I am writing
this quasi-review of the latest DVD recording of Alban Berg’s Lulu in near-complete
ignorance of the background particulars of this video beyond its provenance in
the 2010 Salzburg Festival. Before
watching it, I had never heard of its leading lady, Patricia Petibon, and even
now I had to consult the packaging credits for the specification of her
forename and the spelling of her surname.
Its Schigolch, Franz Grundheber, I have been aware of for many years
thanks to his appearances as Berg’s Wozzeck and Schoenberg’s Moses. But as for the rest of the cast, the
conductor, the designer, and indeed everything and everyone else involved
except the good old Vienna Philharmonic (and the video director, Brian Large,
whose work I know from countless opera videos spanning two-fifths of a century
and whom I have always thought of as “The Irritatingly Ubiquitous Poor Man’s
Humphrey Burton,” and who did not fail to live up to that epithet this time
round [but any comparative critique of the techniques of directors of opera for
television and video seems best postponed to a dedicated essay]) I had never
heard ary a word about any of them. What
I am trying to make plain is that I have no established beeves to air or axes
to grind with anyone involved in the production recorded on this video; that I
am reviewing it simply in its capacity as the third and most recently recorded of
the video records of Lulu that I have yet seen and heard and that when I
say, as I am about to do, that it is by far the worst of these records, the beeves,
bones, axes, etc. contained in that utterance are preeminently and indeed
almost exclusively with Father Time and with his apparent failure to effect an
improvement in the quality of the performances and productions of this opera in
tandem with his augmentation of their frequency. I’m not going to cherry-pick or adhominemize
in my fault-finding; in these pseudo-pages you won’t find me Jack
Horner-esquely ejaculating “Ah ha! I see that So-and-so is up to his usual
tricks!” or taking issue with what So-and-so “was trying to get across,”
because apart from the two already-noted exceptions I don’t know what any of
the people involved in the performance and production recorded on this disc
usually get up to or try to get across.
My beeves etc. will always be aired in the direction of the overall
result, the proof-impregnated pudding, as it were—and hence, I hope, merit at
least a modicum more of credibility than is deserved by the usual stage
door-Johnish kvetchings and carpings of amateur reviewers. So then, furtheradolessly: first to the
performance, which may and indeed really must be divided into musical and
dramaturgical registers, into an appraisal of how well the opera was played
(i.e., bowed, blown, plucked, etc.) and sung, and an appraisal of how well it
was acted. And vis-à-vis the first of
these registers I must admit I have little to complain about, but that may not
count for much, suspecting as I do that I am a philistine’s philistine in this
matter, in that—as with wine—I only really notice it when it’s really bad, and that
otherwise I am completely and mindlessly satisfied. (I say that this may not count for
much because a fair number of singing performances—and wines—that I have found
unendurable certain other tipplers of solid connoisseurial reputation have
praised to the skies; even though one would have thought that the shortcoming
that put me off—shortcomings on the order of triple digit-Hertzed errors in
intonation and swoon-inducing bouquets of locker-room mildew–would have
likewise put off any but the (s)tone deaf or tastebud-bereft. In short, I am intimating that there may be a
fair amount of emperor’s-new-clothism to the whole thing in both cases.) Almost everybody played and sang just fine. The first Lulu of the LP era, Evelyn Lear,
had a tendency to shriek out every note above the upper limit of the mezzo
range like a hysterical cartoon mouse, and Ms. Petibon had a bit of that going
on, but mainly in certain of the spoken or Sprechstimme’d passages,
passages in which she was not really required to sing; such that I am inclined
to chalk up this fault more to bad acting (q.v.) than to bad singing. In the roles of the Prince and Manservant,
Heinz Zednik, formerly (i.e., ca. 25 years ago) the greatest buffo tenor worldwide
[I should have mentioned him alongside Grundheber above, but fudge it], was
clearly well past his prime, delivering all his lines in a crackly cackle; and
it was doubtless with the aim of not taxing him overmuch that the third role buffo-tenor
role, that of the Marquis Casti-Piani, was given to another, younger
singer. The Countess Geschwitz of this
production, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner (with a three-unit sesquipedalian name
like that she must surely be angling to be anacronymized as “TAB”), was probably
the best I have yet heard. “Plummy” and
“smoky” are the words some would use in describing Frau Baumgartner’s voice; I
prefer to say that it gratifyingly had more bottom to it than that of the other
Geschwitzes I have known. Established
practice—doubtlessly taking a cue from Berg’s pragmatic specification of a
single singer for both the Lulu and Geschwitz passages in the five-movement Lulu
Suite—favors casting aging mezzos (e.g., Evelyn Lear in the 1980 Met
production) in this role. Frau
Baumgartner seemed rather to be a contralto in the prime of her career, and
this gave an extra dose of much-needed vocal gravitas and charisma to a
character whom both Wedekind and Berg regarded as the true heroine of the
piece. Everyone else was vocally just
fine—i.e., obtrusively neither superior nor inferior to his or her counterparts
in the other two videos. And the Vienna
Philharmonic was certainly every bit the equal of the Met Orchestra and the
London Philharmonic–but of course one would have been scandalized if it had not
been so. Now to the acting, into which I
shall for convenience’s sake (i.e., because I am about to talk about a
succession of individuated singer-actors) collapse the extra-vocal side of the casting,
even though by rights it really belongs in the production-centered
section. And not to mince words or beat
around the bush, when I write of “the extra-vocal side of the casting” I am in
the main thinking of the extra-laryngial, extra-pneumatic physical
qualifications of the leading lady. And on
this head, as on many of the others I have already remarked on, I have no
complaint. (“And yet you say this is the
worst Lulu you have ever seen!”
Indeed I do. Please be patient. It is always wise to get the flattering bits
out of the way first.) Indeed, from a
purely ocular point of view (sorry for the pleonasm, but after all, most
so-styled points of view on record are anything but ocular!) Patricia Petibon
may very well be the best Lulu yet known to me.
She looks younger than Julia Migenes and is prettier than Christine Schäfer,
each of whom in her allocated day was certainly young-looking and pretty
enough. And given that even such an
abysmal production of Lulu as the one recorded on this disc stars such a
nubile-seeming beaut as Ms. Petibon, we may at least take some comfort in the
thought that the physical specifications of the job-description of this role
appear by now, in its eighth decade, to be more or less set in stone. Seemingly gone are the days when a singer
could be cast in this role on the strength of her vocal prowess alone, when
Lulu could be played by a visibly middle-aged woman
(e.g. Evelyn Lear) or a distinctly unattractive one (e.g., Anja Silja). Please understand, dear gentle reader, that
in celebrating the apparent extinction of the unyoung or unpretty Lulu I am not
signaling the gratification of my personal eye-candy jones, but rather my
approval of the apparent clinching of one register of correspondence between
our empirical Lulus’ stage-presence and the character devised by Frank Wedekind
and appropriated, with few substantial changes, by Alban Berg. Please understand, DGR, that I am well aware,
thanks to both the testimony of others and my own experience, that an unyoung
or even ugly woman may be desirable or “sexy”; but it happens that the
desirability or sexiness of Lulu the Wedekind-Berg character is of a sort in
which the virtues traditionally conferred by age and ugliness can have no
part. At bottom Lulu is (in the animal
tamer’s words in the prologue) an Unschuld, an innocent, a “green girl
unsifted in perilous circumstance”; she neither possesses the savoir faire typical
of a beautiful woman of a certain age nor acts in the crafty, calculated manner
typical of such women. Wedekind was most
explicit in dissociating Lulu from the entire dramaturgical tradition of
stage-managing female leads. “Apart from
an intrigue here and there,” he wrote in his prologue to Pandora’s Box,
the second of the Lulu plays, “Lulu plays [homography entirely fortuitous, I
swear!] an entirely passive role in all three acts [i.e., of this second play,
corresponding to the second scene of Act II and the whole of Act III of the
opera].”
Why,
then, do so many women cast as Lulu (including Ms. Petibon), despite their
physiological qualifications to embody the ingenueish Lulu specified by
Wedekind, play her as a soup-to-nuts string-puller, impart a malevolently
knowing smirk to her every utterance and gesture? There are, at seems, to me two answers to
this question, or two causes of this deviation.
The first, and more efficient of these causes is zeitgeistial: in our
time (and really, indeed, already by Wedekind’s time [Why, after all, would he
have felt compelled to remark outside the text of the play that its heroine was
not a manipulator if he could have taken it for granted that she would not be
regarded as such?]) innocence is equated with powerlessness; we demand
so-called strong female characters, and in our laserscopically incorrigible
Baconian eyes there can be no strong female character who is not in the know
about absolutely everything. This, I
say, is the more efficient of the two causes, because it is the one that
prevails by default and can only be overridden by strong objective counterpressures
from the object on which it imposes itself.
Such counterpressures are indeed abundant in the text of Lulu’s
libretto. But at least in the
Anglosphere they are bound to be counter-overriden by another textual element
that triggers a certain ineluctable Shandyian association with a vast and (at
least in the Anglosphere) authoritative literature on the psychology of sexy
women. At the very beginning of her
central aria, the “Lied der Lulu,” our eponym declares, “Although people have
killed themselves because of me, I am not less valuable for that.” The bare lexical profile of “a woman who can
drive people [by default men ] to kill themselves” immediately pegs Lulu as a
so-called femme fatale, a figure that for all modern Anglo-Saxons is
always a vamp, a pouty, voluptuous, and transparently spiteful and worldly-wise
shrew. This sort of femme fatale is
basically a film-noir figure, a creation of the immediate post-World War II
years (note that Louise Brooks’s impeccable realization of Lulu as ingénue dates
from the late 1920s), although I suppose its apotheosis was reached only long
after the noir era proper, in Kathleen Turner’s character in the 1983 Carl
Reiner-directed comedy The Man with Two Brains. “I love to see the veins in your temple
throb!” this harridan gloatingly screams into the face of her apoplectically
jealous elderly millionaire lover, in full triumphal consciousness that the
stroke she has just induced by making him unknowingly eat his favorite pet fish
will prove fatal and make hers the fortune bequeathed to her in his will. It is as this sort of figure that
present-day dramaturges, audiences, and prospective Lulus alike are bound by
default to see Lulu unless they have attentively read Wedekind’s plays and
Berg’s libretto—and of course the fact that while singing the abovementioned
central aria Lulu is holding a revolver with which she is about to kill her own
husband does nothing to dispel such an envisaging. With all these manifestly insuperable
barriers to conceiving of Lulu as anything but an omniscient vamp so eye-burstingly
obdurately in view, one feels almost wantonly pedantic in chastising Ms. Petibon
for playing her as such a figure, and doubly so in pointing to specific moments
in the opera that contraindicate such a portrayal. Still, if nobody else will, I must, and so
shall, as follows: one must note that immediately after shooting Dr.
Schön, Lulu cries out, apropos of him in default of any other present gents,
“The only man I have ever loved!”; an exclamation that immediately recalls her
earlier declaration, in the “Lied der Lulu’s” first-act complement, a spoken
monologue likewise addressed to the elder Schön, that “if there is anybody I
have ever belonged to [Schön has just referred to her second spouse, the
painter, as “your husband”—in other words, not only her possessee but also her
possessor] it’s you.” Then there is the
tender sub-scene of II.i (occurring just minutes before the aforementioned
“Lied”-cum-shooting episode) in which Lulu tells Dr. Schön that “your love for
me” is the one thing that makes nonsense of the fact that she chose to marry
him rather than vice-versa—in other words, that in a way he still wears the
trousers in their marriage. “And yet one
must not forget that the gun-centered episode that eventuates in Dr. Schön’s
death arises out of his jealousy over a congeries of adulteries of which some indeterminate
but real proportion are not figments of his imagination.” Indeed one must not. But at the same time one must not mistake
these adulteries for mediated manipulative expressions of Lulu’s erotic
dissatisfaction with her husband. They
are, rather, immediate expressions of her appetites and of her inclination to
please. Although throughout the first
half of the opera, Dr. Schön is the number one man in her life, Lulu genuinely
enjoys coiting with other men—with certain other men, mind you, not all
other men—and sees no compromision of her love for the fair doctor in the
free indulgence of her volonté à baiser.
Thus, although her reception of the amorous advances of the painter in
the first scene of Act I is hardly welcoming, by Scene II, she has clearly
taken a certain shine to him as a f**kbuddy (albeit that she clearly still
thinks he is more than a bit of a prat); for when he breaks off their foreplay to
answer the door on the grounds that the caller might be his art-dealer, she remarks
in a petulant aside, “Who cares if it’s the emperor of China?” Here, Lulu resents the doorbell-ringer not
(as worldly-wiseacres of every present-day sexual-political stripe would
maintain) egoistically, qua diverter of the spotlight from her person, but
merely selfishly, qua interrupter of her favorite contact sport. Her appetitive attitude to the other men to
whom we are introduced is rather harder to discern. The schoolboy would appear to be the object
of a genuine albeit minor crush chez lui.
The athlete she appears to be merely humoring in the hope of landing some
sort of remunerative gig. The oldster
Schigolch, her other-styled father, she long ago coited with, probably in
gratitude for his having raised her from the very gutter to the position of
Alhambra Café flower girl in which Schön discovered her. Clearly at a criminally precocious age she realized
that her own body was the asset she both most enjoyed putting to use and had
the most to gain from exploiting. It is
all so simple and yet so off-putting to our present-day gyno-bureau-sentimento-philic
sensibilities. When a supposedly
desperate woman, supposedly endowed with every quality requisite to the
management of the richest business enterprise or most powerful State in the
world, is supposedly obliged to “sell her body” to “make ends meet,” we reach
for our cigarette lighters with one hand and our handkerchiefs with the other. But once such a woman has been raised above
the level of a whore through marriage we expect her to put aside whorish
things: we expect her to busy herself by overseeing some sort of complicated
operation funded by her share of her trophy-groom’s capital—ideally some
charitable concern patronizing oppressed women in some faraway downtrodden
land, failing that a for-profit undertaking catering to the consumerist
cravings of women ici-en haut. If
instead she chooses to while way every free moment coiting with every human
being capable of pissing against a wall without prosthetic help—why, it must be
at the behest of some ulterior motive, her resentment of her victimization by
the patriarchal system being the most obvious one. But at no point in her narrative trajectory
does Lulu evince the faintest soupcon of resentment. Even at the very nadir of her fortunes, when
she has been reduced to turning tricks as a freelance London streetwalker, coition remains preeminently
a recreation for her, something that she requires to be a source of fun. After being taken leave of by her first
client, an uptight, close-mouthed Bible-thumper, she exclaims in ironic
exasperation: “He gave me such a thrill!”
And even more tellingly, she actually begs her third (and as fate would
have it, last) client, Jack, to lie with her even after he has refused to pay
her because she cannot give him enough change to cover his bus fare. Then, as I said, there is the matter of her
apparently unquellable desire to please all these men in her Lebenswelt,
to make them feel that she genuinely likes them—as in fact she genuinely does. Take for instance playful burlesque tease-dance
in the first scene of the opera. Admittedly
the intended spectator of this dance, her first husband, the “Medizinalrat,”
Dr. Goll, is either unconscious or stone dead throughout it. Admittedly she employs it principally (or
perhaps even solely) as a heuristic, as a means of determining whether he is
alive or not. And admittedly within
seconds of learning for certain that he is dead, she is exhilaratededly
exclaiming “Now I’m rich.” But all of
this is quite beside the point, namely that in tone and spirit the dance is
completely and artlessly playful and devoid of spite. As she launches into it she remarks that the
doctor can “see her every move,” thereby intimating that it was a kind of
domestic ritual chez eux, a ritual in which she appears to (have) take(n)
genuine pleasure, despite the doctor’s avine seniority. “Indeed, perhaps because of that
seniority qua augur of her imminent inheritance of a great deal of
money.” Now, now: there is absolutely no
evidence for this in the libretto. From
her delight at being suddenly enriched by the doctor’s death it by no means
follows that she was looking forward to that death. Something that by every means follows from
that delight is that she did not love the doctor, but one assuredly can be
unenamored with someone without actively, determinedly wishing him harm. One can, indeed, be generally well disposed
to someone with whom one is unenamored.
That Dr. Schon is the only character in the opera that Lulu loves is
undoubtedly true, but it is no less undoubtedly true that she likes all the
other characters most of the time, that liking is her default disposition to
other people. Those who mistake this
unloving amiability for spitefulness and accordingly blame Lulu for it are
holding her to a standard to which she is patently incapable of conforming. Active, dedicated hatred no less than active,
dedicated love requires a solid, well-developed subjectivity, which in
turn requires a self-reflective, self-cultivating will—something Lulu does not
possess. In the terminology of the
seemingly unavoidable famous American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt she is not
a person but a wanton, a creature incapable of caring what her will
is. She has desires aplently, but she lacks
all trace of a settled disposition towards any of those desires (any, that is
and of course, except her desire for intimacy with Dr. Schön, which she wants
to make her dominant desire, even at the moment when she is killing him). It is to this absence of a settled
second-order volition Dr. Schön is essentially referring when he warns the
painter “not to expect bourgeois values” from Lulu—for there is after all no
greater monument to Subjectivity with a capital “S,” to subjectivity defined
and subsumed by second-order volitions, than the morality of the eighteenth and
nineteenth-century bourgeois class, Schön’s own class. “How ironic that he, the
opera’s chief embodiment of bourgeois subjectivity, should end up conjoined with
its chief embodiment of subjectivity’s antithesis.” No, that is not ironic but merely
pathetically fitting, for Lulu’s allure to such full-fledged bourgeois subjects
as Schön is partly (I shrink from saying “prevailingly”) founded on her freedom
from second-order volitional constraints.
What is ironic is Schön’s invocation of bourgeois standards of
behavior to Lulu after they are married—his insistence to her that because they
are now “joined together as one” and she—unlike his present self (in contrast
to his past self, who could not resist Lulu’s attractions during his first
engagement)—cannot manage to make her sexual conduct express this
indissolubility, it is her obligation to kill herself, to actualize the “till
death do us part” clause of the marriage contract. And it is in the light of her inability to
understand, let alone embody, consistency of conduct that we must see all her
acts of pitilessness, of which Schön’s murder is notable only because it is the
most spectacular. “If,” her killing of
him implies, “one of us must die for the sake of some completely nonsensical
obligation to be sexually faithful to each other, it is going to be you,
because I am never going to see such fidelity as reasonable in any sense.” Her unrepentant spurning of Geswchitz in Act
III is motivated by exactly consubstantial considerations. To Lulu’s recent avoidance of her the
Countess incredulously protests, “Have you forgotten your avowals of passion to
me?” convinced like Dr. Schön as she is that certain things said at one moment
are meant to dictate one’s conduct at subsequent moments. No, Lulu certainly has not forgotten those
avowals, but she assuredly has failed to grasp their distinctive essence as avowals,
as promises of future actualization of the passion referred to in them. Or perhaps “failed” is not quite the right
word here. For Lulu accompanies her
off-brushing of the Countess with the following diagnosis of sorts: “You have
too much brain for a woman and not enough brawn for a man. That’s why you’re insane.” Here, in implying that she herself has just
enough brain for a woman (and hence less than enough for a man), Lulu may seem
to be putting herself forward as just another hair-twirling, bubblegum-popping,
“Don’t mind dumb little me”-insisting feminist bugbear. But a little reflection on the parallels
between Geschwitz’s conduct and Schön’s goes to show that Lulu is doing
something a bit more complicated than that.
Dr. Schön had enough brain for a man, and look where it got him—worked
up into a homicidal frenzy by his obsessive meditation on the idée fixe of his
wife’s wedding vows. But luckily up to a
point for him, he had the brawn (not to mention the weapons permit) to compel
others to acknowledge the legitimacy of his obsession. (One thing that Lulu apparently really has
failed to see is that she owes her survival to her own possession of masculine
brawn sufficient to have allowed her to wrest the gun away from Schön.) The Countess with her masculine-proportioned
brain is likewise obsessed over a single thing Lulu once said, but
unfortunately she is too physically weak to elicit anything but scorn for her
obsession from her beloved. This
is why she is insane—because she lacks the brawn to underwrite her obsessions
as sane. If and only if she were a man,
says Lulu, she would be acting rationally in the eyes of the world—albeit
completely irrationally in a categorical sense.
In Lulu’s view, having a bigger brain, a mannish brain, does not
necessarily make a person more rational—more sensible, more prudent, more
attentive to immediate self-interest—but merely more rationcinative, more prone
to ruminating obsessively over abstract ideas like chastity and fidelity. Something nearly too much of this. The aggregated upshot of the four things I have
been discussing for the past thousand words or so—Lulu’s undiscriminating
enjoyment of sex, her de facto good natured-ness, her wantonness, and her
well-thought-out a-philosophical, anti-ratiocinative worldview—is that the only
negative emotion, or rather emotional habitus, that an interpreter of Lulu need
concern herself with is exasperation, the kind of irritation (and only
irritation) a person evinces when being pestered not for the first time about
something that she regards as inherently silly or trivial. The instant such an interpreter switches from
exasperation to, or alloys exasperation with, any other negative passion—be it
spite, rage, or Schadenfreude—she is getting the part wrong. And again it must be stressed that this
exasperation should be the exception rather than the rule, that it should crop
up only on the occasions already mentioned and the two or three others in which
Lulu finds herself backed into a corner (e.g., the episode in which the Marquis
de Casti-Piani is pressuring her into joining the staff of the Egyptian
brothel). Otherwise she should be
uniformly, uninterruptedly sunny and frolicsome. Of the three Lulus I have seen, only
Christine Schäfer manages both to twig this combination of good cheer and
exasperation and to segue from the one emotional habitus to the other at
appropriate moments. One sees her
mastery of the essence of the role from the very beginning, in the flirtatious
smile with which she accepts the apple proffered to her by the animal tamer,
right up until the end, when amid the wretched squalor of her streetwalker’s
existence she can barely stifle the giggles reflexively elicited by the
Professor’s mute and po-faced efforts to shush her; and she handles the
episodes of exasperation with comparable aplomb; when, for example, Dr. Schön
is haranguing her about the organic indissolubility of his union with her, she
closes her eyes and remains standing perfectly still, as if toughing out some
excruciatingly painful medical procedure.
Julia Migenes would appear at least to have an inkling of the
combination, but her physiognomy is too unsubtle and inflexible for this
awareness (if it is actual) to come fully through. For example she seems to be having an
appropriately good time during, the early part of the painting scene and her
first interview with Schigolch, but her merriment is expressed mainly in her
bodily movements (e.g., dancing and gamboling about)–on her face, she is
content to sport throughout these episodes a single smirk that may as plausibly
denote mildly acrimonious scorn as high spirits. (Perhaps the intention was to make Lulu the
embodiment of a different feminine archetype from the vamp, that of “woman as
enigma.” If so, it was badly
misplaced. Lulu is not in any sense an
enigma: one should never be in any doubt about what she is thinking and
feeling.) As for Ms. Petibon, she treats
the entire opera as one big vampfest: at every moment she is either reveling
mirthlessly in the ineluctability of her handhold on the huevos of the
remainder of the dramatis personae or howling with atavistically sanguinary
fury at some directorially interpolated (q.v.) challenge to that hold. Throughout the performance, one finds it
impossible to imagine why anyone would feel anything for her but a mixture of
fear and disgust, let alone actually become infatuated with her. While no other member of the cast of the Salzburg production
traduced the essence of his or her part as stridently as Ms. Petibon did hers,
not one of them deserved the operatic equivalent of an Oscar either. Michael Volle’s Dr. Schön was insipid but
appropriately solemn and stern; Frau Baumgartner’s
Geschwitz was insipid but appropriately solemn and glum. Thomas Piffka seemed sensibly to have modeled
his Alwa on David Kuebler’s admirable Glyndebourne interpretation of the
character as a timid, fashionless dweeb only to stretch and swell the
dweebiness beyond the limits of plausibility and likeability alike. Thomas Johannes Meyer as the Acrobat was
much better than the callow and robotically stiff Lenus Carlson in the Met
production but also greatly inferior to Donald Maxwell’s magisterial
Glyndebourne acrobat. Wedekind conceived
of the acrobat as the true villain of the second play, as the epitome of
crassly self-interested petit-bourgeois philistinism, and Maxwell made him seem
exactly that by wolfing down his caviar with real gusto during the casino
scene, shamelessly thrusting forth his paunch and chin in unison while
bewailing his factitious sufferings on Lulu’s behalf, and literally spitting
out his self-righteous denunciation of Alwa as a “snot rag.” Meyer, in contrast, diminished the character’s
dramaturgical stature by playing him as a more or less good-natured and
harmless rogue from the old comedy, as a minor irregular humorist. Speaking of irregular humorists, the character of Schigolch really is one—a
major not a minor one—and therefore needs to be played with plenty of swagger
and panache—swagger and panache much enfeebled in their expression by the
infirmities of old age, to be sure, but always in evidence. It was therefore saddening to see Franz
Grundheber doing almost a walk-through of the part. He didn’t even do a convincing job of making
Schigolch seem old—hardly a stretch for a septuagenarian, one would have
thought. His Schigolch came across as
just some vaguely seedy dude who was vaguely happy to be along for the ride. Perhaps after playing someone as august and
impassible as Moses Grundheber had gotten it into his head that Schigolch was a
little beneath his dignity. The only
member of the cast who brought a welcome touch of something absent in her predecessors’
portrayals was Cora Burggraaf in the two trouser roles of the schoolboy and the
groom. With her long, unruly blond
tresses and unliddable saucer-sized eyes Ms. Burggraaf looked like the young
(i.e., mid-90s) Elen DeGeneres and brought a properly tomboyish
rough-and-tumble hyperactivity to both parts.
(Patricia Bardon in the Glyndebourne production was also excellent, but in
her case, probably owing more to her physique than to her irreproachable
acting, one never quite forgot that these two male adolescents were being
played by a full-fledged woman.)
Now
at last I come to the production, under which rubric I subsume (for want of
proper schooling on how the various duties of director, set designer, upmaker, and
costume designer are apportioned among the behind-the-scenes personnel involved
in the complete staging of an opera) the costumes, the sets, the props, the
makeup, and the various bits of stage business the actor-singers get up to (for
vis-a-vis this last item I assume—perhaps unfairly—that the directors of
operas, unlike their counterparts in the movies and to a lesser extent the
unsung stage, do not allow much if any ad-libbing). Ms. Petibon’s disfigurement of the leading
role aside, I could easily have put up with all the shortcomings in the
Salzburg performance that I have so far mentioned; indeed, even with that
disfigurement tacked on, given that Julia Migenes’s realization of the role was
far from perfect, the Salzburg performance might very well have ousted the
Levine Met performance from its second-place perch in my ranking of the three
that I have so far seen. But the whole
dash-blamed thing is earmarked for the rubbish heap by the production. Needless to say, this production is one of
those that seek to give the impression that everything is taking place as
nearly as possible to ten seconds from now, one of those in which not a
shoelace or handbag-strap of less than present fashion-year vintage can be worn
or carried, and in which everybody must be shown busying himself or herself
with some piece of gadgetry—a segue or a wee or an I-pad–utterly unknown to the
uptight Biedermeiers or Victorians or Georgians (in either the eighteenth- or
the twentieth-century sense) who constituted the show’s original audience. Perhaps not quite needless to say, I am
generally averse to such productions, and in the exceptional case of Lulu
my aversion receives sanction from the composer-librettist. Most composers and librettists have been
content to leave even the broadest specifics of staging to the opera houses,
such that not even the very first production of a given opera can claim to be
authoritative, and that at least from a score’s-eye point of view the present-day
would-be producers of an antique opera are entirely within their rights to use
whatever scenery, costumes, and props strike their fancy. If someone chooses, as someone indeed has
done, to set The Abduction from the Seraglio in the mansion of a late
twentieth-century oil tycoon crammed full of electronic paraphernalia, then
whether one likes it or not, there is not much one can say on Mozart’s and
Bretzner’s behalf in favor of a more traditional staging in an Ottoman-era
pasha’s palace bereft of any accoutrement of more modern manufacture than an
oil lamp, because the score of The Abduction does not specify what Selim’s
palace is supposed to look like or with what sorts of props it is to be
cluttered. Berg’s score for Lulu
is in contrast almost fussily detailed and specific about how people, rooms,
and objects are supposed to look.
Admittedly it is not evenly fussy: we are told nothing of the
architectural-historical provenance of the painter’s studio, nothing (most of
the time) of what Dr. Schön and his son Alwa are wearing. On the other hand, we are told that the
animal tamer is wearing a cinnabar-red tailcoat, that the painter’s studio is
furnished with an ottoman draped in a tiger’s skin, that in the first scene
Lulu is dressed in a Pierrot’s costume, and that Dr. Schön’s drawing room dates
from the German renaissance. Conceptually
(if not necessarily financially), the smoothest and least perverse way of
accommodating such a welter of desultory detail is to presuppose an early
twentieth-century setting and fill in the gaps naturalistically with the
obvious bric-a-brac of the period—with three or four-button three-piece
business suits for the Schöns in the studio scene, white ties and black
tailcoats for them in the theater scene, a dormer-windowed garret for the
painter’s studio, and so on. In any
event, leaving out the cinnabar tailcoat and the tiger skin and so forth is not
an authentic option. Such being the
case, of the three productions I am familiar with, my favorite ought by all
rights to be the Met one, the only one that both adheres faithfully to Berg’s
stage directions for setting and costume and seamlessly integrates its own
interpolations into this mise-en-scene.
And yet it is only my second choice.
My first choice is the Glyndebourne production, which simply leaves out
most of the props and scenery Berg asks for, replaces many of the others with
things of its own invention, and costume-wise serves admirably as a time
capsule of the fashions of the micro-epoch of its staging, the mid 1990s. In this production as early as the prologue
one notices deviations from the score:
the animal tamer is dressed not in a cinnabar red tailcoat but in a blue
lamé dinner jacket, as if to make him seem more like a Vegas emcee than a
ringmaster in an old-fashioned circus, and Lulu is wearing not a Pierrot’s
costume but a long-sleeved green T-shirt and green snakeskin trousers, by flagrant
way of giving point to the animal tamer’s designation of her as “the
serpent.” (I have already mentioned the animal
tamer’s handing her an apple, which of course ties in nicely with Lulu’s
possession of the alternate handle of “Eva” [i.e., Eve] but is unfortunately,
and like the serpent costume, an interpolation.) And in place of Berg’s suite of full-blown
tableaux, which of course in any traditional opera house must be erected and
broken down in full at the beginning and end of each scene, this production
opts for a single two-tier wooden set with no backdrops (or curtain), and
indicates changes of scene by simply dimming and re-brightening the lights. I prefer this production to the Met one for
two reasons. The first is mainly
technical and negative: namely, that despite its many omissions and
modifications there is very little about the Glyndebourne production that
positively contradicts either the spirit or the letter of Berg’s Nachlass. From a technical point of view, a production
that mimicked the Met’s but included all the splendid performances of the
Glyndebourne festival’s would have been preferable, but ultimately none of the
things that are missing or different in the Glyndebourne production are of a
kind to make or break one’s estimation of it.
Sure, Lulu in a Pierrot costume would have been nice, but what apart
from certain charming but ultimately dispensable echoes of Berg’s teacher
Schoenberg’s atonal signature work Pierrot Lunaire is perforce
jettisoned along with it? And the set,
for all its spartanness, at least includes almost all the structures requisite
to the execution all the utterances and movements specified by Berg: it
includes, for example, a front door through which Alwa, Dr. Schön, Schigolch,
and the police can make their entrances, a flight of stairs about which Schigolch
can kvetch as he stumbles down them, and a within-doors door behind (or
[admittedly annoyingly enough] beneath) which Lulu the painter’s widow can
withdraw to change her clothes and Lulu the prostitute to be alone with her
clients. Most of what it omits can be
left to the imagination: for example, one does not mind overmuch that Schigolch
is treading on bare wood as he gushes about the lush carpets into which he is
supposedly sinking his feet. (Admittedly
the absence of flat vertical surfaces does exact one unreasonable act of imaginative
calisthenics: in the final scene we must imagine that Lulu’s portrait is being
“hung on the wall”—as the dialogue on its own makes clear—even as it is being
nailed to the floor. [George Perle complained of an identical makeshift in the Paris premiere of the
complete Cerha version, which inexcusably set the last scene in a (wall-less)
public toilet.]) My second reason for
preferring the Glyndebourne production is (sorry if this sounds pompous) philosophical
and derives from such truth-content as Lulu possesses, or rather has
come to possess, above and beyond Wedekind’s and Berg’s explicit intentions. At bottom Lulu is not at all about
modern humankind’s monomaniacal enslavement to sex (at least not qua sex); but
rather about its bifurcated, schizoid enslavement to the irreconcilable forces
of the so-called reality principle and the so-called pleasure principle, which
in an industrially commercialized society are invariably mediated by the forces
of production and consumption respectively.
The opera’s chief embodiment of the reality or productive principle is
Dr. Schön, a high mucky-muck in every extant prestigious and profitable sphere
of activity available in the city in which he resides. He is at once the editor and publisher of a
major metropolitan newspaper, a substantial shareholder in some apparently
rather hefty corporations (hefty enough that the maintenance of his portfolio
requires his hebdomadal personal presence at the stock exchange), and some sort
of Ziegfield-scale impresario. (The lavish music-hall spectacle that Lulu walks
out of is entirely his baby.) And let us
not forget that he (like his son Alwa) has a doctorate. In what subject, you ask? Who knows or cares: in the
Wilhelmine-stroke-Franz Josefine German-speaking world, the Ph. D., far from
serving as a byword for charlatanry and unemployability as it does in the
present-day Anglosphere, imparted to its possessor an almost oracular—or indeed
Moses-like-aura of unchallengability. By
all rights, such as rights are, Dr. Schön ought to be invulnerable to seduction,
let alone destruction, by the likes of a social and economic nonentity like
Lulu. And yet he is seduced and
ultimately destroyed by her. Why? Partly because the very nature of his
professional activities places him in intimate (albeit by default purely voyeuristic)
contact with that part of the world that productively speaking is at antipodes
with his own. The acrobat calls the
Schöns’ paper a “scandal sheet,” an epithet that inevitably evokes associations
with Murdockian tabloid-style journalism that are as misleading as they are
germane. What I mean is that we have no
reason to believe that Schön’s paper is notably smutty--that it is not much
closer to the German equivalent of the New York (or London) Times—in
other words the F.A.Z. or Die Welt—than to the German equivalent
of the Sun or National Enquirer (examples of which I am proudly
unable to adduce); nor have we any reason to believe that the Schöns are
cynically pedaling a product they despise or do not appreciate themselves. The decades-ancient marginalization of
newspapers to a de-facto prestige niche has blinded us to the fact that since
at least the early nineteenth century journalism tout court has been an
inherently prurient and sensationalist medium, a medium for which no gentleman
in the old-school eighteenth-century sense can deign to cultivate an appetite. But the Schöns for all their wealth are not gentlemen in the old-school
sense. The elation that prompts Alwa unceremoniously
to burst into the painter’s and Lulu’s house exclaiming, “Revolution has broken
out in Paris!” is occasioned not by the event’s historical significance
(revolutions being after all a dime a decade in France), nor even by the urge
in circulation and revenues it promises, but rather by its spectacularity as a
scoop, as an occasion for an unscheduled extra section featuring a big multi-column
story with banner headlines and dazzling photographs. Alwa’s Parnassian aspirations as a composer—a
composer of operas, works for the stage, mind you, not of symphonies or
string quartets, works for the concert hall—should be seen not as a
back-turning retreat from the family business but as a surcharged embrace of
it, as an attempt to purge the journalistic spectacle of its parasitic
dependence on historical contingency, to generate events that are as
awe-inspiring as revolutions without being at all sporadic or unpredictable. Animated by the spirit of this purgation,
Alwa breezily announces, “I think that for my matinee I’ll use electric light”—that’s
new-school bright, steady, gorgeous, odorless, and dependable electric light;
as opposed to old-school dim, ugly, shaky, shifty smelly gas light. And for the human centerpiece of this
electrically illuminated matinee he has chosen Lulu—the bright, steady, dependable
(in attitude if not action), and above all young, positively history-less
Lulu. Both Alwa’s and Ludwig’s passion
for Lulu must be seen as fundamentally utopian in orientation, as
vectored towards a world in which the slate will have been wiped clean in all
possible senses—morally, politically, economically, religiously, psychologically,
sanitarily, and (last but not least) cosmetically. Unfortunately, the inevitable flipside of
Lulu’s unsulliedness by the history of production is her indissoluble
association with a number of figures who are marginal to the productive
mechanism in less salubrious ways.
Schigolch, like Lulu, has never worked a day in his life, but his life
is much longer than hers and consequently blighted by decades of scams, cheats,
and subterfuges, most of them too old to be useful by now (the “squeezebox” [Harmonika]
Lulu asks after seems to hail form this realm of superannuated
hoodwinkery). The acrobat, on the other
hand, although presumably fairly young, has taken refuge in a productively
irredeemable, a dead-end, pseudoprofession.
There are no qualifying exams for being a circus performer, hence no
means of proving to a would-be circus performer that he is unqualified for his
calling and should seek employment in some other trade. And so as long as the acrobat can find
somebody to leech off of, he is free to indulge his pipe-dreams of becoming a
world-famous circus performer and indeed of collaborating with the “greatest
female gymnast of our time,” as he prospectively styles Lulu. And finally, of course, the schoolboy is a
productively problematic figure because he is not legally old enough to
participate in the productive mechanism.
In virtue of its utter shiftlessness and heterogeneous,
ragtag-and-bobtail composition, this Lulu-centered demimonde reminds one of
Karl Marx’s catalogue of the classless riffraff who brought “that crafty roué”
Louis Napoleon—the future Napoleon III—to power in France in 1852: “vagabonds,
dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, sharpers, jugglers,
lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand performers, gamblers, procurers,
keepers of disorderly houses, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors
grinders, tinkers, beggars--in short, that whole undefined, dissolute,
kicked-about mass that the Frenchmen style ‘la Bohéme.’” Of course, in Marx’s view the 1852 French
revolution was not a real revolution at all, and the bohemians were mere
interloping placeholders for the true revolutionary class, the proletariat, who
he fully expected to be back in the pilot’s seat and sailing full steam ahead
once the clueless bourgeoisie realized how badly they had been had by that
crafty roué and his crapulous henchpeople.
Little did he know that the bohemians’ power would only continue to grow
and would indeed eventually eclipse that of both the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, as it was already threatening to do by the time Wedekind wrote the
Lulu plays, as it was in process of doing by the time Berg adapted those plays
for the opera house, and as it had long since done by the time Graham Vick and
company brought Lulu to Glyndebourne.
One sees at last, I trust, the philosophical grounds of my preference of
the Glyndebourne production: if Lulu is trying to tell us that it is the
bohemians—the unrepentantly unproductive—who have inherited the earth, then it
is exigent that we should find its bohemian characters compellingly repellent
embodiments of unrepentant unproductivity.
A scrupulously period-perfect production like the 1980 Met one will
inevitably fail to make us find them such because the as-yet-merely-insurgent
bohemians of the penultimate turn of the century retained many of the sartorial
trappings of their bourgeois adversaries: they wore waistcoats and ties and
floor-grazing dresses and so forth. A brazenly
present-set production like the 1996 Glyndebourne one, on the other hand, may
properly disgust us with the bohemian characters by putting us in mind of the
actual, utterly unreconstructed, debourgeoisfied boho types we have been forced
to deal with in our own lifeworld. The
Glyndebourne Schigolch, Norman Bailey, sports a rainbow color-schemed knitted
tam-o’-shanter of the type favored by a broad swath of post-1960s
countercultural layabouts from deadheads to Bob Marley worshippers. “Don’t Worry: Be Happy!” seems to be the
message this Schigolch is broadcasting via this bit of headgear, both in
affirmation of his happy-go-lucky ethos and in flagrant contradiction of the
misery this ethos both feeds off of and propagates. The Glyndebourne acrobat, Donald Maxwell, is
togged out in a leather jacket, bolo tie, jeans, and cowboy boots. He looks like nothing so much as the
front-man of one of those obnoxious pig-swiving rockabilly revival bands that
pullulated across the FM dial and the U.S. interstate highway system
fifteen-to-twenty years ago. Who among
us over the age of thirty-five has not had to contend with the buffaloing
braggadocio of such an asshole at some point—when patiently queuing for the
restroom, or attempting to order a drink, or requesting clarification of an
item on a restaurant menu? But speaking
of this amongwhominal “us”: in any modernizing production of Lulu worth
its salt all freewheeling imaginative costuming of the bohemian characters must
be counterpoised with an almost prosaic restraint vis-à-vis the wardrobes of
the “straight” bourgeois personages, of the Schöns and Countess Geschwitz (who,
though a lesbian, is certainly no club girl: recall that her penultimate piece
of dialogue is a vow to apply to law school).
These figures must dress as formally, as tastefully, and as
unflamboyantly, as any upper-middle class professional can still get away with
dressing in this age in which everyone in every walk of life seems to prefer to
dress (in Alistair Cooke’s memorable formulation) “like an unemployed plumber.” For we must be able to tell them apart
from their bohemian inferiors, and more subtle sartorial caste-markers (e.g.,
jeans worn without visible thongage or boxer elastic above the waistband)
simply will not get the point across.
The Glyndebourne production does its absolute damnedest to make sure
that we are so able. Apart from the
scene set backstage at a theater, when he wears a nattily conventional tuxedo
with color-coordinated powder-blue bowtie and cummerbund, Dr. Schön is always
seen in a two-piece single-breasted gray business suit which may or may not be
partially concealed by a tan wool or camel’s hair overcoat depending on whether
he is on his way in or out the door or not.
In the full, overcoat-including panoply, he looks irreproachably
authoritative and official, as if he has just been called in from playing Henry
Kissinger in Nixon in China; in his mere business-suited version, he
looks like a man who might be required to report to a corporate board meeting
at any minute, as though in the most leisurely case he is on an extremely
hard-working holiday. As for Alwa,
although his juniortiy and nominally boho-affecting lifestyle preclude his
being dressed in formal business attire, Vick & co. make sure that we can
never mistake him for a true countercultural outtuner-cum-outdropper: like a
young, tenure-track college professor, he favors corduroy blazers, button-up
shirts, and twill slacks. Then there is Lynn
Harries’s hyper-patrician Geschwitz, who, with her long black dress, black
tights and heels, and black sombrero-sized picnicking hat, looks like a newly
widowed duchess (i.e., no mere countess) on her way to the Regatta or
the Grand National. How can one praise
this toilette highly enough? What a prosaic,
shockingly undignified, petit-bourgeois b**l-d*ke does Frau Baumgartner’s baggy
union suit make her Geschwitz seem by comparison! But even she looks positively regal when
juxtaposed with Michael Volle’s Dr. Schön. The Salzburg
designers seem to have gone out of their way to make him look simultaneously as
preposterous and seedy as possible. In
no way is it possible to imagine this Schön’s being involved at present in any
enterprise of even peripherally world-historical importance. In all the non-backstage scenes he has on a gray
blazer, an open-necked shirt, and—get this—an ascot knotted under
the shirt’s collar! Now, at no point in
human history has a person of present consequence ever worn an ascot under his
shirt-collar. To the contrary: for the past
three-fifths of a century the under-the-collar ascot has been a bysign for the most
downmarket sort of senescent parvenuism, an indication that its wearer has
derived his pattern of aristocratic bearing and equpage entirely from Gilligan’s
Island’s Thurston Howell III. Even
the healthiest and most wholesome-looking specimen of middle-aged masculinity
cannot slip an ascot under his collar without thereby silently declaring to the
world, “Right! I’m off for a little
jaunt round the lagoon in my new yacht [which everyone knows to be a DIY
hybrid of a ten foot-long john-boat and a catamaran sail],” without thereby
presenting himself as fitter to co-star in a Hall and Oates video than in a
purportedly world-class production of a Berg opera. But if one subtracts the pink of health from such
a sub-collar ascot-flaunting middle-aged gent and then adds a dollop of black
mascara to each of his eyelid-pairs and a fistful of pomade to his hair
(without, it should be added, spending much time combing it back down afterwards),
why then one ends up with an altogether more horrifying figure—a sort of zombie
pederast off to try his luck at the bar-elbow of the nearest
charcuterie-cum-hookah lounge. As such a
hideously ridiculous mutation of Pantaloon does Volle’s Schön come across in,
as I said, all scenes save Act I, Scene III.
And in that scene he hardly looks any better: his tux is self-evidently
a 40-Euro rental donned strictly for the occasion, with down-turned collar and
no cummerbund; one sees him literally and copiously sweating to get out of the
thing, and, presumably, to slip into a more comfortably loose-fitting
wife-beater and pair of tighty-whities.
I have already remarked on Thomas Piffka’s desecration of Kuebler’s Alwa through hammy hyperdweebism;
here I may add that the desecration is retraced with pantographic fidelity by
the costuming: in place of Kuebler’s button-ups, Piffka wears under his
non-corduroy blazers a form-fitting T-shirt, the hem of which obligingly
retreats from time to time to show off an inch or three of the tenor’s paunchy,
pasty lower belly. In short, whether
knowingly or not, the wardrobe contingent of this production has managed to
undermine, nay, obliterate, every trace of a hierarchically significant border
between the opera’s high characters and its low ones. But the costuming is really only the tip of
the iceBerg (I swear I don’t look for these puns: they just sort of ambush me)
of the Salzburg
production’s traducement of Lulu’s essence and entelechy. In its treatment of sets and stage business,
this production really violates ground not even accosted, let alone touched, by
its Metropolitan and Glyndebournean predecessors, and effectively treats the
work as a sort of 5” x 8”bulleted list of helpful hints, almost after the manner
in which the story of Aladdin is treated in Christmas pantomimes, or Milos
Forman imagined Don Giovanni’s being treated in Emanuel Schickaneder’s (allegedly)
squalid dreigroschen music hall.
To re-return to the very beginning: in the prologue the figure of the
clown is omitted entirely. In support of
such a choice it might be argued that the clown’s is a mute role—that it is not
only non-singing but also non-speaking.
In devastating refutation of this argument it might be argued that the
clown’s is an instrumentalizing role, that it is he and not any member
of the orchestra in the pit who is instructed to play the numerous cymbal and
bass-drum strokes with which the animal tamer’s monologue is prefaced and
punctuated. In cinematic parlance, these
clashes and thumps are diagetic: they are a palpable, materially
effectual part of the world that is being depicted, and to resituate their
point of origin in the orchestra, which lies outside that world, is to take as gross
and wrongheaded a liberty with Lulu as one would take with On the
Waterfront in reediting it to make Marlon Brando’s “I could have been a
contender” speech into a voiceover.
Still, as appalled as I am by the omission of the clown, I have to admit
that it is still small fry compared with what follows. In the first scene the score describes the painter
as standing before an “easel bearing Lulu’s not yet completely finished
portrait.” The size of the portrait is
not specified, but because it has to fit on an easel it cannot be especially
large—Mona- Lisan dimensions are probably about right. We are not told anything about the style of
the portrait either, but because we do know that it is Lulu’s portrait we can assume that the figure depicted in it is to
bear some resemblance to Lulu as she is now dressed and posed on the platform
that is said to be in the center of the room.
In the Salzburg
production the painter is standing before the front or painting surface of a
gigantic mural that is coextensive with the entire backdrop of the set. This mural is dominated by a crudely stylized—indeed,
elementary school art class-esque—representation of a woman with long red hair. The figure is lying on her stomach with her
head raised and her face—such as it is, two dabs of blue paint for eyes, one dab
of red for a mouth, and a single pencil-stroke nose—turned towards the viewer. She is clad in low-slung blue trousers and a
midriff cum lower bosom-baring sort of wrap in lieu of a shirt. On the other hand, Lulu herself, the woman
who is ostensibly posing for this picture, is dressed in a white bra, a white
scrim petticoat, white knickers, white garter-belted white stockings, and white
angel’s wings—all in apparent inevitable homage to the terminally
erection-deflating Lady Gaga, an anti-Lulu if there ever was one [and of course
there have been many]. (Happily, Ms.
Petibon has both a prettier face and a more curvaceous figure than Dame Gaga,
so the complet is less off-putting on her.) The sole trace of the presently attired Lulu
in the mural is a much smaller figure in the foreground—a representation of a
woman’s naked lower half as seen from the rear, which we know has something to
do with the Lulu we can now see because its in-filled portion is starkly white
and it is surmounted by a whoosh of lines that are instantly evocative of
angel’s wings (if also of Marilyn Monroe’s famous upblown skirt—a rather clever
synthesis if I do say so in the teeth of my own polemic).
Needful to say and itemize, all these deviations from the score (as the
reader may have noticed, I have been writing “score” even when referring to the
composer’s non-musical instructions—this on the grounds that the score is where
these instructions appear, cheek by jowl with the clef lines and note-heads. But if decorum requires me to refer to all
non-musical instructions as components not of the score but of the libretto, I
shall be happy to do so.) make either incorrect sense or nonsense of several of
the events of this scene. When the Alwa
in the score, immediately after entering the studio and just before visually
“comparing Lulu with the painting” asks “Do I see aright?” we are meant to take
it merely as a jocular change on “Fancy meeting you here!”: although presumably
he has been forewarned of Lulu’s presence and the reason for it, he is still
taken aback at seeing her dressed in this strange costume (which, we must
remember is supposed to be a Pierrot’s costume, a version of masculine
drag) and affects to wonder whether she is somebody else. But when the Alwa in the Salzburg production
visually compares Lulu with the painting—this painting of a woman who we know
looks nothing like her or anyone else in particular—before saying “Do I
see aright?,” we cannot but take it as a critical comment on the painting qua
portrait, as a pithier and more tactful way of saying, “I can’t believe this is
supposed to be a picture of you.” More
risible and disruptive are the consequences of the mis-presentation of the
painting for Dr. Schön’s remonstration with the painter that “the hair” in the
portrait “is all wrong.” This
remonstration is said in the stage directions to be made “with a noticeable
intention not to respond to the preceding remark,” the preceding remark being
Lulu’s request to Schön to “present my regards as a stranger [i.e., as someone
who has never met her and never cares to meet her] to your fiancée.” Schön has rightly taken Lulu’s request as an
ironic expression of her jealous anger at his purported impending desertion of
her for another woman, as well as of her incredulity in the possibility of such
a desertion, and he wishes to show her that he is not fazed by either sentiment. At the same time, because he is fazed
by both he has to let off his aggressive steam in some fashion, and so he
chooses the easiest, the least defensible target ready to hand, the portrait,
and he opts for the easiest and least contestable register of criticism—the
register of naturalistic verisimilitude.
“The hair’s all wrong,” he says, because he knows that the hair is both more
than close enough for government work to being right and endlessly amenable to
improvement. And we in the audience pick
up on all this—the nature of the criticism and its psychological
motivation—precisely and only because we are afforded but the haziest postage
stamp-sized of view of this portrait, a portrait that from our vantage point
could either be a masterpiece or a piece of daubery. But anyone getting his first glimpse of Lulu
from the Salzburg production is bound to see the criticism not as an expression
of Schön’s “intention not to respond” to Lulu, but rather simply as a
spontaneous outburst of authentic philistinism bereft of any connection to the
main dramatic line—this because first the painting aspires neither to
naturalism nor even to being a depiction of its ostensible subject, and second,
the viewer can see the painting every
bit as clearly as Schön can and has been staring at it for a good two minutes
by the time Schön weighs in on its demerits; and hence, when Schön says that
the “hair is all wrong” he is registering a complaint that the viewer must conceive
of as either overlooking the painting's most egregious transgressions or completely missing the point of it, depending on whether he thinks it ought to have
been a naturalistic representation or not.
In either case, the Lulu-innocent viewer will be incapable of
seeing the remark as what it is—namely, a manifestation of a cultivated and
intellectually subtle man’s efforts to master his passion for and anger at the woman
he loves. In fine and short, as presented
in the Salzburg production, Act I Scene 1 comes across not, as it should do, as
a laying of the principal psycho-physiological mines that will explode three
scenes later, in Act II Scene 1, but rather as an unintelligible and apparently
pointless preliminary to the painter’s and Lulu’s catch-me-if-you-can game. Speaking of Act II, Scene 1, it is in this
scene that we meet with the other significantly disruptive misuse of scenery by
the Salzburgers (not that it is by any means their only other significant
disruptive intervention, or even the most egregious one, but merely that the
others are centered on dramaturgical elements other than scenery). I am referring here to the entire scenic
complex by passage through which several characters are required to make numerous mutually involved entrances and exits. In the score, this complex consists centrally
of an imposing staircase (which, as mentioned above, the Glyndebourne
production manages to incorporate) plus an assortment of nooks distributed
among various mutually distant bits of architectural fixtures and bits of
furniture (all likewise convincingly included or faked chez
Glyndebourne). In the Salzburg production, the whole shebang or kit
and caboodle is bundled into a single structure, a black plastic pyramid of
none too prepossessing dimensions. Each
member of the supporting cast enters by poking his head and at most his upper
torso out of a compartment built into this structure, and exits by withdrawing
his back into the compartment. For the
best part of this scene Schigolch, the acrobat, and the high-school student are
prevented from setting foot on the surface of the stage. Accordingly, hardly any of the numerous
physical high-jinks (or should it be high-jinkses?) the score requires can or
do take place. “These polished floors:
nothing but cliffs, but traps!” Schigolch repines while supposedly descending a
very long and slippery staircase but actually negotiating a piece of pure and
none-too-tricky handwork—viz. opening the door of his cubbyhole. Shortly afterwards, the acrobat exclaims
apropos of the high school student, “This little fellow barely weighs forty
kilos!” a remark that seems completely unmotivated given that the acrobat is
not even touching the student, let alone carrying him as directed by the score.
The remainder of the Salzburgers’ material transgressions is
confined to the level of stage business, but these transgressions are no less material
for all that, and indeed some of them are among the most production’s most
egregious. Take, for instance, the
sub-scene of II.i involving Lulu, Alwa, and the manservant. The central purpose of this sub-scene is to demonstrate
the scope and power of Lulu’s charms through their interference with the
manservant’s ability to perform his duties with that impeccable reserve and
composure one takes for granted in domestics in the households of the rich and
the great. In the score, this purpose is
conveyed almost too laconically, via a handful of questions and remarks by Alwa
on the servant’s unhealthy appearance, the servant’s “blurting out” (SD) the
remark that “one is only human too,” and the stage direction that while he is
setting the table for Lulu and Alwa he is to gaze at Lulu and her portrait (now
gracing Lulu’s and Dr. Schön’s drawing room) with a “disturbed
expression.” If the producer relies on
these instructions alone, he can easily convey the misimpression—as the Glyndebourne
production does—that the servant is merely suffering the prosaic occupational
strain occasioned by working for and around people with explosively dramatic
personal lives. The Salzburg production certainly and creditably leaves
us in no doubt as to the cause of the manservant’s distress. But no one who has any amount of affection
for Lulu can fail to be appalled by the means by which this production
apprises us of that cause: the moment the manservant enters (for no seeming
reason, as he is completely empty-handed, with no food or drinks to serve),
Lulu reaches under her skirt, doffs her knickers (red ones, naturally) and
tosses them over to him. They land on
his head; he removes them and begins running his fingers over them and sniffing
them. Then and only then does Alwa ask
the servant, “What’s the matter?”—the first indication in the score that the
man is upset about anything. The manservant’s palpation and olfaction of the
knickers is certainly a distasteful enough spectacle in its own right, one
whose repulsiveness is augmented by our outrage on behalf of Mr. Zednik qua
buffo elder-statesman. (Surely there is
no reason why a comic actor should be expected to degrade himself any more than
a tragic one). But the real victim here
is Lulu, who in being compelled literally to stoop to the lowest trick in the
striptease dancer’s playbook of seduction, suffers the cardinal injustice
visitable on this role, an injustice codified by George Perle in the
diptych-half that remains the authoritative text on this work: “Above all, Lulu
must never be made to seem common. She
is always ‘that ray of divine light.’ We
must always see her through the eyes of those who desire her.” Or, to recast this prohibition in the terms
more familiar to the reader of this essay: Lulu must not be seen to be driven
by a desire—the basest and most common of desires—to exert control over other
people. Only a woman who wishes to exert
control over men’s wills feels compelled to tease them with favors, and only a
woman who desperately wishes to control every man’s will can stoop to giving
the lowliest among them the very knickers off her…. The manservant’s infatuation with Lulu—like
the schoolboy’s, like the Countess Geschwitz’s, like the two Schöns’—is not
supposed to be something that she has whipped up or takes any pleasure
whatsoever in keeping in an up-whipped state.
It is, rather, something that has simply happened, in simple apodictic
consequence of Lulu’s being her cheerful, youthful, beautiful self in proximity
to someone else—a someone else less cheerful, youthful, and beautiful than she
is. A logical corollary of the
Salzburgers’ misrepresentation of Lulu’s disposition to the manservant in the
first scene of Act II is their much more consequentially misleading misrepresentation
of her disposition to Alwa and vice-versa in the second scene. But I cannot justly detail this
misrepresentation without first getting in my two schillings’ worth of piss about
the Salzburgers’ treatment of the interlude between the two scenes. Berg indicates that this interlude is to
accompany a silent film depicting Lulu’s arrest, trial, incarceration,
hospitalization, and eventual liberation, and he supplies a fairly detailed
scenario pairing specific visual-dramatic episodes with specific measures of
music. The score in no way hints that
the film is optional, let alone proposes makeshift alternatives to it. One might have thought that a production
destined to be preserved for televisual viewing would be more than mildly eager
to include it. Yet of the three
productions now preserved on video, only the Glyndebourne one includes a proper
silent motion picture—and let it be said, a spectacularly realized one that
allows the singer-actors featured in it ample scope for the accentuation and elaboration
of their portrayals. In this film we
see, for example, Lulu exchanging a delightedly conspiratorial smile with
Countess Geschwitz as the two of them swap their undergarments, and the acrobat
loutishly slouching across the frame with his lower lip jutting forward in
simian stroppiness. The Met production,
on the other hand—and not only disappointingly but surprisingly in the light of
its otherwise scrupulous adherence to Berg’s instructions, opted to present a
montage of still drawings—crude pastel-and-chalk affairs reminiscent of the
improvised sketches of courtroom portraitists.
But at least the Met covered the interlude with something of visual interest. The Salzburgers
decided to treat it as just another scene-change coverer, and so the viewer of
their video is regaled with three minutes of medium long-shots of the conductor
and various sections of the orchestra waving, scraping and blowing away,
together with the occasional shot of the empty stage, as if by way of rubbing
in the fact that there is absolutely nothing going on right now
during this performance of the most giddily hyperactive stretch of music in the
entire orchestral repertoire. Oh, I
suppose they had their reasons for omitting the movie. Perhaps they thought its inclusion too
luxurious, too expensive, an indulgence for a one or two-off festival production. But the Glyndebourne production was also a
festival production. I admit I am not
aware of the comparative budgets of the two festivals, but I find it
implausible that an event that bills itself as “the world’s preeminent music
and drama festival” would find it harder to swing the inclusion of the film
than would an event that can merely lay claim to being the UK’s preeminent
festival for opera alone. Perhaps they
thought the film superfluous in the light of Lulu’s Act II, Scene ii spoken
exposition of the events dramatized in it.
In that case, they forgot that Berg, although composing a full
half-decade into the era of the talkies, specified a silent film, and,
moreover, a silent film without captions, which he can have done only because
he regarded the spoken exposition as an inalienable complement of the movie. When watching the film, we are meant to be
mystified not enlightened. To be sure, the
arrest. trial, and incarceration scenes are predictable enough as set modules:
we know from Alwa’s closing line in II.i
that the police are on the premises, and where there are police there
will be an arrest, and an arrest will usually be followed by a trial, and a
trial will often be followed by imprisonment.
But beyond this point the causal logic of the episodes is opaque: the
first-time viewer is bound to wonder, first, what are Geschwitz, Alwa,
Schigolch, the high school student, and the acrobat doing on screen now that
the trial is over?; then, why is Lulu being treated “more as an invalid than as
a prisoner” [tr. George Perle]?; and why, finally does Lulu emerge from the
prison dressed as the countess? All of
these questions are answered in the first scene proper, and most of them in the
course of the above-mentioned Lulu-assigned non-sung passage, during the
delivery of which we are clearly meant to be repeatedly exclaiming to ourselves
in Archimedean delight, “So that was what that was all about!” The omission of the film deprives the
first-time viewer of the pleasure of these revelations and demotes the spoken
passage to a seemingly digressive longueur that one is tempted to fast-forward
past. But why should the Salzburg Luluproduktionsmannschaft
have given a proverbial monkey’s about whether any part of the opera looked or
sounded as stimulating and integrally cogent as it was supposed to? Clearly I have so far overlooked the most
obvious and therefore most probably accurate explanation for their omission of
the film: that it was the most natural course to take for any Luluproduktionsmannschaft
who did not give a proverbial monkey’s about whether their production brought
out the most evident beauties of the work, who approached the entire commission
in an attitude expressive of “Let’s get this bastard on the skids so we can go
work on protest theater.” (Here they
naturally make the money sign, rise, and make for the coke [sic on the
lowercase cee] dispenser.) But I mustn’t
continue in this vein, the selfsame one I pledged myself at the beginning of
this essay not to indulge in, viz. the vein of attributing motives and purposes
to the producer of the Salzburg Lulu
video; and so let me close my animadversions on the three minute film-sized
hole in this video by locking swords with the churl whom I declared my
arch-adversary at that selfsame beginning, viz. Father Time, thus: I cannot
forbear remarking how deliciously ironic it is that of the three visual
documents of the three-act Lulu now available, the only one that omits
the film entirely is also the only one to hail from the all-digital,
post-cinefilmic pseudo-epoch, a pseudo-epoch in which everything requisite to
the making of a film, apart from the labor-hours of the cast and crew, can
effectively be had for free.
Now on to the Salzburgers’ II.ii-ic traducement of the Alwa-Lulu dyad. Berg represents Alwa’s and Lulu’s duet at the
end of II.ii straightforwardly as a session of foreplay to the long-deferred
(at least from Alwa’s point of view) consummation of their de facto coupledom. Lulu, we are told in the score, “pulls Alwa
close to her on the couch”; Alwa “kisses her with great intensity”; Lulu “digs
her hands into his hair” and “kisses him with deliberation”; and finally Alwa
“buries his head in her lap.” There is
not the faintest hint of a suggestion by Berg that at any point during this
episode Alwa is interested in anyone or anything other than Lulu. It is true that he makes abundant use of the
terminology of his vocation throughout this episode: he tells Lulu that
“through [her] clothes he apprehend[s her] body as music,” then likens various
parts of her body to various expressive musical indications—her ankle to a grazioso,
“this charming swelling” (her breasts?) to a cantabile, her knee to a misterioso,
and an unnamed part whose identity one can easily guess to “the fierce andante
of desire.” But these are after all
metaphorical usages, and no person schooled in such usages gathers that a
man—even a composer—who likens a woman’s ankle to a grazioso is evincing
his preference of music to feminine beauty any more than he gathers that a
man—even a gardener—who likens a woman to a red, red rose would rather keep
company with a flower than with his sweetheart.
The Salzburgers would appear to be unschooled in such usages, for they
preposterously transform the foreplay session into one of those composer’s
brainstorming sessions one sees in so many of those autofellationary Broadway
musicals about the makers of Broadway musicals: each time Alwa mentions a
musical term, he scribbles something down on a sheaf of score paper, leaving
Lulu to sit off to one side pettishly scowling at his neglect of her. This whole tableau is of course sufficiently and
indeed unprecedentedly objectionable on the grounds that it is not only not to
be found in the score but also flagrantly contradicts and completely displaces
the series of action that is to be found there. But it might conceivably be redeemed if it
could be made to jibe with those elements of the work that cannot be changed
without effectively making it into an entirely new opera—much in the way that
Tate’s King Lear is a different play from Shakespeare’s –and that indeed
have not been changed in the Salzburg production. I am talking somewhat opaquely about the balance
of Lulu’s plot, the plot of the third act. If Alwa were really devoted preeminently to
his music, in this act we would see him continuing to compose while giving only
perfunctory attention to Lulu, or perhaps we would even see him abandoning Lulu
altogether and hence vanishing from the dramatis personae. What we witness instead is his following Lulu
into the demimondial slagheap of the gambling party in Paris and thence, in the final scene, to the
squalid little garret apartment in London. Of his musical history the only remaining
trace is Casti-Piani’s one-time dismissive reference to him as Lulu’s “composer
friend”; we certainly never see him concocting scenarios for “interesting
opera”s and lighting schemes for impending premieres of those operas, as we did
in the first two acts. In short, the
third-act Alwa hardly behaves like a man who loves his métier more than he does
the woman in his life; to the contrary, he behaves exactly like a man who has
renounced his métier for good for the sake of that woman. Accordingly, it is nothing short of absurd to
represent Alwa as an erotically apathetic artistic workaholic in the concluding
seconds of Act II. “So why,” you ask me,
thereby forcing me to violate my taboo yet again (but never mind that, because
it is so obvious a question that not to let it be asked and answered would
smack of an imbecilic degree of obtuseness), “did the Salzburgers think it
worthwhile to represent him as just such a type?” I think they did it for the same reason they
represented Lulu throughout the opera as a vamp—namely, because the
zeitgeistial imperative to do so was well-nigh ineluctable. Just as we intermillennials cannot stomach
the portrayal of a(n obligatorily) strong woman who is not omniscient, we complementarily
cannot stomach the portrayal of a(n obligatorily) weak man who is not impotent. To be sure, even from the Berg’s-eye point of
view Alwa is hardly a figure worthy of deification. As the score presents him, Alwa is always a
passive and usually an unwitting tool of the ascendant figures in his
lifeworld—first his father, then Schigolch and the acrobat, then the Jungfrau
Funicular Railway Company, and finally one of Lulu’s johns, the Negro, who
bludgeons him to death. Still, Berg’s
Alwa has a certain tiny pesky anti-flaw, a certain confetto-sized speck of
plate-iron in his pantywaist suit of cheesecloth armor, an anti-flaw which is
bound to drive the intermillennial dramaturge straight up the back-bottom of his
personal goat, and whose removal alone is capable of setting his (the
intermillennial dramaturge’s) heart at ease: he (Alwa) is sincerely,
passionately, carnally in love with Lulu, and both eager and able to put this
love into copulative practice. And up
with this an intermillennial dramaturge categorically cannot put; for just as
he takes it as a given that a(n
obligatorily) strong woman’s ostensible passion for one man must be a
forceful protest against her oppression by another, he complementarily takes it
as a given that a(n obligatorily) weak man’s ostensible passion for any woman
must be a forceless surrogate or beard for his one true passion—his devotion to
himself, ideally as manifested in some nerdy hobby chockfull of specialist
jargon. Whence the utility and indeed
the indispensability of the II.ii dyad to the Salzburgers: although it
unhappily happens to be the episode of the most intense and extensive physical
contact between Lulu and Alwa, it is also the only episode in which Alwa recurrently
alludes to his métier, and hence the only episode that, albeit via a ruthless
virtual graphotomy of the score’s stage directions, can be made to make him
seem like a limp-dicked music geek.
The Salzburgers’ treatment of the stage business in the first
scene of the third act introduces a new flavor of perfidiousness—the flavor of misplaced
frivolity and high spirits, otherwise known as Diefledermauserei
or pink champagne. As scored,
III.i begins with a thirteen-bar instrumental introduction followed by the
acrobat’s wholly sung proposal of a toast in honor of the party’s hostess, “the
Countess Adeleide von…” (We never learn
her last name [a French one, Berg specifies] because the acrobat conceals his
inability to pronounce it under a swig from his glass). As staged by the Salzburgers, this scene
begins apparently during the closing minutes of the intermission, when a
certain member of the audience, a man seated in one of the front rows rises,
turns around so that he has his back to the stage, and speaks the above
mentioned proposal. The viewer very quickly
recognizes this bumptious jackanapes as Thomas
Johannes Meyer in character as the acrobat, and wearily resigns himself to an unsweet
session of fourth wall-downbreaking. And
what an imponderably tedious session thereof it is! For the acrobat’s proposal cues another dozen
or so house-plants, the remaining members of the cast involved in the beginning
of this scene, to rise and speak their first lines up to the point when
the groom (who has been ludicrously but logically transformed into a Salzburg
Festival usher, sharing the livery of navy blue waistcoat and black necktie
with the actual youngsters on duty and visible alongside her in the frame),
asks everyone to “take your places,” a request that ostensibly prompts
everybody to sit back down so that the acrobat ostensibly has to re-propose the
toast, which leads to a reenactment of the above routine, which leads in turn
to (you guessed it) yet another reenactment—in other words, a third
enactment—of the routine, at the end of which the conductor arbitrarily but
mercifully strikes up the orchestra, thus genuinely prompting the cast to
deliver their lines a fourth time, albeit only the first time as directed by
the score. But even this moment does not
afford full relief from the anti-fourth-wallian
tinkering, for rather than “taking their” actual score-directed “places”
on stage, the cast for the most part remain in the audience and consequently
end up singing, speaking, walking, &c. their parts over, past, and around the
heads of dozens of actual paying punters.
However entertaining these APPs may have found it at the time (for I
dare not assume they found it even ever-so-slightly so), the whole thing
makes for appallingly confusing and uninteresting TV viewing, even (so I dare
indeed assume) from the perspective of a non-Lulu buff. Seriously, I can’t imagine what they (the Salzburgerluluproduktionsmannschaft)
were thinking; or, to rephrase it in non-taboo flouting terms, I can’t imagine
on what sort of grounds such asininity could be plausibly defended—perchance on
the grounds that Lulu, for all its gore and misery, is at bottom a
comedy, or that if it must after all be regarded as a tragedy, we must not
forget that even King Lear has its fool and Hamlet its
wisecracking gravediggers. But at bottom
the distinction between comedy and tragedy is not in point here. The Marriage of Figaro and Falstaff
are comedies, but even during the most unconventionally produced stagings of
these operas we do not expect the performance to be interrupted by crowd-baiting
shenanigans. Now we do not only expect
but practically demand such shenanigans during performances of works of a
certain genre of musical theater—namely the operetta, but Lulu is
no operetta, and we know it isn’t one because on the title page of its score there
is no “etta” after “Oper.” Operettas
survive directorial interpolations and indeed thrive on them because there is
built into the very notion of operetta—or more properly the entire performance
history of operetta—the assumption that the performance of the work is an
occasion of no great importance. Indeed,
the operetta might describe its mission in exactly the same words as a certain fin
du vingtième siècle
pop star described his: “Hey, this is Vegas: people buy beers; they go to a
show; they have a good time.” But an
opera performance, for better or worse (but mostly for better, by dint of the
sheer paucity of alternatives) is an intrinsically serious occasion, regardless
of the tone or mode of the opera being performed. If the score of an opera calls for full
frontal nudity, splitting trouser gags, and custard pie fights, they should by
all means be included in the performance, but these antics should be confined to
the stage, and the audience should be expected to spectate on them from their
seats in po-faced silence. Those are the
rules, and would-be stagers of opera who find them too inhibiting should
consider going into the circus. “Oh, the
bare bottom-exposing irony of it all!
That you should recommend this alternative career track of all
alternative career tracks to the producers of a work that is framed as a
circus act, and that likens its spectators to domestic animals,
thereby licensing and indeed demanding the very third wall-downbreaking shenanigans
you inveigh against so sanctimoniously!”
Oh, the bare brainstem-exposing inanity of it all! That you should fail to see that the third
wall-downbreaking shenanigans blunt and muddy rather than hone and refine the
critique of the traditional relation of performer and spectator that is built
into the score of Lulu! For while
the opera’s own dramaturgically self-reflective elements—the animal tamer’s
prologue, Alwa’s conception and eventual composition of an opera about Lulu,
and the quotation of the opening measure of Wozzeck—may elicit an
appreciative smile from the cognoscenti, that smile is utterly untinged by
mirth, because the unalterable gist of these Verfremdungsgesten is
hardly comical or humorous. In likening
the performance the audience is about to see to a circus act, the animal tamer
is hardly trivializing or defanging it of its potency as a mimetic spectacle:
to the contrary, he wants us to realize that although the people and events of
the opera are not real, dealing with them as an author or director is still a
very serious business—it is, indeed—as he reminds us in his peroration—like
sticking your head in a lion’s mouth.
Why? Because the seductiveness of
a given person or object is largely independent of its ontological status, of
whether it is technically existent or not.
It is every bit as easy to be smitten by the fictitious personages and
events of a play or opera as it is to be smitten by the beauty of a real,
factual woman (e.g., Lulu as she appears to the other characters in Lulu). Conversely, that woman’s factuality does
nothing to mitigate the transience and apparent contingency of her beauty’s
affiliation with the thing-in-itself: we are just as capable of being
disillusioned by her beauty—either when it fails to fulfill its Kantian remit
of serving as “a metaphor for moral good”, or when it fades with age—as we are
by the beauty of fictional representations, when the events of life fail to
echo them, or as may even be even worse, succeed in anticipating them. It is this second phenomenon that Alwa’s disquisition
on the “interesting” and as-yet nonexistent opera” about Lulu is meant to exemplify. Alwa is prevailingly horrified rather than
delighted by his discovery of the aptness of Lulu as an opera heroine, because
this discovery is tantamount to a reminder to him of how thoroughly permeated
his lifeworld is by spectaculrity, and of how much suffering he must look
forward to in consequence. “How long can
this go on?” he asks himself in his appallment at the thought that the events
of his own life—in its capacity as the life of one of Lulu’s associates—are
bound to become ever more dramatically vivid, and hence ever more unpleasant to
the person who is obliged to live through them.
The Wozzeck quotation that immediately precedes Alwa’s
disquisition underscores Berg’s own vulnerability to the curse of
spectacularity: “Just because I have written a famous opera in which human
beings appear to sing at my command” this quotation seems to say, “does not
mean that I have any mastery over the events of my own life; to the contrary, I
am no less helpless and subject to the dramaturgical whims of contingency than
Alwa is.” In sum (and, yes, short), the
self-reflexive parts of Lulu are meta-tragic in purport: they attempt to
inculcate the lesson that alienation from a dramatic representation in no way
constitutes an escape from the bewitching and ultimately annihilating power of
such representations. The Salzburgers’
self-reflexive interpolations, in contrast, function at the less sophisticated
or more nearly infantile level of meta-comedy: they want to console the
audience by making it believe that by merely realizing that what they are
watching is only a representation, they will escape the dramaturgical jinx once
and for all. And when a sophisticated
argument is presented in tandem with a less sophisticated one that
superficially resembles it, a kind of cognitive analogue of Gresham’s law tends to prevail: that is to
say, the content or implied thesis of the more sophisticated argument is
assimilated to that of the less sophisticated one. Hence, one must assume that the first-time
viewer of Lulu via the Salzburg
video will gather that the message of Berg’s own self-reflexive gestures is identical
to that of the Salzburgers: viz., “This is all a big joke. Don’t take the theater or opera seriously.
Relax! Kick back! Take a load off! Light up a spliff! Fairly wallow in your complacency vis-à-vis
your own imperviousness to suggestion by spectacular representations!”
In
some ways, my objections to the Salzburgers’ treatment of the final scene of
the opera are bound to come across as a bit anticlimactic, occasioned as they
are by mere deviations from the score in staging—and deviations that mercifully
confine that action to the stage--rather than by the sort of madcap
no-holds-barred, from-whole-cloth-cut interpolations one witnesses in their
version of III.i. Moreover, one hesitates
to assert that these deviations, numerous and significant as they are, are
sufficiently deleterious to prevent the brightest and most attentive Lulu-innocent
viewer from constructing a notion of the opera’s conclusion that is not in any
essential respect at odds with the score.
All the same, the fact that they come at the end, and indeed at the very
end of this opera that as written has the most dramatically potent ending of
any in the repertoire (apart, perhaps, from the down-dragging of Don
Giovanni’s eponym into hell, which can materialize as an ending only if that
opera’s goody-goody epilogue is licentiously deleted) somehow makes them
more abominable than all the others put together. Anyway: the significantly
disruptive Salzburger tinkering begins at rehearsal 1275 in Cerha’s revision of
Stein’s edition of the piano and vocal score.
From this mark onwards, the action prescribed in the score is as
follows: Lulu “exit[s] to her room”; Jack
“follow[s] her [into the room] and audibly locks the door from within.” With Lulu and Jack now both inside the room, Countess
Geschwitz is the only person left on the visible part of the stage, and she now
delivers her brief soliloquy about her plans to leave “these people” and return
to Germany to fight for women’s rights and study law. The soliloquy is followed by two measures of
vocal silence, of pure instrumental music diminuendoing to “a whisper,” over
which Lulu declaims in Sprechstimme “from within the room” the word “No”
four times and then emits a “death scream.”
Geschwitz now rises and throws herself at the door of the room, whose
handle she “shakes with all her might.” Next
Jack, “stooped over, tears open the door and plunges the blood-stained [i.e.,
from his just-finished murder of Lulu] knife into Geschwitz’s body.” Geschwitz “collapses,” Jack walks past her to
the “basin sited under the skylight,” washes his hands while congratulating
himself on what a “lucky fellow” he is, and finally leaves the flat, remarking
to Geschwitz as he passes by her again on the way out, “You won’t be around
much longer.” Only a measure and a half
after Jack’s exit, Geschwitz, now once again the only person visible on stage,
sings the last words of the opera—“Lulu, my angel! Let me see you one more time! I am near you, always near you, in
eternity!”—and dies (The stage directions pertaining to her death read verbatim
and in toto: “sie stirbt.”). Then, after
a measure and a half from the orchestra, one encounters the phrase “Ende der
Oper.” Now to the Salzburgers’ version
of these concluding minutes: Instead of withdrawing into Lulu’s room, Lulu and
Jack merely move a few feet towards stage right. The two of them are still fully visible to
the audience and are presumably also still visible to Geschwitz, because there
is no object of any kind standing between her and them. While Gesshwitz is delivering her soliloquy, Jack
produces his knife. Lulu sings her four neins,
Jack stabs her in the abdomen, and she screams her death scream. Her clothes
now abundantly blotched with red stains (incidentally, this version’s treatment
of Dr. Schön’s death in II.i is a comparably blood-soaked affair), she falls to
the floor. There is no sign of Geschwitz
within the camera frame; if she has reacted to the scream in any way she has
presumably done so from the leftward spot where she finished singing. Jack washes his hands and begins heading very
slowly to the stage-left exit. From this
point onwards, right on through to the work’s last measure, he is the focus of
the camera’s attention; we see nothing but him from the mid-chest upwards as he
slowly, abstractedly stalks out of the apartment. Along the way, he does indeed absently utter
the words, “You won’t be around much longer,” but that the “you” addressed is
Geschwitz the Lulu-innocent viewer will gather only by deduction,
because she is off-camera; moreover, such a viewer will most likely find the
comment itself bemusing, because Jack has done nothing to the countess suggestive
of a shortening of her prospects of immediate survival; perhaps the LIV
will interpret the comment as a peculiarly prescient diagnosis of a peculiarly
severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Certainly, given that Jack remains the only figure we see while
Geschwitz is singing her swansong, the first-time Lulu-viewer is well
within his or her rights to conjecture that the countess is still alive at the
opera’s end.
So
that—to employ a monetary metaphor once again—is my five-million 1923 paper
marks’ worth of commentary on the 2010 Salzburg Festival Lulu video. Much as I loathe the disc as a presentation
of Berg’s masterpiece, I am immensely grateful to it for having apprised me of
the identity of the emetic agent that for nearly three decades has been making
my gorge rise against the entire mobility of so-called postmodern so-called
artists working across all the media and in all so-called forums of so-called
artistic so-called expression—from Peter Sellars to Damien Hirst to Tracy Emin
to, yes [sorry, just checking the jacket of the DVD again], Vera Nemirova. I used to suspect that my revulsion could not
but be founded in a residual attachment to some aesthetic cause that, as the
reader already knows, I knew (and know) to be fatuous—to “historical
authenticity” or “fidelity to the artist’s intentions.” After all, my favorite production of Don
Giovanni, Peter Hall’s, made use of an Empire-style costume template
unknown in Mozart’s lifetime, and, as I have already remarked, my beloved
Graham Vick production of Lulu took extravagant liberties with Berg’s
score. I suspected that I would
eventually have to acknowledge that I was at bottom a sentimental old
fuddy-duddy who would never be able to adduce any sort of rational proof in
support of his prejudices. At bottom, I
owed this suspicion to my lack of patience: being sufficiently put off by the
sight of Schoenberg’s Moses in a brand-name emblazoned hoodie, or of Un
ballo’s conspirators seated in a row of toilet stalls, I did not often
elect to stick around long enough to see how these repugnant images fitted into
the so-called big picture, into the so-called artist’s so-called overall
concept. But having forced myself not
only to sit through but repeatedly to examine a so-called postmodern artistic
product of substantial temporal dimensions, I see what was implied in little by
all these off-putting elements—that it is precisely the absence of a big
picture by which such productions tend to be most strongly vitiated. The besetting sin of the 2010 Salzburg Lulu
production is incoherence: in the aggregate its artistic choices make no sense;
they do not add up to anything approaching a cogent representation of the
world; having been conceived and imposed only at the conceptual resolution of a
specific scene and sometimes even only of a specific episode within a scene,
they collectively transform Berg’s magnificently unified opera into a desultory
collection of dramatic fragments. Such a
dismemberment can be neither of benefit to the viewer-listener nor of credit to
the producer(s) and performers: in the words of that fellow in that Seinfeld
episode, it’s “not good for anybody.”
Any choice in the execution of a performance-dependent artwork is
defensible, and indeed meritorious, if it makes the work seem richer or more
wide-ranging or far-seeing or concentrated than it did before; never mind what
the work’s author or composer does think, did think, or would have thought of
the choice. (I have already given an
example of such a work-enhancing composer-flouting choice in the Glyndebourne
production’s treatment of costumes.) But
what can be the justification for an interpretative choice that makes a work
seem feebler, more narrow-minded, more purblind, more scatterbrained? “Why, obviously the thrill of blasphemous transgression
against the cult of high art—a.k.a. the old Duchampian frisson induced by
drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.”
Well, sure, that would make sense as a justification—however
feeble—if it were possible to draw the equivalent of one big moustache on a
work that unfolds, as Lulu does, in time, if one could, say, apply the
left handlebar of the ’stache-analogue to Act I of Lulu, the peak or
Hitler-section to Act II, and the right handlebar to Act III. But Duchamp’s moustache is a single
instantaneous gesture, a flourish, and can only ever be mimicked in the
execution of a temporally extensive work as a series of such flourishes,
each of which to come off as a flourish must stand out not only from the de
facto uncontroversial realization of the particular passage to which it is
applied, but also from all the flourishes that have been applied at earlier moments
of this execution. The net effect of a
succession of such flourishes, registered retrospectively at the end of the
performance, is bound to be something analogous in Duchampian terms to a long,
serpentine black line (no Freudian titters, please!) that merely starts out under
Lisa’s nose and subsequently traces such an involved and extensive route
through so many other sectors of the painting that it is impossible to
recognize as a moustache. The Duchampian
imprevu is always summarizable under the auspices of the question-opener
“Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” and realizable in the time needed to fill in the
rest of the question. Wouldn’t it be
cool if the Mona Lisa, who is after all only a woman by convention, had a
moustache?” Voila! Now (s)he has one. “Wouldn’t it be cool if in this scene Alwa,
who is after all a composer, were composing instead of kissing and
cuddling?” Eccolo! Now he’s doing
just that. But the temporally parasitic
artwork cannot be realized within the intellectual constraints of “Wouldn’t it
be cool if…?” The would-be realizer of such an artwork must
consider not only what would be cool here and now but what would make sense in
conjunction with what has already happened and what is going to happen. He must be possessed of that Hoffmannian
quality that I have extolled elsewhere in these pages, the quality of Besonnenheit
or presence of mind, the quality that has always signalized not only the
greatest artistic achievements, but also the greatest achievements in all
fields of endeavor requiring sustained intellectual exertion. But it is probably futile to upbraid the
likes of the producers of the Salzburg Lulu for want of Besonnenheit,
because in its involvement of the intellect, Besonnenheit is at odds
with received aesthetic opinion in our age, which regards abjuration of the
intellect and surrendering to the moment of so-called inspiration as the
qualities distinguishing the mental life of an artist from that of a natural
scientist. To raise the standard of
Besonnenheit in face of such an artist is tantamount to robbing (or at any rate
being seen to attempt to rob) him of his powers of expression.
In
any case, even if the Besonnenheit-founded argument manages to carry the
day in its own terms, the booster of a 2010 Salzburg Lulu-style
production can always argue that such a production, for all its shortcomings,
injects a long-overdue sense of novelty and surprise into a work whose beauties
we have grown indifferent to thanks to a glut of traditional productions; and
that even those who do not find it to their taste should be liberally
good-natured enough to concede that the existence of a single madcap
off-the-wall new version hardly
threatens the well-being of dozens if not hundreds of the established stolid, conservative, traditional
versions available for viewing thanks to the current season programs of opera
houses the world over and the DVD catalogues of
the likes of Kultur, ArtHaus, and Deutsche Grammophon. And to be sure, vis-à-vis certain madcap
productions of certain operas I am only too willing to be so liberally
good-natured. The 2006 Salzburg
production of Don Giovanni was almost as heavily stoked with
impertinencies as the 2010 Lulu one—in particular one could have done
without the presence of a dramatis personae outdrowning dozen plus-strong mute
chorus of bra and knickers-clad women in virtually every scene (although even
here more Besonnenheit was in evidence than in the 2010 Lulu
impertinencies, in that the women started out young and ended up old). And yet because one had seen many other
productions of DG, such that one had a kind of composite imaginary
landscape of Seville ready to hand for consultation throughout the screening,
one found it easy enough to overlook or look through this production’s betises
and to concentrate on the performances.
But as I have had occasion to mention before, the 2010 Salzburg Lulu
video is one of only three recorded performances of the complete three-act Lulu
available, and neither of the other two is wholly satisfactory. The Metropolitan video, although scrupulous
in the matter of scenes and costumes, is marred by some poor performances
(although I should mention that Franz Mazura’s Dr Schön is every bit the equal
of Wolfgang Schöne’s in its own more fussy Edwardian way), not to mention the
gloomy bleariness of its videotape-dependant camera image. The Glyndebourne video, although graced by
outstanding performances, is on the whole too eccentric to serve as a standard Lulu:
in particular, its utter absence of scenery is distracting; and even on
technical grounds, it could be improved on, for while Humphrey Burton’s
cinematic handling of the camera is exemplary, the recording medium, like that
of the Met’s, is analogue videotape and visually hamstrung by that medium’s now
universally (and literally) glaring limitations. What the world now needs, in addition to a
good ten-cent cigar, is some sort of judiciously reverent digital Lulu video
record. The production on which that
video is based may take if not any then at least many number of forms: a
picture-perfect reemployment of the 1980 Met production with better
performances would certainly do, as would a comparably well-performed restaging
of the 1996 Glyndebourne production against a succession of 1990s scenic
backdrops. I would very much like to see
at least once a Lulu that mimics as closely as possible the art deco
mise en scene of Pabst’s Pandora’s Box; for although this movie is by no
means unimpeachable as an adaptation of Wedekind’s plays (most notably and
problematically it tinkers with the conclusion by writing Geschwitz out of the
plot in the penultimate scene [or “sixth act” as the captions term it] and
leaving Alwa alive in the final one), in its unmistakable siting of the drama
in its own present, the 1920s, which the famous Hungarian-American historian John
Lukacs has sagaciously termed “the only truly modern decade of the twentieth
century,” it somehow captures the truth-content of Lulu as a blueprint
of absolute modernity more precisely and capaciously than any production of the
opera with which I am as yet familiar.
“Blueprint
of absolute modernity!” you scoff: “could you possibly get any more
grandiloquently pretentious than that?”
Perhaps not, but perhaps I needn’t even have gotten as pretentious
as that. For all I really mean to
say in so styling Lulu is that nothing either of its kind or of even
remote kinship thereunto has surpassed it in point of sheer, breathtaking
captivatingness. When I hear supposedly
cultivated people crying up the aesthetic merits of that bastard chickenshit
genre known as the musical, for example, I want to weep veritable cataracts
of vomit, knowing as I do what a wretchedly wan, half-baked, limp-spined
creature the finest musical shows itself to be when juxtaposed with Lulu. And my dyspeptic sorrow issues not
principally or even tertiarily from the fact that the language of musicals is
typically (and very probably invariably) less advanced (sic on the
absence of quotation marks) than that of Lulu, that your Hammersteins
and your Sondheims mulishly insist on writing “tunes you can hum” in
old-fashioned diatonic keys rather than deriving their compositional materials
from twelve-tone rows. It arises in the
main, rather, from my conviction that Lulu has all the things that supposedly
top-notch musicals are required to have and most pride themselves on, but in a
more heightened, more concentrated, more intoxicating degree. Many connoisseurs of-cum-authorities on
twentieth-century music (e.g., Charles Rosen) admire the richness and complexity
of Lulu’s musical architecture while looking down their noses at the
subject-matter of its libretto, contemning it as almost tabloidishly lurid. For my part, I am not in the least put off by
this subject-matter, and indeed find it among the most moving in the history of
Western drama. I find the travails and
sufferings of Lulu’s characters
who (in Theodor Adorno’s words about them) “love without hope”—the
Schöns, the high school student, and Countess Geschwitz--enormously compelling;
and the fate of Lulu herself is equally moving in an entirely different
register, for however strongly one may wish to condemn her for her callousness
(and the reader has already seen that I do not wish to condemn her at all
strongly for it), she ultimately dies in retribution for a supposed crime that
is not in any sense her fault, and that would still have been treated by the
world as a crime even if she had lived as chastely as a nun—the crime of being
beautiful. What is more, far from
regarding Lulu’s music as a sort of highfalutin soundtrack alienable
from the libretto, I regard it as the perfect and inalienable accompaniment to
the events and utterances of that libretto, as the only kind of music that is
capable of underwriting the intrinsic dignity and emotional force of those
events and utterances. When I weep—all
right, “tear up a bit” is nearer to what actually happens—at Countess
Geschwitz’s death it is because and not in spite of that death’s being
accompanied not by a whole-note root-position C minor triad, but rather by a
series of non-diatonic chords followed by a strategically anticlimactic
downbeat eighth-note unison F. Moreover,
when I hear Lulu singing the words “Oh freedom” along an ascending minor
seventh and a descending minor second, I feel the fetter-blasting, sun-in
letting intensity of relief contained in those words much more fully than I
would in hearing them sung to an arpeggiated inversion of a C major triad. And I believe that any Tom, Dick, Jane,
Harry, or Henrietta who appreciates dramas of such compellingly searing intensity
as Lulu’s libretto—dramas with which Hollywood and Broadway alike abound—must
likewise acknowledge the justness of this music, regardless of whether he or
she is a fan of opera at all, let alone non-tonal opera—provided, of course,
that he or she makes his acquaintance with this opera via a production of it
that does justice to its most basic and compelling dramatic qualities—that, in
other words, makes it as superficially dazzling as any of the classic cinematic
realizations of the supposedly classic Broadway musicals. When it was still a very recent hit,
Tchaikovsky called Carmen “the chef d’oeuvre of our age”; by the end of
the century it was firmly established as the most popular opera in the world, a
position from which the ensuing hundred-plus years have not managed to dislodge
it. If there is one opera written since Carmen that deserved to be recognized in
its own time as the chef d’oeuvre of its age, and deserves now to dislodge Carmen
from its perch of high-and-low annihilating preeminence it is Lulu. The turmoil of the Second World War combined
with Helene Berg’s jealous custodianship of Berg’s sketches debarred Lulu
from receiving the first of these honors by respectively reducing the number of
performances and restricting the basis of these performances to a two-act
torso; since the premiere of the three-act Lulu in 1979, the opera’s
progress towards the second honor has been impeded by inadequate
productions. If Lulu is ever to
attain that honor it must be treated by its realizers for stage and screen alike
with the reverence it deserves as the pinnacle of achievement in both the
operatic medium (or genre) and mainstream early twentieth-century culture tout court,
rather than as an infinitely abusable avant-garde curio or antediluvian
warhorse.