The Ultimate Femme Fatale - Lulu

SATO presents Alban Berg’s decadent swan song, today: Lulu, which was nearing completion at the time of his death in 1935.

The story was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904), and tells of Lulu's steady decline from unfaithful wife to mistress to murderess to fugitive and prostitute. Yet she exudes a particular kind of attraction - Sir Andrew Davis, music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, was so smitten by the character and the score that he named his dog Lulu!

Paolo Pietropaolo is guest host for today's performance, which is a production from the Lyric Opera of Chicago and WFMT in Chicago.

For more, much more, about the opera and today's production, please continue reading:

Alban Berg paints a devastating portrait of the rise and fall of the title heroine (soprano Marlis Petersen), an amoral young woman who exudes a "fatal attraction" to men and to at least one woman. Lulu's ill-fated admirers are Countess Geschwitz (mezzo-soprano Jill Grove); Dr. Schön (bass-baritone Wolfgang Schöne) and his son, the composer Alwa (tenor William Burden); the impetuous Painter (tenor Scott Ramsay); Schigolch, a mysterious old man who may – or may not – be Lulu's father (bass-baritone Thomas Hammons); and the exotic Prince (tenor Rodell Rosel). Wolfgang Schöne also plays Jack the Ripper, at whose hand Lulu meets her brutal end in the final scene.

The Chicago Tribune singled out the seductive and sensual potrayal of the heroine, given by Marlis Petersen. "The German soprano was born to play this slinky male-fantasy figure, and she does so as a curious kid in an erotic candy store. What’s more, she sings Lulu’s murderously difficult music as if it were Mozart, trailed by the sounds of an alto saxophone as carnal as sweat."

Lulu, opera in a prologue and three acts
Composer: Alban Berg
Libretto: Alban Berg after Frank Wedekind's plays 'Erdgeist' (Earth spirit) and 'Die Büchse der Pandora' (Pandora's Box)

First performed: Zurich, Stadttheater, 2 June 1937 (Acts 1 and 2);
Paris, Opéra, 24 February 1979 (three-act version, completed by Friedrich Cerha)
This Production: Lyric Opera of Chicago, Nov. 2008

Cast and Characters
Marlis Petersen, high soprano, Lulu
Wolfgang Schöne, heroic baritone - Dr Schön, editor in chief / Jack the Ripper
William Burden, young heroic tenor - Alwa, Dr Schön's son, a composer
Jill Grove, dramatic mezzo-soprano - Countess Geschwitz
Thomas Hammons, high character bass - Schigolch, an old man

Jan Buchwald, heroic buffo bass - Animal Trainer/Athlete
Scott Ramsay, lyric tenor - The Painter/A Sailor
Buffy Baggott, contralto - Theatrical Dresser/High-School Boy/Groom
Rodell Rosel, buffo tenor - Prince/Manservant/Marquis

Bradley Garvin, high bass - Theatre Director/ the Banker
Kathryn Leemhuis, mezzo-soprano - A Lady Artisan
Corey Crider, high baritone - A Journalist
Ronald Watkins - Police Commissioner
Paul Corona, lower baritone - A Manservant
Angela Mannino, opera soubrette - A Fifteen-year-old Girl
Katherine Lerner, contralto - Her Mother
Craig Irvin, high bass - Professor of medicine / Professor

Performers for the entire concert:
Orchestra: Lyric Opera Orchestra
Conductor: Sir Andrew Davis

SYNPOSIS
Prologue
To a flourish in the orchestra the Animal Tamer welcomes the audience and invites them to inspect his menagerie. As each animal is introduced the orchestra identifies it thematically with a character in the opera. The snake appears last; assistants carry Lulu on, and the orchestra introduces the music that will accompany each of her entrances in the opera.

Act 1.i A spacious but shabby painter’s studio
Dressed as a pierrot and watched by Dr Schön, Lulu is having her portrait painted. Alwa arrives to take his father to the dress rehearsal of his new ballet, asking after Lulu’s husband, the Professor of Medicine (Recitative). The Painter seduces Lulu; he calls her ‘Nelly’ and later ‘Eva’ (Introduction-Canon-Coda). The Professor is heard knocking at the door; he enters and collapses with a heart attack (Melodrama). While the Painter goes to fetch help, Lulu tries unsuccessfully to urge her husband back to life, accompanied by a saxophone (Canzonetta). On his return, the Painter questions Lulu’s motives (Recitative-Duet): does she love anything or anyone? Lulu’s response is always the same: she does not know. She goes off to change her clothes, and the Painter worries about what a future with her might hold (Arioso). An orchestral interlude then develops the music first heard in the Canzonetta and Canon.

1.ii An elegant salon in the Painter’s house
Lulu and the Painter have married. They discuss the morning’s mail; Lulu is astonished by the announcement of Dr Schön’s engagement. The Painter celebrates Lulu’s beauty and his good fortune in marrying her (Duettino); the sound of the doorbell (a vibraphone tremolando) interrupts them. The visitor is a beggar and the Painter leaves Lulu to deal with him. It is Schigolch, an old friend of Lulu’s- perhaps her father, perhaps a former lover (Chamber Music I, for wind nonet). He calls her Lulu; she says, ‘I have not been called Lulu in the memory of man’. The doorbell sounds again, and Schigolch leaves as Dr Schön enters.

The remainder of the act is dominated by a large-scale sonata form, the elements of which symbolize Lulu’s relationship with Schön. Its first theme is introduced with Schön’s opening words as he shows his distaste for Schigolch. He is surprised by the Painter’s blindness to Lulu’s behaviour (exposition transition), but the purpose of his visit is to insist that Lulu stop seeing him (second subject: gavotte and musette). Lulu’s love for Schön is crystallized in a Mahlerian lento theme that forms the coda of the exposition, all the elements of which are repeated as their argument goes back over the same ground. The Painter returns and Lulu leaves. The reprise of the exposition coda is interrupted by a passage dominated by an obsessive, steadily accelerating rhythmic figure, the opera’s Hauptrhythmus, which signifies death and destruction and which had previously appeared at the death of the Professor of Medicine (Monoritmica). Schön tells the Painter of Lulu’s past; appalled, the latter rushes off and cuts his throat. Lulu reappears and Schön realizes what has happened; Alwa arrives and together they discover the body. The music now begins to decelerate as Schön telephones the police to report the suicide. The doorbell announces their arrival, and Lulu tells Schön that she will still marry him. The orchestral interlude picks up the sonata coda at the point at which it was broken off; it gives way to the sound of a jazz band to introduce the following scene.

1.iii A theatre dressing room
Lulu is changing for her performance as a cabaret dancer. She asks Alwa whether Dr Schön will be in the audience and tells him of her latest admirer, a prince, who wants to take her to Africa as his wife. When she goes on stage Alwa wonders whether he could write an opera about her, but decides it would be too incredible. The Prince’s conversation with Alwa (Chorale Variations) is interrupted by an alarm, and Lulu storms in (Ragtime): she has seen Schön in the audience with his fiancée. Schön soon follows and tries to make her return to the stage (Sextet); the Theatre Manager gives Lulu five minutes to compose herself, and everyone leaves except Schön.

The sonata movement resumes with a development section as Schön pleads with Lulu not to stop his forthcoming marriage. But when she tells him of her plan to marry the Prince, he realizes that he is incapable of severing his links with her. As the sonata finally reaches its recapitulation Schön breaks down, and Lulu, triumphant, dictates a letter for him to send, breaking off his engagement.

Act 2.i A large living-room in Schön's house
Lulu has married Schön but continues to attract admirers. She welcomes one of them, the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, who invites her to a ball for women artists (Recitative). Geschwitz’s music has strong pentatonic associations, harmonized in bare 5ths. As she leaves, Schön regrets that such people are now part of his ‘family circle’ (Ballade). Against Lulu’s wishes he goes off to the Stock Exchange (Cavatina); Geschwitz returns, followed by the Athlete, Schoolboy and Schigolch (Ensemble). As they settle down for the day, Lulu greets them. All three declare their love for Lulu and their wish to marry her (Canon); they panic when ‘Herr Doktor Schön’ is announced (Recitative) and rush to hide, but it is Alwa who enters, not his father.

Alwa’s declaration of love for Lulu begins the rondo that will dominate this act (just as the sonata form dominates the first one), representing his own obsessive dependence on her. The main theme, highly lyrical, is heard first as Alwa enters. Its course is constantly interrupted, first by two Chorales as the Manservant brings hors d’oeuvre and returns to clear the plates. Schön’s return goes unnoticed, until the Athlete sees him brandishing a gun (Tumultuoso); Alwa is taken off by his father and the Athlete takes the opportunity to hide again. In a five-strophe aria Schön then rounds on Lulu, accusing her of disgracing him and offering her the revolver to kill herself and save his face. He searches the room, discovering Geschwitz’s hiding-place. Before his final strophe Lulu offers her first apologia: in her Lied, whose high tessitura and elaborate figuration crystallize her vocal character in the opera, she disclaims responsibility for the men who have died for love of her. Schön knew her character when he married her, and she has never pretended to be other than she is; he may have sacrificed his position for her, but she has offered her youth to him. Resuming his aria, Schön threatens Lulu with the gun, but a noise from the Schoolboy distracts him, and Lulu fires five shots into her husband. As he dies he catches sight of Geschwitz - ‘the devil!’. Lulu begs Alwa to save her from arrest (Arietta); the scene ends as the police knock on the door.

The palindromic orchestral interlude is the turning-point in the opera, the division in Wedekind’s drama between Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora; Lulu’s remorseless climb to success and social status in the first half will be mirrored by her fall in the second. The music accompanies a silent film that portrays her arrest, trial for Schön’s murder and imprisonment, and then, during the retrograde, the plans for her escape (to be effected by catching cholera from Geschwitz and changing places with her in an isolation hospital).

2.ii The same living-room, a year later
Alwa, Geschwitz and the Athlete await Schigolch (Recitative). He brings plans for Lulu’s rescue and leaves with the Countess, who is to take Lulu’s place in the hospital (Largo). The Schoolboy arrives, having escaped from a correction centre. He has his own plan to rescue Lulu, but the Athlete convinces him that she has died in prison and throws him out. Lulu appears with Schigolch and slowly descends the stairs; the Athlete is appalled by her wasted appearance and leaves, threatening to betray her to the police. When Lulu is finally left alone with Alwa, she regains her former vitality and celebrates her freedom (Melodrama). The music of the rondo surfaces again as Alwa declares his love, praising her beauty in minute detail and musical metaphors (Hymn). As the couple fall on to the sofa, Lulu observes that it might be the very spot where his father bled to death.

Act 3.i Paris, a spacious salon
The Athlete proposes a toast to the assembled company in honour of Lulu’s birthday in the first of three large-scale ensembles that dominate the scene (each is cast in ternary form with material based on the circus music of the Prologue, which returns on each occasion with increasing frenzy). The Banker is questioned about the prospects for the Jungfrau Railway shares that everyone has bought, and the crowd drifts off to the gambling tables. Lulu is threatened by the Marquis: he is blackmailing her, but instead of demanding money intends to instal her in a Cairo brothel (Concertante Chorale Variations I and II). In his Procurer’s Song (Intermezzo I) a solo violin quotes for the first time a Wedekind cabaret song (the Lautenlied), which will form the basis of the subsequent orchestral variations and articulate the final scene. Lulu refuses (Intermezzo II) in an aria that recapitulates her Lied from Act 2 scene i, and the Marquis threatens to reveal her to the police as the murderer of Doctor Schön (Variations III-XII).

The crowd returns, on its way to supper; the Jungfrau shares are booming (Ensemble II). The Athlete again tries to blackmail Lulu, and as the Banker is told of the collapse of the Jungfrau shares, Schigolch too asks Lulu for money; together they make plans to dispose of the Athlete (Pantomime). In a spoken dialogue over a cadenza for solo violin and piano the Marquis warns off the Athlete, and in a dialogue that mixes speech, Sprechgesang and lyrical arioso Lulu first convinces the Athlete that Geschwitz is in love with him, then persuades Geschwitz (who is horrified by the prospect) to spend a night with the Athlete. The Athlete and Geschwitz leave for Schigolch’s lodgings, while Lulu arranges to exchange clothes with the Groom. There is uproar as the news spreads of the Jungfrau collapse: everyone is ruined (Ensemble III). In the chaos Lulu manages to escape just before the Marquis brings the police to arrest her.

The orchestral interlude is a set of four variations on Wedekind’s Lautenlied, first heard during the Marquis’s Procurer’s Song in the preceding scene. At the end of the interlude the tune is crudely harmonized and played on seven woodwind to simulate the sound of a barrel organ. The tune will reappear three times in the course of the next scene.

3.ii London, a windowless garret in the East End
Alwa and Schigolch await Lulu’s return on her first night as a prostitute. They hide as she enters with her first client, the Professor; the music associated with her first husband, the Professor of Medicine – the Melodrama and Canzonetta of Act 1 scene i – returns. As Lulu and her silent client go into an adjoining room Alwa and Schigolch rifle his pockets, finding nothing but a devotional book. They hide again as he leaves, but the next visitor proves to be Geschwitz, carrying Lulu’s pierrot portrait which has dogged her throughout the opera. When it is nailed to the wall, Lulu and her three admirers contemplate its beauty and how their fate has been bound up with it (Quartet). Lulu is unable to bear the memory of her past and leaves again for the street, followed by Geschwitz, as the fourth variation from the interlude is recalled in the orchestra.

A reprise of the second variation accompanies the conversation of Schigolch and Alwa, who hide again as Lulu returns with her second client, a Negro. As they argue about money, the music associated with the Painter in Act 1 (the Monoritmica and Duettino) is evoked; Alwa intervenes and the Negro clubs him to death. Lulu leaves again; Schigolch drags off Alwa’s body as the third variation is heard. Geschwitz considers suicide, but Lulu appears with another client: Jack the Ripper. Music associated with Dr Schön from the Act 1 sonata and Act 2 Cavatina is recalled as Lulu begs Jack to stay the night and then argues about money. As the couple go off into the next room there is a final quotation of the music that has accompanied Lulu’s entrances throughout the opera. Geschwitz contemplate Lulu’s portrait and a return to Germany (Nocturno). There is a scream off stage, and a death cry (to a 12-note chord) as Jack kills Lulu. He then stabs the Countess as she goes to help her. Jack washes his hands and leaves the dying Countess to her Liebestod, and to a final cadence based upon chords associated with Alwa, Schön and herself.

Opera Background
Berg began to prepare an operatic treatment of Wedekind’s two Lulu plays in 1928, when his negotiations to secure the rights to Hauptmann’s Und Pippa tanzt came to nothing. He had known the text of Erdgeist at least since the early 1900s, and in 1905 had attended a private production by Karl Kraus in Vienna of Die Büchse der Pandora. Although Berg did not finalize his agreement with Wedekind’s widow until the following year, the libretto of Lulu was completed by the end of 1928 together with musical drafts of early scenes, which carried over some of his sketches for Und Pippa tanzt. Work on the opera occupied him until his death in 1935; he interrupted it twice to fulfil commissions, in 1929 for the concert aria Der Wein (which served as a study for some aspects of the sound-world of Lulu) and in the first half of 1935 for the Violin Concerto.

By 1934 the short score of Lulu was virtually complete, but under the Nazi regime the possibility of a German or Austrian opera house’s daring to mount the première became increasingly remote. To encourage a production further afield Berg prepared a five-movement concert suite from the opera, the Symphonische Stücke aus der Oper ‘Lulu’; consisting of the rondo, Film Music and Lied der Lulu from Act 2, together with the interlude between Act 3 scenes i and ii, and the final Adagio; these became the first portions of the score to be orchestrated, and the suite received its first performance, conducted by Erich Kleiber, in Berlin on 30 November 1934. Berg then began to orchestrate Lulu from the beginning, incorporating those sections already scored for the suite. By the time of his death Acts 1 and 2 were complete, as well as the first 360 bars of Act 3, together with its interlude and the final Grave taken over from the Adagio of the suite. Of the remaining short score four brief passages (87 bars out of a total of 1326 in Act 3) remained to be fully notated, with accompanimental or subsidiary vocal lines still to be added.

After Berg’s death his widow, Helene, was at first keen to see the opera completed; it was generally agreed that such a completion would be possible without the need for any new music to be composed. Schoenberg and Webern were asked to carry out the task but both declined, and after the première of the first two acts in Zürich (conducted by Robert Denzler, with Nuri Hadzic in the title role, Maria Bernhard as Geschwitz, Asger Stig as Dr Schön and Peter Baxevanos as Alwa) Helene Berg became increasingly unwilling to allow the score to be finished by another hand; in 1937 political pressure halted the engraving of the vocal score of Act 3.

After World War II concert performances in Vienna in February and April 1949, conducted by Herbert Hafner with Ilona Steingruber as Lulu, were followed in September by a staging at La Fenice, Venice, conducted by Nino Sanzogno and directed by Giorgio Strehler. Productions at Essen in 1953 conducted by Gustav König, and at Hamburg in 1957 conducted by Leopold Ludwig with Helga Pilarczyk in the title role and Toni Blankenheim as Schön, renewed the debate over the completion of the score, and during the next decade Berg scholars including Hans Redlich and George Perle argued strongly in favour of such a treatment. But by 1960 Helene Berg’s prohibition had become complete: no-one was to be allowed access to the Act 3 material, a decision repeated in her will made in 1969 and published after her death in 1976. In 1962, however, shortly after the Viennese stage première on 9 June (conducted by Karl Böhm with Evelyn Lear as Lulu, Gisela Litz as Geschwitz, Rudolf Schock as Alwa and Paul Schöffler as Schön), Universal Edition had allowed Friedrich Cerha to begin a study of the sketches and short score with a view to completing the work. After Helene Berg’s death the Alban Berg Foundation took legal action to prevent the performance of Cerha’s version, but the première of the three-act Lulu eventually took place in Paris in February 1979, conducted by Pierre Boulez and staged by Patrice Chéreau. Teresa Stratas sang Lulu, Yvonne Minton Geschwitz; Kenneth Riegel was Alwa and Franz Mazura Schön. The same forces subsequently made a commercial recording. There followed a rapid sequence of new productions of the three-act version. The American première took place at Santa Fe in July 1979 in English translation (by Arthur Jacobs) and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, with Nancy Shade in the title role. Covent Garden staged the British première on 16 February 1981, conducted by Colin Davis and directed by Götz Friedrich; Karan Armstrong was Lulu.

Although Lulu lacks the easily comprehended musical symmetry of Wozzeck, its large-scale structure is completely reliant on closed forms in a way that invokes the ‘number opera’, even though those formal divisions do not always coincide with the dramatic divisions into acts and scenes. Each scene is built up from more or less self-contained units, carefully defined in the score; Berg’s terminology is not wholly consistent, and the unfinished Act 3 left some of the forms untitled. The first two acts are dominated by the sonata and rondo structures respectively, the third by the theme and variations that first appear in its orchestral interlude; the entire structure is unified further by the increasing tendency of the music to recapitulate earlier material, until the final scene contains little that has not been heard earlier in widely differing dramatic contexts.

Berg’s use of 12-note technique in Lulu is very much tailored to his own dramatic ends, and differs from classical Schoenbergian method in several respects. Although all its note rows are ultimately derived by permutation from the single basic set that represents Lulu’s innate sexuality, in practice the score is based on a collection of interrelated rows used both as ordered pitch sets and as tropes, and whose distinct melodic shapes function as character motifs throughout the opera: they portray Lulu’s protean nature (indicating how each of her admirers has a different concept of her), Schön’s conformist inflexibility, Alwa’s lyrical idealism, Geschwitz’s selfless love and so on. Material derived from several rows may be combined in harmonic complexes with strong tonal tendencies. Perle (1985) offers a masterly dissection of the structural intricacies of Berg’s musical language.