Period Piece

The young man was pouring out his love to the girl in accents of passion. Did he know, asked the girl, that she had poisoned his mother? He did not. But he remembered, of course, that she had shot his father dead in that same room not six months before. Did that alter his feelings? It did not. At scene's end, the happy couple sprawled in warm embrace while the young lady mused: "Is this the same divan where your father bled to death?"

The girl, by all odds the most fatal femme fatale in all opera, is the heroine of Alban Berg's Lulu. Left uncompleted at Composer Berg's death in 1935, Lulu has one of the most difficult scores (twelve-tone) and the most sordid libretto ever written. It is a kind of nightmarish perversion of fin de siecle German romanticism; its subject matter includes sadism, narcissism, incest, homosexuality, masochism and murder. Counting its Zurich premiere in 1937, it has been staged only six times. The Frankfurt Opera is now giving Lulu its seventh production, and probably its best.

Contradictory Feminine. Berg based his tortured opera on two plays (Erdgeist and Die Buechse der Pandora) by erotic, tormented Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). In German Playwright Wedekind's mind--and in Berg's--Lulu is an amalgam of all the contradictory feminine instincts: she is innocent and worldly, timid and rapacious, sentimental and heartless. Before the garishly painted curtain rises on a circus ring, a ringmaster invites the audience to witness the spectacle of the human circus, then calls: "Bring in our snake." In comes an assistant carrying Lulu, dressed in long black stockings and a close-fitting satin corselet.

In subsequent acts her painter-lover cuts his throat when he learns of Lulu's sordid past. Then an elderly lecher marries her; when he discovers her trysting with his son, he offers her a gun to commit suicide and is promptly shot dead himself. Lulu is smuggled out of prison by another of her lovers, Countess Geschwitz, who fools the authorities by changing clothes with Lulu and taking her place ("Now," muses the ungrateful Lulu, "the poor monster sits in prison instead of me"). Lulu decamps to Paris, philanders with gamblers, procurers and swindlers. The end comes in a sordid London garret, where Lulu, now a common prostitute, makes the mistake of bringing home Jack the Ripper and is disemboweled by him.

Lyrical Lassitude. The Frankfurt production is properly corrosive. Designer Teo Otto uses a garish circus scene throughout the opera, changes scenes merely by changing the props. In the Paris sequence, Otto projects Lulu's progress on a huge screen, in drawings recalling Toulouse-Lautrec; the last one shows Lulu standing naked with black handprints all over her body. Conductor Georg Solti leads his cast and huge orchestra with deft skill, and at each performance Soprano Helga Pilarczyk scores triumphs in the fiendishly difficult title role.

The score of Lulu is still formidable, impressive and amazingly exact in indicating the composer's intentions. The orchestra squirms morbidly in the first half, almost as if playing without direction, but the second half achieves a kind of romantic, lyrical lassitude. The opera bristles with an immense variety of forms: a sonata represents the elderly lecher, a rondo suggests his son, ragtime gives way to an English waltz.

The opera's biggest failing is that it never makes clear the source of Lulu's deadly charm, and the audience is unable to sympathize with her or her victims. At several points, e.g., when an elderly butler confesses in an aside that he himself is smitten with Lulu, the spectators usually break into titters. Musically more advanced than Berg's only other opera, Wozzeck (TIME, March 16), Lulu has little of Wozzeck's compelling dramatic power. Remarkably, only 25 years after its premiere, the most experimental opera of one of the century's most experimental composers plays like a period piece.

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