As I was writing my recent review of the "Berlin Lulu" �" that dratted 2012 version of Alban Berg's opera that deals with its monstrous tragedy by breaking off yet more parts of the antiquated kewpie-doll Lulu, starting with the head �" Munich's Bavarian State Opera was giving the premiere of its new production of Berg's Lulu , intact and then some, which I feared I'd never know. But the trusty old Bavarian Radio carried a live broadcast of opening night, and there was a live-stream telecast which is now safely ensconced on Medici TV. A word to the wise is sufficient.
Why, you ask, are you back at us so soon with this tawdry tale? Because, I reply, it tells us more about the consequences �" hazards, really �" of so-called romantic love, no matter who's doing it, than, say, Looking, or anything else since Tristan und Isolde. The more we can look at Lulu without blinking, the more likely we are to have a life.
I had barely pounded in the four corner-posts of my own personal operatic tent �" Norma, Don Giovanni, Madama Butterfly and Tristan �" when Lulu pulled me into her orbit. It was my second year in the Bay Area. During the first I had heard the Tristan with Nilsson and Windgassen, so I knew the War Memorial was a happening kind of place. And while I've often rued the other productions I missed in 1971, e.g., a Sutherland Maria Stuarda , I remember the force with which the Lulu �" an opera about which I knew absolutely nothing, and which was still being performed as a "torso" minus most of it third act �" hauled me away from graduate school across the Bay and froze me in place for reasons beyond the giddy reality that Christoph von Dohnanyi was conducting with Anja Silja the Lulu. Those were the days.
There were acres of empty seats then, but it's been the single greatest amazement of my opera-going life that, over its course, Lulu has not only regained the rest of its third act, but, whenever it's been given a fighting chance, it's become a sell-out and often a hot ticket. That's how much we need it.
What makes the character Lulu �" you must pardon the expression �" an Everyman is that she's a slave to being sexual, and to others around her being sexual. And she deals. By the time she sings her exultant "O Freiheit!" ("O freedom!") in Act II, sex alchemically mixed with love is over for her, kaput, and all that's left is to see it all wind down, which she does with singular Little Lulu-ish courage. This is what's really meant by adult fare. Want to torpedo your perfect, beautiful life? Add romance with sex.
What blew me away back then was seeing, right there onstage, a designated lesbian, the smitten Countess Geschwitz, whom Lulu characterizes as crazed (particularly when Geschwitz is around her). But Lulu calls her "verrueckt" only in a futile final attempt at protecting the Countess, who, when you step back even a little, has the largest aggregate of positive character traits of anyone else in the opera. Sure, by the terms of the DSM-5, no one in Lulu is a bit well, and Berg's creations are as much archetypes as "real people," but Geschwitz's most unmistakable attribute is a pathological generosity. She just keeps on giving �" and thinking of others.
Without retracting a jot of my praise for Deborah Polaski's Geschwitz in Berlin, the character was, in Andrea Berth's production, all too typically played to stereotype. In Dmitri Tcherniakov's vastly more involving production for Munich, Daniela Sindram's Geschwitz is, whatever the signer's sexuality, every inch the convincing lesbian �" she looks like my SF doctor �" but with an infinitely greater and more subtle emotional range. Unlike her Berlin counterpart, her costume doesn't change; she does. When she goes into her final fantasy about how, when all this sordid business is over, she's going to get a law degree and fight for the rights of women, you believe it and root for her.
Tcherniakov departs from Berg's detailed stage instructions only in ways that are true to the, well, Weltanschauung of the piece. Staging it all in a maze of glass panels �" but not the cage that has become the cliche of Lulu stagings �" he strikes a brilliant balance between transparency and objectivism, color and feeling, that's also not deaf to the strokes of dark comedy in Lulu.
That's at its most spellbinding in the Paris stock exchange scene (wily mirroring-telescoping on Berg's part) at the beginning of Act III. There, in the middle of one of the most complicated ensembles in 20th-century opera, is Marlis Petersen, singing Lulu in her ninth production of the work, in what's easily the most complete realization of the character on today's stage (and sung not as if it's Verdi but as if it's Monteverdi in its fusion of text and musical line). For once Lulu's toast ("Prosit!") makes contextual sense, and, while singing her birdcage music, Petersen pulls off a stretch of physical comedy �" Lulu's getting progressively more drunk and frantic �" that I would put up there with Lucille Ball in the chocolate-factory scene of I Love Lucy, than which I have no higher praise.
In my favorite I-told-you-so of this century, masterminding it all is conductor Kirill Petrenko, since named the new chief director of the Berlin Philharmonic.