Lulu is hard to take straight up. No one since Proust had taken a harder look at the lethal folly of romantic love than the opera's creator, Alban Berg, and although misconceptions about it continue to fall away, producers and audiences still find the challenging work easier to enjoy as a theatrical "sensation," plying its trade in a gutter somewhere between the naughty and the outright immoral. The 1937 opera, finally established as one of the 20th century's greatest, is such strong stuff that Berg's widow fought to suppress it. Her husband lived on the knife-edge of Eros' madness, and that's what he served up, lovingly and as compassionately as Proust, in Lulu.
Its 1979 premiere in its completed three-act form was a visually imposing misfire from one of the greatest opera directors, Patrice Chereau, who thought he could out-Berg Berg. But its incompletion at the time of Berg's death is not the reason lesser artists have, in the guise of fixing it, often contradicted and dulled it. Recently, William Kentridge, a visual artist taking over as director, wallpapered it in a much-heralded traveling production that Nonesuch has preserved in its Metropolitan Opera stopover.
One sign of a true Lulu is that the producers display the Lulu portrait in every scene. Time and again, I exhausted myself locating Kentridge's portrait in the blizzard of projected images, some arresting, many banal and off-point �" and all of them, collectively, distractions from the opera's meticulously calculated, fine-bore horrors.
Just before I watched it, life, in one of its synchronous caprices, tossed me a "dated" video of Wieland Wagner's Lulu production as staged in Stuttgart in 1968. Even as the old two-act "torso," it took Berg at his word and sliced like a blade to the beating hearts of the opera's characters who, liberated from the bounds of type, stereotype and symbol, threw Lulu' s heat.
By comparison, Kentridge's Met Lulu is a cool glass of milk. The incandescence of soprano Marlis Petersen, one of the great Lulus of our day in her final incarnation of the title role, only highlights the vacuity of what transpires around her. The other singers get the job done �" their "pieces of work," in Jack the Ripper's droll take on the opera's climactic murders �" but none rises anywhere near Petersen's level and most are just not good enough, though garishly clothed.
I know nothing of Susan Graham's sexual preferences, and I'm good with that, but as opera's most iconic lesbian, the complicated Countess Geschwitz, she is a cipher and seems uninterested in her music, if irrefutably professional about it. As she sings and acts it, the role is smaller than one remembers. Perhaps tellingly, perhaps unwittingly, in Kentridge's staging the dying Dr. Schoen aims his last words �" "The Devil" �" not at Geschwitz, as in Berg, but at Lulu, who has done him a favor by putting five bullets in his back. He loves her. He has loathed to a one the many others in competition for her, but he has reserved his true hatred for Geschwitz, the one threat he cannot overwhelm, as Berg understood.
It's not that Kentridge's Lulu is sloppy. The singing and acting are noteworthy in the horrifically difficult ensembles, which clearly were rehearsed to a fare-the-well. Still, in the pivotal one, the genderfuck of Act II, Scene 1, out come the unlit cigars and the tired Freudian question they pointedly ask. It's one of those "amplifications" of Berg through which its energy leaks away.
Kentridge does triumph where he had damn better. In the middle of his opera, Berg asks for a film of the pivotal action, over a musical palindrome of seething brilliance, and even directors with big budgets have �" unaccountably, unconscionably �" largely abjured. Kentridge's is the most accomplished and shattering I have seen. But elsewhere all that art becomes the "Schmutz" Schoen deplores. Shortly after the Painter has made the Lulu portrait �" and promptly killed himself, gratefully offstage �" Lulu cries out, "I can't stay here." I know how she feels.
The met Opera Orchestra under Lothar Koenigs, deputizing for James Levine but hardly at the last minute, is, appropriately enough, a shadow of the self it had been for this work under Levine and Fabio Luisi.
In another of life's consolation prizes for this Lulu lover, immediately after I watched the Met's, I heard the Kentridge in its reincarnation at English National Opera last November, on a delayed BBC radiobroadcast. What a difference this potent music alone makes! Without having to constantly bat away the welter of visual images like cobwebs, the music comes through at full strength, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. The cast is terrific, and James Morris is a fine Dr. Schoen. Brenda Rae is yet another of the great Lulus, and Sarah Connolly is a dream Geschwitz, as complete and soul-baring an executant of the role as I have heard.
If you want to make Lulu's acquaintance, there's never been a better time. The ENO Lulu is sung in a brilliant English translation, by Richard Stokes, that "reads" clearly, and it will be available on the BBC's iPlayer Radio until Feb. 3. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087q1xc