perfect for the role – frail and birdlike, her limbs darting in odd, angular jerks. She’s nimble, swaying her hips like the snake the Animal Trainer refers to. When she catches the Painter between her knees, she snares him like a boa constrictor. She’s so flat chested you can see her ribs, so fragile looking you think she’ll break when embraced. Physically she brings out the dark side of the plot, the danger, the child abuse and cruelty. No wonder Stratas is rated by many as a good Cho Cho San even if her voice isn’t lush enough for Puccini. As an actress, she’s fine, though no one can come near to the incomparable Christine Schäfer who haunts every frame of the Glyndebourne production.

Chéreau’s production of Lulu came in for flak because he moved the time from turn of the century Vienna to the 1930’s. Why this should have caused a fuss is incomprehensible, since Berg was writing in the 1930’s and wasn’t following Wedekind slavishly in any case. Moreover, nothing in the narrative actually references a particular period. There wasn’t a revolution in Paris in Wedekind’s time any more than in Berg’s : what counts is the sense of looming disaster, which a 1930’s setting expresses even better. They had a stock market crash for real! Had Berg lived, he and many close to him would have suffered under the Nazis, and he knew it. As for Jack the Ripper, in this opera he’s symbolic, not historical.

Sets and designs (Richard Peduzzi) are completely realistic. The Painter’s studio has paintings, not just of Lulu. One looks vaguely like a portrait of Dr Schön which is a subtle clue. Similarly, Chéreau and his team picked up on another fundamentally important detail. Schilgoch doesn’t feel safe in Lulu’s mansion, because the marbles is polished so perfectly that he’s afraid he’ll slip. Dark green marble dominates the set, at one shining and elegant yet vaguely sinister. Impenetrable hard surfaces, whose coolness can be treacherous. Schigolch, who knows Lulu so well, can recognise the implications. Christof Loy’s toughened glass wall is thus a descendant of Chéreau’s polished marble.

Not all stage directions carry the same density of meaning. Shining surfaces reflect (literally) the hard brightness of Lulu’s life when she’s rich and in control. It doesn’t matter much whether Dr Schön dies on a sofa or on the floor. In his anguish he could not care less. Falling on marble is perhaps more meaningful. And Lulu and Alwa don’t need a sofa to make out on. Wouldn’t the police have removed it for forensics, anyway? In a wealthy household, no one would keep an old bloodstained divan. As if Alwa didn’t know where his father died. What counts in this scene is the malevolent way Lulu announces the fact to the poor fellow.

It doesn’t make a jot of difference whether Lulu meets her end in an attic or in a cellar : all that matters is that she’s shown in degraded surroundings. Götz Friedrich at the Royal Opera House in the 80’s showed Schilgoch and Alwa peeing against a wall in the final scene. Why not? That’s what London streets are like. The men treat the wall with the same disregard as Lulu has been treated all her life. Indeed, it’s not so far from the way people casually dismiss complex imagery. Perhaps some like Schigolch and Alwa need “instant relief”.

In complete contrast to the abstract Christof Loy production, Chéreau filled his stage with people – waiters, maids, actors, theatre staff. This is risky because too much activity can distract from essentials. But that’s never been an objection in literal, conservative stagings where busy surroundings are often admired. Notice how carefully the extras are positioned. Between gaps of singing, the singers can take a glass, move about, smoke, hardly missing a beat in the music. Like the music itself, they circulate.
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In the theatre scene, the extra personnel in their bizarre costumes serve to highlight the contrast with “real” people. Who is in the circus after all ? At the very start of the film (not the performance) there's a shot of bejewelled and befurred climbing up the marble staircase . They don't know it yet, but they're just like the rich folk whose world keeps Lulu at bay.

Dr Schön’s fiancée appears fleetingly in the background, a glowing vision of blonde female glory, everything that Lulu isn’t. She doesn’t have to say a word, nor does Lulu. No wonder Lulu is so upset. What she wants is more than just Dr Schön. Even when she marries him she knows she’ll never have what the privileged Adelaïde took for granted. Knowing Berg’s obsession with symmetry, the presence of the fiancée makes complete sense. She’s a forerunner of Countess Geschwitz, the only person who can offer Lulu a degree of selfless comfort. Again, both Geschwitz and Adelaïde have background totally closed to Lulu. Perhaps that’s why the Countess talks of going back to Germany and to university ? What does that represent, since Geschwitz dies ? There’s something pivotal about the fiancée even if it’s not at all explicit. Berg’s cryptic puzzles are deeply embedded, often ignored.

In the Paris scene, the crowd is part of the meaning: people are milling about pretending to be powerful, but they’re all on the make. Like jungle animals pacing their cages, always watching each other. Previously, Lulu was alone, a solitary among larger groups with things to do. Now she’s one of a wider group all chasing unsavoury deals. Berg isn’t commenting on business and economics, even though he knew all about the Crash of 1929. Rather, he seems to see Lulu as part of a wider system that operates like a sinister clockwork that regulates society. This fits in with the way the music operates, its symmetries and patterns as neat as an accountant’s ledger. Indeed, the music seems to evolve on parallel levels, like multiple frames on a cinema screen. Berg’s “worlds within worlds” yet again.

Some of Chéreau’s other details I don’t yet understand from two viewings. One is the magnificent chandelier. Of course, mansions have chandeliers and you need light to lift all that dark marble, and cast strange shadows. But it serves a deeper purpose too, which I can’t yet figure. Does it relate to the little fairy-figure seen only at the beginning ? He’s astride a glittering ball of light. He’s also dressed in pale shades reminiscent of Lulu’s silks. But that is the joy of complex images. You don’t “have” to get them immediately or even all the time. Like Berg’s music, clues are elusive and what you get equates to what you put in.

There was a lot of animosity at the time the production was premiered, partly from long festering resentment of the Bayreuth Ring and the end of the Cosima mentality. Furthermore, the mystery of the Third Act caught the popular imagination. Lulu was the first modern opera to get that massive publicity in the English speraking world. A lot was hanging on who got the contracts for completion and production, financially and in terms of reputation. Fortunately after 30 years the dust has settled and most people actually know the opera well enough to make more measured assessments. Quite frankly, there's nothing shocking in Chéreau's production, and even a few insights. Along comes Christof Loy who does the opposite and draws fire too. Perhaps it's time to heed what Berg himself said apropos to Wozzeck. He was a composer not a stage director and acknowledged how things change in art and life. "I write for the future".

Please read my other posts on Lulu and on the Royal Opera House production - click on label "Berg" at right. There's lots and even a movie download.

Lulu London Loy even more shocking 2nd time round

Christof Loy's new production of Berg's Lulu at the Royal Opera House really does benefit from repeat viewings as there is so much to take in, it's not possible in one or even two sittings. Second time round, the cast is more confident and settled, so the singing and acting was much better all round.

This time, too, I was sitting nearer the front, to get close-up detail. In a production as spartan as this, Der Teufel is in the detail. There are long passages with no singing, but these are absolutely integral to the development of the music. Instead of distracting the audience with silly gimmicks, Loy puts the focus on the music as simply as possible. So Agneta Eichenholz's Lulu stands alone and vulnerable on an empty stage while the music surges round her. Even at a distance it's a telling moment. Close up, you can see her facial muscles twitch, her shoulders jerk with suppressed tension. This Lulu may look serene but Eichenholz expresses the hidden volcano within.

Eichenholz's Lulu isn't just a cipher or a creature of sensual instinct but a seriously fractured personality. The controlled, elegant exterior is a way of suppressing the chaos within, rather like Berg's almost OCD obsession with patterns and codes. So zips get pulled, shoes and dresses removed, silently showing how clothes are a kind of armour behind which we can hide. Even Peter Rose's portly tum is touching, vulnerable, "exposed".

Thus when, towards the end, Lulu is confronted by her portrait, she loses control and screams "Throw it out!". This scene is brilliant. The portrait isn't an object. What we see instead is a harsh spotlight projected onto Lulu. It pins her down so she can't escape its probing glare. So she cracks up. In many ways, this is her real death, what happens with Jack the Ripper is just the follow-on.

Throughout the opera, things are constantly being projected – other people's fantasies onto Lulu, the music onto the stage. So the idea of film is fundamental to the opera. Intermezzo's blog makes a good point – why so much fascination with the movies? In the case of Berg and his contemporaries, film was cutting-edge technology, a whole new art form with infinite possibilities, opening up new ways of extending opera and music. Nowadays we think of movies as mass entertainment, but German movies were serious art. Many of them are still classics today.

Watching Michael Volle this time evoked a younger version of Emil Jannings, the schoolmaster in Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel, who is destroyed by his love for the vaguely Lulu-like woman played by Marlene Dietrich. Berg of course knew The Blue Angel, it was a sensation, and he and his crowd appreciated film in a way we don't do today outside art-house cinema.

Close up works better too for Klaus Florian Vogt's Alwa. Because so much of this opera is shocking, Alwa's delicacy is often overwhelmed, yet he's in many ways the "conscience" of the piece. He's a composer who hears Lulu in music – one of Berg's more explicit autobiographical clues. When the Painter commits suicide because of Lulu's infidelity, the message cannot have been lost on Schoenberg. So Vogt's understated lyricism was prescient – subtle, almost dominated by the other characters, a counterpoint to the brutality in the major musical themes.

Berg's writing is almost mathematical in its precision – like a balance sheet where entries must match, credit and debit. Although he wasn't doing economic analysis in this opera, the idea of society kept in order by checks and balances does creep in. Life here is a sequence of cold calculating transactions. Lulu uses sex for power, Dr Schön's wealth buys Lulu status, there are so many references to money (and the explicit in-joke of Jungfrau shares). Since seeing this production, the Paris scene is bringing up lots of new ideas for me. It's almost pure Berg, the discords in the music are expressing the discordant situation. Where Cerha pops up, it's in the barrel organ music around Schilgoch in the London scene, a little too literal compared with the distortions Berg's written in before.

Like a good wine, Loy's production improves with age and will, I think, be one of the defining moments in the performance history of this opera. Next season he directs Tristan und Isolde. It will be worth investing in top price seats if it will be as subtle as this Lulu.

Shockingly different Berg Lulu, Royal Opera House

The buzz was right - this new Lulu at the Royal Opera House, London is shockingly different.

Christof Loy's production of Alban Berg's Lulu is what minimalism should be: pared down to essentials so all attention is on the music. The stage is almost empty, no props, no furnishings. At first you think, why stage this at all, then ? Why not just a concert performance? But gradually it dawns that the "empty" space isn't empty at all but inhabited by the music, uncompromising and unadorned. That's why it's so disturbing. Without décor to cushion the narrative, it's impossible to escape.

The word "concept" is sneered at in our anti-intellectual world, but without intellect we are no more than beasts. Berg was an extremely conceptual composer. Lulu is constructed like a complex maze, with mathematical symmetries and interrelationships. Berg was obsessed by secret codes and numerology, with patterns and images shifting as if in a kaleidoscope. Berg is doing much more than telling a story in sound. He's creating a whole new concept, where ideas are expressed through abstraction. He's not literal, so this very non-literal production reveals just how radical his ideas could be.

The stage is bare but for a wall of glass. Like the glass, Lulu is opaque, impenetrable. Like Lulu, the glass takes on whatever role is projected onto it, whether the scene takes place in a mansion, prison or slum. The glass is Lulu's mirror image. No wonder there's no need for a painted portrait. The glass is staring us in the face.

Although the designs look sleek and sophisticated, danger lurks beneath the surface. Twice the narrative is interrupted by news of a revolution in Paris. Then the Third Act takes place in Paris. Everything's askew like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari where you don't know who the madman is, doctor or patient. So there's no film sequence in this production. It "is" the essence of film, and of the opera, and it's even in black and white.

The Caligari reference is relevant for throughout this opera people are becoming what they are not, pretending to be someone else, reappearing in different forms. It's in the music too, with its intricate constructions. So the Professor of Medicine sits with his back to the audience as Lulu fools around with the painter, has his heart attack then rises discreetly from the dead and walks off to become theatre manager and banker. The Painter doesn't have to commit suicide "convincingly" because he comes back as The Negro. Berg isn't being naturalistic, he's playing games of patterns and subterfuge. If Loy's production is confusing, that's because the opera is about confusion.

This is not "Lulu for Beginners", though, conversely, if it's taken entirely on its own terms, without assumptions of what opera "should" be, it might even be easier to grasp the concept of Lulu as a musical puzzle The first time I saw Lulu was 1978 - the original of the 3 act version - and was so shocked by the passive anti-drama of Lulu's personality that I didn't realize that this was exactly what Berg wanted to do. Here, Loy has taken away the obvious signposts to narrative, so we're forced, like Lulu, to be constantly alert, always aware that things may not be what they seem, and be prepared to shift and adjust. We are drawn into the jungle of shadowy dangers: hence the references to Africa (unknown territory), to snakes and predatory men. It's a far deeper insight into Lulu's background than the basic assumption that she was abused as a child. Loy's implication is that the whole world's a place where people are forced to play tricks to survive, like the Animal Trainer's charges.

No doubt there'll be huge opposition to this Lulu but it's one that will keep generating ideas for a long time to come. Spartan as it is, each detail is significant. For example, when Dr Schön embraces Lulu, his arms go round her, but his palms are stretched outward. When he starts to disintegrate emotionally in Act Two, there's a smudge of greasepaint on one side of his face. Lulu had worn such makeup when she was a dancer, and he is a man about to marry someone else. Now he's the vulnerable one. These details are fleeting, easily missed and may mean different things, so repeated visits to this Lulu are in order.

Indeed, the full impact of this production may not emerge until long after it's over. Since coming away from it, I've been thinking about Berg's obsessive sense of order. If the world is in perpetual, confusing chaos, then compulsive orderliness is a means of staving off danger. Berg's symmetries and palindromes aren't simply pattern making but a kind of secret incantation. Was he on the verge of something really radical when he died? We shall never know but it's stimulating to wonder.

Because this production throws so much emphasis on the music, it's quite a surprise at first how soft edged the orchestra sounded. Because I'm imprinted so much by Boulez, I make allowances for anyone else. In rehearsals, Antonio Pappano has emphasized the Viennese aspects of this opera, and its submerged romanticism. Submerged, like Lulu's tragedy. Despite the violence in this opera, it's tender and dignified. So I can see where the soft focus is coming from. It acts like a counterbalance to the stark sharpness of the staging: Boulez conducting a production like this would be almost too intense to bear! On the other hand, as my friend Mark Berry in Boulezian points out, a production with such emphasis on the music might need a more uncompromising performance. As he suggests, Metzmacher, Abbado, Harding or Gielen.

Agneta Eichenholz was Lulu. She's quite experienced though mainly in Sweden, which is perhaps appropriate for a Lulu , whose background is unknown. A First Night at Covent Garden was perhaps the highest profile she's ever had, so if she sounded tense, it's completely understandable.. It's a difficult part to sing, and to some extent shrillness fits in with the character. She doesn't quite have the hypnotizing presence of Christine Schäfer, but it really is asking too much of anyone to expect such standards.

Michael Volle's Dr Schön is a benchmark realization, all the more impressive because it's his first time in the role, though he sang Wozzeck only a few months ago. This is Dr Schön's tragedy as much as Lulu's. He's a man who showed compassion when he took Lulu off the streets, even if he may have got something back for doing so. Lulu clearly loves him, though she's incapable of giving him the same kindness. Because Volle's Dr Schön looks vigorous and in his prime, his disintegration is all the more distressing. He embodies Berg's theme of control and chaos: an authoritative, powerful voice but the actorly skills to transit from magnate to tortured soul.

Paradoxically – Lulu is full of paradoxes – the most unrealistic scene in the opera occurs when Countess Geschwitz and Lulu swap clothes and personalities. That couldn't happen in real life but in Loy's production the two women really do look alike. Jennifer Larmore's Countess Geschwitz is also a far more sympathetic portrayal than the butch Cruella DeVille some assume gay people must be. Berg's sister Smagarda was lesbian, so he knew they were people just like anyone else. Again, this production captures the essence of the opera by not giving the game away with obvious clues. You have to concentrate when Larmore and Eichenholz aren't singing to keep track of which is which.

Sturdy performances from Klaus Florian Vogt as Alwa and Peter Rose as the Animal Trainer/Athlete. Schigolch, though, might have needed greater definition. Unlike the other characters, he stays the same. He's the animal who can't be tamed, and a counter to Lulu herself, so more should have been made of the role. Gywnne Howell sang well, but the wild edge to the part wasn't present.

Get to this production. Chances are it won't be seen too often as it's hardly box office candy. Some ladies sitting near me were day trippers from the country on a package tour of the capital. They must have been thinking how odd Londoners are – don't we like The Lion KIng?

For production pix, see the formal review HERE
FIVE OTHER POSTS on Lulu and this production and a wholemovie download ! click on labels link at right. Christoff Loy will be directing the new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Toyal Oepra Hpouse London in September. Michael Volle sings Kurnewal, Heppner and Nina Stemme is I