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On 16 February the complete Lulu was heard in a live performance in Great Britain for the first time. It was heard, not seen. What was shown on the stage of the Royal Opera House was a farce by Götz Friedrich, superimposed on Alban Berg's music and libretto. Friedrich is an outstanding example of a type characterized by Arnold Schoenberg more than fifty years ago: ‘Producers who look at a work only in order to see how to make it into something quite different’. Operatic production today seems increasingly to be based on the assumption that composers—who are inept, naïve, and indifferent to the dramaturgical aspects of the operatic theatre—compose music in a vacuum which it is the producer's responsibility to fill. But the music of an opera is not composed in a vacuum. The productive aspects of the work—entrances, exits, lightings, groupings, curtains, movements, the very thoughts and feelings of the characters—have their correspondences in the music. This is what it means to compose an opera.
1 Schoenberg, , Letters (ed. Stein, Erwin), 14 04 1930Google Scholar.
2 InDas ‘Opernproblem’, 1928. Republished in Alban Berg by Reich, Willi, Vienna, 1937Google Scholar.
3 ‘The Character of Lulu: Wedekind's and Berg's conceptions compared’, The Music Review, November, 1954. See also my reply, ‘The Character of Lulu: a Sequel’, The Music Review, November, 1964.
4 In almost every production of Lulu that I've seen there is the intimation that the Countess's love for Lulu is not unrequited, but in none of them were the suggestions of a sexual relationship between Lulu and the Countess made with such conspicuous vulgarity as in Friedrich's version. The idea seems to be that we must show Lulu to be as naughty as possible, so why not broaden the range of her promiscuity by also suggesting a lesbian liaison along with all the others. Yet both Wedekind's play and Berg's libretto make it perfectly clear that such a relationship is impossible for Lulu. If Lulu is the incarnation of sexual desire and of everyone's dream of its ideal fulfilment, the Countess Geschwitz as surely represents the outcast whose love is doomed by its very nature to utter frustration. Yet she alone lives only for that love and is possessed by no other conflicting passion, as is Dr. Schön, the man of power and money, or his son, the creative artist who must mate something out of what he feels and experiences. The largest dimensions of the opera's musical structure are based on the relation between Lulu and each of these three persons most profoundly involved with her, Schön, Alwa, and Geschwitz, and are predicated on the assumption that Geschwitz's love is one that can only find its fulfillment ‘in eternity’. See my article, ‘Der Tod der Geschwitz’, in the Osterreichische -Musikzeitschrift, January 1981.
5 Cerha, Friedrich, Arbeitsbericht zur Herstellung des 3. Akts der Oper Lulu von Alban Berg, Vienna, 1979, pp.8 and 9Google Scholar.
6 Friedrich's Lulu, like Cheréau's, is as much a mutilation of Wedekind's drama as it is of Berg's opera. The fact that the revision happens in this one and only instance to conform to Wedekind's text in departing so totally from Berg's libretto is not mitigatory.
7 Schoenberg, Letters, 12 Sept. 1931.