Lulu sucks, LULU rocks

Dylan and Kamala

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Jun 20, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/20/98

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Well I'll say this for her, she certainly had the legs for it.
Unfortunately Eilana Lappalainen, the titular earth-spirit in San
Francisco's summer production of Lulu, had very little else to offer either
musically or dramatically. The dramatic failure was not entirely her fault.
Director Lotfi Mansouri had envisioned his heroine as a glib, happy-go-lucky
golddigger, a figure out of musical comedy, Busby Berkely rather than Pabst.
If there is one thing that is indispensable to an interpreter of Lulu, it is
the ability to project hunger. This is a girl born on the streets, who
learned at the age of twelve that sex was the only thing she had to trade
for survival. For her, male desire is--literally--meat and drink.
Lappalainen's corn-fed chorine had clearly never missed a meal in her life,
and I do not mean this a snide comment on her excellent figure, but on her
deeply American sense of complacency, of a kind of greed that comes not from
having had nothing, but from having always had plenty and not seeing why one
should not have even more. The character, in short, was repellent, a living
contradiction of Berg's astonishingly perceptive and compassionate score.

Berg was decades ahead of his time in understanding the societal trap that
makes Lulu what she is, and in finding the outlines of a human individual in
the rather stock temptress figure of Wedekind's plays. Berg's Lulu is not
"femme eternelle" at all, but a mortal creature living in a trap that slowly
closes, as she learns that the sex she sells, which she imagines gives her
power over men, in fact makes her utterly dependent on their vision of her.
The "one thing that belongs to her" that she wails against selling on the
street in the final scene, was never her own property to begin with. What
she does own, and cannot sell, is her humanity, her existence separate from
the fantasies of desire she trades in. But it is this very quality that
Mansouri's direction seems determined to erase, and Lappalainen's generic
coquette follows his lead.

I suppose it is not fair either to blame Lappalainen for being overwhelmed
vocally by this very difficult role; she never should have been cast, and
never would have been if today's body-obsessed culture had not made cup-size
a more important criterion for the part than lung power. The part is a
heavy one, but no heavier, surely, than Salome, and competent Salomes are
not particularly rare. Lappalainen simply could not be heard for very much
of the time, and even when the orchestra obligingly thinned out and dropped
back to give her room for Lulu's lied, and conductor Stefan Lano reined his
forces in even more, the soprano made no impression whatsoever, and this
most electric moment of the drama played as drawing room comedy.

But mention of Stefan Lano brings me to what was good about the production.
The orchestra made a beautiful, beautiful case for the romaticism and
lyricism of this score. Lano is clearly steeped in the music and had
somehow brought the so-often-recalcitrant SFO orchestra into line. So
finely and sensitively did Lanos shape his orchestral portrait of Lulu's
inner life that if one closed one's eyes for a moment one could almost see
another actress in the role, one that would make an air-breathing woman of
Lulu rather than a cartoon. It was heartbreaking to hear this artist
struggle against the nonsense that was going on onstage.

Not all the performances were as bad as the lead's. First among them all,
of course, was Von Stade's debut in the role of Grafin Geschwitz. My
sister, a soprano, complained after the first act that the writing for the
voice was ungrateful, and that no singer could have made it beautiful. At
Von Stade's first notes in Act II, I caught my sister's eye and she nodded
understanding: these are magnificently expressive lines, requiring only an
interpreter who knows her business. Thank God, Von Stade has the last word
in the opera, so that the final moments, in the hands of the Countess and
Lanos in the pit, sounded like a valediction for a real Lulu rather than the
stand-in we had been watching for three hours.

Kristine Jepson was also musical and convincing as the Schoolboy, and
Christopher Lincoln's background in Mozart and Rossini made him a
persuasively lyrical Alwa even if he did sometimes sound strained and out of
his depth (which made sense for the character, anyway). Tom Fox's
Schon/Jack was a bit more problematic. He acted well, but his voice often
spread and became indistinct in its bottom half, although oddly he sounded
much more confident in the darker-colored music of Jack in the last scene.
Franz Mazura, a famous Schon who appears on the Boulez recording, was
Schigolch. I quite liked the painter, Robert Gambill, and David Okerlund
gave a vigorous if appropriately unbeautiful reading of the Animal
Trainer/Acrobat.

Bob Mackie's splendiferous gowns, although they were a part of the
triviality I disliked in the production, were undeniably fab, especially the
last one, which was black and left one shoulder bare but had a sable trimmed
hood and asymmetrical strings of rhinestones that traced all the soprano's
lovely contours and my goodness, all the opera-glasses were just popping out
like mushrooms! Some of the sets were great too, with these dinky little
chairs in the second scene shaped like pink-and-green-and-ivory ivy leaves.
But for some reason the set for the second act almost exactly recreated the
set for Norma Desmond's mansion in Broadway's Sunset Boulevard which was
pretty weird, especially when Lulu stood on the sweeping staircase holding a
revolver and acting all defiant.

At one point in the second act the Acrobat mocks Alwa for composing an opera
about Lulu, "starring my fiancee's legs. No decent theatre will produce
it." Well, that does not describe the opera Alban Berg wrote, but it's a
pretty fair precis of the show I saw last night.

Dylan
=dbd=

Wisst Ihr den Namen, den dies Raubtier fuehrt?
Verehrtes Publikum -- hereinspaziert!
- Wedekind

James Jorden

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Jun 20, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/20/98

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Dylan and Kamala wrote:

> The part is a
> heavy one, but no heavier, surely, than Salome, and competent Salomes are
> not particularly rare. Lappalainen simply could not be heard for very much

> of the time ...

Berg intended the part for a lyric-coloratura, but the sopranos who have
had the most success seem to be lyrics with some steel in the tone:
Lear, Stratas, Migenes-Johnson. Christine Schaefer is a light soprano;
high coloratura Natalie Dessay sings her first Lulu in Vienna in 2000.
I think the lighter the voice the better for the character, suggesting
either her innocence or her lack of affect, depending on how you
interpret Lulu's behavior...

--
james jorden
jjo...@ix.netcom.com
latest opera gossip from parterre box:
http://www.anaserve.com/~parterre/lacieca.htm

robert seigler

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Jun 20, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/20/98

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dylan:

thanks for your thoughtful review of LULU, which i had no opportunity to
attend. but i vigorously disagree with your concept of her character -
especially when it is compared to pabst's great film.

the critical consensus on the character created by louise brooks is that
her lulu is a total innocent having no idea whatever about the fatal
attraction she holds. on her first appearnce in the film she is carrying
a bottle of spirits under her arm, and she is clearly well fed. it is
the hunger of the people around her that makes her dangerous.

the most wonderful scene in the movie is the climax with jack the ripper
- a moment perhaps more 'operatic' than anything composed by berg. the
chief difference is the depiction of the killer as a victim. when lulu
picks him up in the street, it is clear she is drawing him into an act
he lacks the strength to refuse. the murder itself is highly erotic, and
the film ends with jack marching off behind a salvation army band!

in berg and wedekind's original, this is all a cruel joke, with jack
wiping his hands on lulu's portrait complaining, 'these people never
have a hand towel when you need one.'

but geschwitz' final moment is meant to be stunning. it was when i heard
troyanos at the met, the year before her death.

thanks again,
bob seigler

cgrose

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Jun 21, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/21/98

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James Jorden schrieb in Nachricht <358C3B...@ix.netcom.com>...

>Dylan and Kamala wrote:
>
>Berg intended the part for a lyric-coloratura, but the sopranos who have
>had the most success seem to be lyrics with some steel in the tone:

(snip)

>I think the lighter the voice the better for the character, suggesting
>either her innocence or her lack of affect, depending on how you
>interpret Lulu's behavior...
>

I would be interested to hear if anyone had the opportunity to hear
Constance Hauman in this role, I read that she's been singing it different
venues (in Scandinavian countries?) recently. As a student at Northwestern
a decade ago she was extremely promising and was also a light lyric
coloratura (then), and an excellent actress as well. Can anyone comment on
her Lulu?

Cynthia

Dylan Bryan-Dolman

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Jun 23, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/23/98

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James Jorden <jjo...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> Dylan and Kamala wrote:
>
> > The part is a
> > heavy one, but no heavier, surely, than Salome, and competent Salomes
are
> > not particularly rare. Lappalainen simply could not be heard for very
much

> > of the time ...

>
> Berg intended the part for a lyric-coloratura, but the sopranos who have
> had the most success seem to be lyrics with some steel in the tone:

> Lear, Stratas, Migenes-Johnson. [...]

Thanks for the correction. But do lyric-coloraturas generally have very
long careers singing Lulu? A group of older friends, when they heard I was
going to see it, declared that everyone who sings Lulu ends up as "a
screecher" a few years down the line, though the only example they could
think of was Anja Silja, whom I don't know. It was my impression that
except for the lied, for which Berg obviously thins his texture, and which
has the only extended coloratura writing in the role, Lulu does have a
certain amount of noise from the pit to push against.

Dylan
=dbd=

Dylan Bryan-Dolman

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Jun 23, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/23/98

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robert seigler <babsd...@webtv.net> wrote:
> thanks for your thoughtful review of LULU, which i had no opportunity to
> attend. but i vigorously disagree with your concept of her character -
> especially when it is compared to pabst's great film.

We certainly do disagree, as we always seem to do on questions of character
interpretation. I would also disagree that Pabst's film is a useful guide
to the operatic Lulu--both Pabst and Berg depart from Wedekind, and often
in contradictory ways.

> the critical consensus on the character created by louise brooks is that
> her lulu is a total innocent having no idea whatever about the fatal
> attraction she holds. on her first appearnce in the film she is carrying
> a bottle of spirits under her arm, and she is clearly well fed. it is
> the hunger of the people around her that makes her dangerous.

Well obviously we see her after she has been under Schon's protection for
several years. Her relationship with Schigolch would clearly suggest
another kind of life, even if we did not hear her origins narrated by (the
perhaps not entirely reliable) Dr. Schon in the second scene. Hunger
learned in the bone as a child is never, ever assuaged by luxuries enjoyed
in adulthood; I believe that this is the key to Lulu's insatiability. I
also think that the "child-woman" conception of Lulu's character, so often
repeated by the various besotted men in her life, is a fairly conventional
post-Victorian erotic fantasy, and is one of the hackneyed elements in
Wedekind's play that Berg's music redeems by placing it in the ironic
context of the characters' various deceptions and self-deceptions. The
bluesy saxophone line to which Lulu surveys the corpses of her first and
third victims is not naive music--it is wry, knowing, regretful, sexy,
compassionate and coolly triumphant all at once. A wonderful moment.

Lulu is also hardly free from the neurotic assumptions of her culture. She
is even half-wistful for a conventional bourgeois morality--witness her
jealousy of Dr. Schon's fiancee and insistence on marriage. Her treatment
of Geschwitz makes it sadly clear that she shares her society's contempt
for women, which of course implies a self-contempt that would not be a part
of the emotional makeup of any "erd-geist" worthy of the name.

Anyway, the "child-woman" idea is insulting to Lulu--forget total innocent,
she would have to be a total idiot not to notice that men are falling for
her like a herd of lemmings, and that this fact is the source of her bread
and butter.

> the most wonderful scene in the movie is the climax with jack the ripper
> - a moment perhaps more 'operatic' than anything composed by berg. the
> chief difference is the depiction of the killer as a victim. when lulu
> picks him up in the street, it is clear she is drawing him into an act

> he lacks the strength to refuse. [...]
>
> in berg and wedekind's original, this is all a cruel joke, [...]

I think the idea that Lulu is by this point consciously or unconsciously
eager for her own destruction is also pretty clear in Berg.

> but geschwitz' final moment is meant to be stunning. it was when i heard
> troyanos at the met, the year before her death.

You dog. Never mind, Flicka was wonderful too.

Dylan
=dbd=

James Jorden

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Jun 24, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/24/98

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Dylan Bryan-Dolman wrote:

> We certainly do disagree, as we always seem to do on questions of character
> interpretation. I would also disagree that Pabst's film is a useful guide
> to the operatic Lulu--both Pabst and Berg depart from Wedekind, and often
> in contradictory ways.

The Pabst film is in a sense an independent treatment of the "Lulu"
material, as far from Wedekind as, for example, Verdi's MACBETH is from
Shakespeare's.

Perhaps one reason we all have different takes on Lulu's character is
that we are simply behaving like the characters of the opera. Lulu
exists as a series of projections of the desires and fears of the men
and Geschwitz. Thus she is by turns temptress, victim, virgin, whore,
wife, angel, child and what have you. What Wedekind saw as black
comedy, Berg reimagined as tragedy, perhaps because the composer himself
projected his feelings about women onto the "blank" Lulu.

What this means in practical terms is that the soprano singing Lulu does
not really create a character in the usual sense of the word; rather she
strikes a series of attitudes. She is all fascinating surface, with,
the music tells us, somewhere inside a very unhappy human being, and
maybe we can see glimpses of her now and then. That's a huge challenge
for the singer: the moments of humanity are so fleeting, she is tempted
to overplay her hand and mooch for the audience's sympathy. Or else she
may go too far the other way and just strike poses and change wig
colors. Then the opera is dull or cheaply sensationalistic.

I would say the ideal voice for Lulu is a soprano who is a brilliant
Manon, that is to say, a lyric with a youthful sound and easy access to
the top. My dream Manons would have been Beverly Sills and/or Patricia
Brooks (pity this idea didn't occur to Julius Rudel circa 1965 -- he had
Donald Gramm, John Alexander and Frances Bible on hand too); I look
forward to what Natalie Dessay will do with the part.

robert seigler

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Jun 24, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/24/98

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dear dylan:

yes, we seemed trapped in eternal disagreement about character
interpretation, but there's a factor you may not have taken into
account. the operas i have posted on are works i considered as being
symbolic. i don't look at all operas this way, and we might easily see
eye to eye on puccini's 'little women' for instance. puccini's mimi,
cio-cio-san and minnie are meant to be seen as 'real people'. lulu and
the queen of the night come from stranger stuff.

wedekind's plays were written in the days of jungenstyl. their titles
betray there symbolic intent. lulu is the earth spirit, the eternal
pandora whose curiosity brings sin into the world, introducing death as
its punishment. she represents the architype carl jung called the
chthonic mother - the dark mother earth whose womb is the tomb.

in berg's opera, the libretto specifies lulu appears backstage wearing
the costume of the queen of the night. their 'real' name is lillith, the
evil ghoul who devours children. in christian iconography she becomes
the 'mater doloroso' - the grieving mother we see in michelangelo's
'pieta'. from dolores we get to the diminuative 'lola' - the name von
sternberg gave to dietrich's 'blue angel'. just think of her song:

men cluster to me
like moths 'round a flame
and if their wings burn
well then, am i to blame?

lulu is a vampire in the form of a venus fly trap. the hungry fly seeks
out the plant, but it's the plant that gets fed.

remember the detail of lulu meeting dr. schon by stealing his watch.
compare this with an observation by the highly symbolic william blake:

time is a man,
space is a woman
and her masculine portion is death.

lulu's task is to turn biological time into the space of the grave. jack
the ripper is her disciple.

have you ever thought of the variations on a theme by wedekind in the
third act as berg's version of 'mack the knife'?

bob seigler

Dylan Bryan-Dolman

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Jun 24, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/24/98

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robert seigler <babsd...@webtv.net> wrote:
> dear dylan:
>
> yes, we seemed trapped in eternal disagreement about character
> interpretation, but there's a factor you may not have taken into
> account. the operas i have posted on are works i considered as being
> symbolic. i don't look at all operas this way, and we might easily see
> eye to eye on puccini's 'little women' for instance. puccini's mimi,
> cio-cio-san and minnie are meant to be seen as 'real people'.

Nope. Check Dejanews and you'll discover that I see Liu and Cio-Cio as
inhuman symbols. We've switched to each other's position, but we're still
on opposite sides.

Dylan
=dbd=

robert seigler

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Jun 24, 1998, 3:00:00 AM6/24/98

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dylan:

i haven't looked up your posts yet, but i find your idea about liu being
a symbolic character intriguing. for me, she may be unbelieveably
self-sacrificing, but she functions as the 'real human' whose devotion
to calaf finally allows the 'symbolic' turandot to 'cast a shadow.'

turandot's identity with the earth mother is the fact she attributes her
hatred of men to her ancestor, the pricess lu-ling! the name gives it
away: lu-ling to lulu to lola to lillith. her savior, on the other hand,
has a similar name, with one 'l' missing - liu!

as i've already hinted, there is a deep relation between TURANDOT and
DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN. nobody questions the symbolic nature of the
strauss work, and of all its characters, the only one human enough to
have a name is barak. it is a name which occurs in gozzi's play,
'turandot'.

my, my, my - with this sort of polarity, we ought to become fast
friends.

yours,
bob seigler

gggg...@gmail.com

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Mar 21, 2020, 12:29:59 AM3/21/20

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On Wednesday, June 24, 1998 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, robert seigler wrote:
> dear dylan:
>
> yes, we seemed trapped in eternal disagreement about character
> interpretation, but there's a factor you may not have taken into
> account. the operas i have posted on are works i considered as being
> symbolic. i don't look at all operas this way, and we might easily see
> eye to eye on puccini's 'little women' for instance. puccini's mimi,

> cio-cio-san and minnie are meant to be seen as 'real people'. lulu and
> the queen of the night come from stranger stuff.
>
> wedekind's plays were written in the days of jungenstyl. their titles
> betray there symbolic intent. lulu is the earth spirit, the eternal
> pandora whose curiosity brings sin into the world, introducing death as
> its punishment. she represents the architype carl jung called the
> chthonic mother - the dark mother earth whose womb is the tomb.
>
> in berg's opera, the libretto specifies lulu appears backstage wearing
> the costume of the queen of the night. their 'real' name is lillith, the
> evil ghoul who devours children. in christian iconography she becomes
> the 'mater doloroso' - the grieving mother we see in michelangelo's
> 'pieta'. from dolores we get to the diminuative 'lola' - the name von

> sternberg gave to dietrich's 'blue angel'...

Concerning THE BLUE ANGEL:

https://books.google.com/books?id=WQ6vDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA231&dq=%22there+are+clear+thematic+parallels+between+lulu+and+the+blue+angel%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjg3eHM3KroAhXHtp4KHVtFAXIQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=%22there%20are%20clear%20thematic%20parallels%20between%20lulu%20and%20the%20blue%20angel%22&f=false