'Lulu''s back in town -- Chicago Lyric prepares for Berg's masterwork

Here is my Chicago Sun-Times preview article on Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Alban Berg's Lulu, opening at the Civic Opera House on Friday November 7, 2008, and running through November 30.

To sing, with love: 'Lulu'

Expect visual dazzle as Lyric revives a seldom-heard Berg classic

BY ANDREW PATNER

There are operas to be heard and there are operas that must be seen to be fully appreciated.

While we won't be disappointed by a fine staging of La Bohème, we can certainly imagine -- and do with many beloved and historic recordings -- the lovers shivering in the cold of their Parisian garret or celebrating in a Left Bank cafe.  Wagner's music for much of his Ring cycle can wash over us quite effectively from the radio or stereo speakers at home without our missing too much.

But other works demand our participation in their full theatricality -- we want our hide-and-seek games in The Marriage of Figaro.   Britten's Death in Venice becomes only more haunting and disturbing when we observe its protagonist's physical as well as mental dissolution.  And we want to see the "real-life" characters break into song and dance in John Adams's Nixon in China.

So it is with one of the great if least produced operas of the 20th century -- Alban Berg's Lulu, which is having a rare revival in a new production at Lyric Opera of Chicago starting Friday.  (Lyric's last -- and first -- production of the opera was in 1987.)  Inspired by two turn-of-the-last-century German stage plays about the ultimate femme fatale and composed after the Kansas-born actress Louise Brooks had already immortalized their heroine in G.W. Pabst's 1929 German silent film Pandora's Box, Berg's opera is a musical and visual phantasmagoria -- a total theatrical experience.

And with a plot filled with sex and betrayal, suicide and murder, degradation and disease, how could it be otherwise?  As the title character moves down the social ladder of Weimar-era Europe, her lovers and admirers include a painter, a circus acrobat, a father and son, a schoolboy, a lesbian countess, and Jack the Ripper.  And the anger, horror, and naked lust that these characters feel for one another are visual as well as musical.

If all this sounds overly bleak, there's more at work here.  Paul Curran, the young Scottish director staging Lulu, reminds us that although Berg died at 50 in 1935 without orchestrating the final act (it was completed by Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha and first performed in 1979), the composer had finished his work on the opera in 1934.  That was "the same year as the Gershwins wrote Porgy and Bess [up next at Lyric] and Cole Porter did Anything Goes.  This was a time of great excitement and pageantry in musical theater."

And of musical cross-currents as well.  In addition to Berg's own melodic and tonal development of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone system, Berg draws on jazz, Viennese operetta, and vaudeville in the opera's third and final act.  Berg even calls in the score for a film to be shown, and Lyric projections designer John Boesche has obliged.

You might say Lulu is truly an opera in 3-D.  Or even 3-D plus X-rays, according to Wolfgang Schöne, the veteran German bass-baritone who has played the double part of Dr. Schön (the name is a fortuitous coincidence) and Jack the Ripper in nine different productions over 17 years.

"I cannot think of any opera that is so penetrating psychologically as Lulu, Schöne said during a break from rehearsals for his much-overdue Lyric debut.  "It has an examination and an understanding of the connections and conflicts of men and women in certain extremes that is not at all from some distant and foreign past.  Everything in this opera is still existing."

For Schöne, as for conductor Sir Andrew Davis, Lyric's music director, there is an almost perfect coordination between feeling, sight, and sound in this opera.

"The music is not only of such enormous emotional power," Sir Andrew said, "it is just meticulously coordinated with each line of text and with each movement on stage."  Intriguingly and independently, both men say that the only other opera that they could say this about is Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

At a key point in the opera, the character Lulu utters the pithy summary of her tawdry life -- "I can not be anything but honest with myself."  According to Schöne, in a positive way the same is true of German soprano Marlis Petersen, today's reigning Lulu, whose Lyric performances will be her first in the role in the United States.

"I have performed this opera with many fine singers," Schöne said. "But none of them gives dramatically what Marlis does. She is absolutely natural.  Absolutely sincere.  She cannot be anything but honest with herself, as an actress, as a singer, and as her character."

Strong praise.  And describing an opera that has to be seen in order truly to be heard.