It often has been said that Berg's Lulu was asking for it. Performers of the role - many of whom volunteer that singing Lulu has, for various reasons, changed them - wave off that allegation when they even acknowledge it. Lulu is an archetype who has a way of showing up when summoned. She's back to remind us that our day is, once again, hers, and that unconsidered submission to Eros is the path to soul death.
As if on cue, when sexual assault charges and denials roil the airwaves, along comes the "Lulu" we've been waiting for. Well, some of us anyway. BelAir's new video release (DVD/Blu-ray) of Dmitri Tcherniakov's production of "Lulu" for the Bavarian State Opera settles a good many scores.
The Tcherniakov production achieves its singular clarity almost literally, with its savvy use of moveable Plexiglas panels. In one performance Marlis Petersen, the perpetual-motion Lulu of this production and, until recently, of our time, slammed into one of them, nearly ending prematurely her 100-performance run with the role, which would have been tragic while somehow essentially Lulu-ish. Seeing it is like cleaning your "Lulu" glasses.
Berg's uncompleted but fully sketched 1935 opera was first performed in its full three acts in Friedrich Cerha's masterly completion in Paris in 1979. Berg's score, if incomplete, left detailed instructions about how "Lulu" should look as well as sound. But from that belated Paris "premiere," all manner of accretions have accumulated like plaque on Berg's libretto. In Tcherniakov's see-through staging, they have fallen off like birds flying into plate glass, dropping broken-necked.
(One of the truer stagings was San Francisco Opera's in 1989, a Lotfi Mansouri production with Ann Panagulias - the smartest, most dramatically multifaceted and musically accurate Lulu in my long experience of the opera - as one of the pioneering proponents of the idea that Lulu was more than self-absorbed slut. Even the great Teresa Stratas allowed her stage allure, equal parts sex and danger, to re-vamp the "old" Lulu.)
Petersen, whose farewell appearances in the role at the Met last year were obscured by William Kentridge's cluttered production, is transfixing throughout this occasionally glaringly clear production, lit potently by Gleb Filshtinsky. She's been vocally more true elsewhere, but by this 2015 staging she's at her most penetrating dramatically. The physical acting in Act III, Scene 1 is as good as you'll witness on an opera stage.
There her drunken (and still champagne-swilling) Lulu exhibits, on the turn of a dime, Lucille Ball-level comedy and the convulsive spasms of a torture victim. She has drilled so far down into the core of this complex character that the far more famous mirror aria of the first act and the "Lulu-Lied" of the second yield right-of-place to the short Act III monologue. There she tells us, plain as can be, in matters of Eros what she must not submit. Threatened with deportation to a brothel, she declares, "I cannot sell the one thing that is truly mine."
I've heard out lesbians at the top of their vocal games sing memorable Geschwitzes. While I don't know Daniela Sindram's orientation, she's the first that has seemed to me a credible lesbian, and she fully captures the character's pathos and plight.
The two women lead a cast without a single deficiency and several clear standouts. Rainer Trost's sexy painter is uncommonly sympathetic, and his reappearance in the final scene as Lulu's second john (Berg's "Neger," minus the blackface) is meted out in a few telling strokes that make him arguably more sinister than her other two clients. While I've been indifferent to Bo Skovus in the past, his Dr. Schoen/Jack the Ripper is easily the best, most developed I've seen live.
Tcherniakov's rich working of his concept (as usual, he also designed the sets) never stands in the way of singer-direction at its most differentiated and evolved. That first scene of the last act is probably the most intricate, difficult ensemble in all of opera. (Berlin recently solved its abundant problems by cutting the entire, crucial episode.) It's not just a prodigy of stagecraft, it's an actualization of the human menagerie Berg promises in the Prologue.
Without cuts or a hint of rushing, it's the fastest "Lulu" I've seen, if only because it never takes a breath. It lets the ambiguities, contradictions and blunt declamations of the text come at you exactly the way they do in real life, far too fast to sort out.
Nearly a century later the piece is still nearly too hot to handle. While allowing the fleeting moments of onstage "sex" to regain their shock value, these artists together trace the inevitably deadly consequences of sex too readily loosed and surrendered to.
Characteristically, conductor Kirill Petrenko touches both the absolute zero and the hot running lava of the music, and every distinct, clearly audible note in-between, without once reminding you that he's even there.