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Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
composer, poet, critic, essayist

Saturday 23 March 2013

Interview in Two Parts: David Pountney. 2: Leoš Janáček's 'The Cunning Little Vixen'

David Pountney, Artistic Director of Welsh National Opera, is internationally celebrated for his many, pioneering productions of operas by Janáček. Ahead of the opening night of The Cunning Little Vixen, in revival at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff as part of WNO’s ‘free spirits’ themed season, he spoke about the piece (part two of a two-part interview) and about Janáček’s extraordinary achievement as the most innovative composer of music-drama in the twentieth century.

SP: David, I believe you first produced The Cunning Little Vixen in 1980 as part of a large cycle of Janáček operas, staged in collaboration with Welsh National Opera when you were Director of Production at Scottish Opera?

DP: Yes, correct. We did five pieces; The Cunning Little Vixen, Kát’a Kabanová, the Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead and Jenůfa.

That was tremendously pioneering at the time and I wonder how it feels to you now, as Artistic Director of WNO, to be bringing Vixen back to the company?

Well I suppose it might seem like an act of vanity! But actually the point really was that, having been asked to do Lulu, I’ve always wanted to bring those two pieces together, so it seemed like the perfect moment to revive this, well, rather ancient production!

But do you find that each time it’s done, you come to the production with a combination of experience and fresh eyes so it becomes new - or renewed - in a tangible way?

Yes and also the Vixen has, as it so happens, matured into a classic - although it wasn’t necessarily perceived as such at the time as I recall. And, probably, we got better at doing it. It’s a complicated piece to mount and we put it on in quite unusual circumstances in Edinburgh - it was part of the Festival where preparation time is always very short because there are lots of other things going on. And the piece has matured in the ears and eyes of the audience I think; all these pieces seemed very strange and difficult at the time to many people and now the Vixen is evidently a kind of classic. And of course it’s been a very interesting perspective doing it alongside Lulu because everybody says, ‘oh it’s such a relief to come back to Vixen’!

Do they? That’s interesting!

Because it’s musically so much easier. Although people - I think particularly orchestral players - used always to regard Vixen as difficult because of the way Janáček writes. He’s not a very efficient writer – more to the point, I think he’s not really interested in efficiency.

No, and he writes difficult parts in extremes of register for the instruments.

Yes and he wrote things down in a way which could have been done more simply. But that’s all part of his energy and what he’s doing. I remember, one conductor said to me, well the whole point is that these scores should feel difficult to play; they’re not meant to be comfortable in the way that you might think of, say, Brahms’s symphonies as comfortable to play.

It seems ironic that Janáček’s been criticised for so-called ‘lack of technique’ and yet, in terms of dramatic vision, he achieves an extraordinary meld of music and drama. I think you once described Vixen as real Gesamtkunstwerk?


It’s the perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, yes. Because it’s the best piece of complex twentieth century dramaturgy in terms of the accuracy with which he uses all the different media of an opera composer; all the different forms are used with brilliant accuracy, exactly saying what they need to say in the right moment and with terrific concision. I think, dramaturgically, it’s a much better work than Lulu because he just focuses on what needs to be said, even when it’s pure comedy or slapstick - he’s always focuses on the point of the piece.

And tremendously innovative in terms of the genesis and the writing of the piece [which was based on a cartoon], incorporating elements of ballet, with children on-stage and choruses off-stage and so on?

Yes, and using this kind of collage technique where scenes are juxtaposed one against the other without necessarily being in a clear linear direction - every possibility of an opera composer’s toolkit is used with just terrific appropriateness.

As you say, Vixen’s become a much-loved part of the repertoire but it’s not a straightforward, pre-lapsarian, sentimental vision by any means is it? It’s multi-layered in its symbolism.


Very, very much so. It’s obviously a discussion about what is the role of nature, or of animal nature, within man - particularly sexuality, which is what makes it such an interesting comparison with Lulu. And it’s the way in which Janáček combines these themes. You have these animals who exist in actually quite a brutal, amoral universe in which they’re as much predators as victims - which is, of course, something that’s true about nature; something that’s frequently forgotten in our supermarket, clingfilm-wrapped world. But also he’s talking about the way in which the necessary limitations that human beings put on their animal feelings - and particularly their sexuality - to some extent atrophies into an inability to express those desires or those feelings, those necessities. So you also have a whole gallery of human characters who basically exhibit various traits of depression - and, of course, with great wit and intelligence he shows that the animals that have been domesticated also exhibit those same tendencies. So that, you know, we have these men who sit around in the pub fantasising about this woman who’s the sort of Lulu-Vixen equivalent.

Terynka?

Terynka - but we also have the fact that the dog is howling away because he doesn’t know what love is and has a frustrated love-life - with the Cock and the Hens also exhibiting some kind of gender-dysfunctional society. So, on the one hand, the human beings are criticized, or mocked even, for their repression and their up-tightness. But, on the other hand, in the guise of the Forester, we see a human character who is also granted a kind of amazing epiphany in the moment of his death. And, on top of that, there is a very optimistic, cyclical view of nature and rebirth - so it’s very, very complex. Written and composed, of course, by a man himself in his early seventies by this point, and clearly grappling with his own idea of mortality - as well as his own perhaps spasmodically functioning erotic life! It’s one of the most profound statements, I think, by any artist about the human condition in a huge range of ways.

It’s remarkable how Janáček manages to shift the dramatic focus so smoothly from Vixen Sharp Ears, once she’s been shot dead, onto the Forester and his final epiphany. So there’s no sense of negativity or loss when she dies; it’s about the totality of the cycle.


Yes, it’s a terrific trick to pull off isn’t it - to kill your main character in the first scene of the last act and give yourself time to really discuss the fact that life or death is not the most important thing but that actually it’s the continuum of nature which is important! A huge statement to make I think.

Throughout the opera, Sharp Ears basically gets away with taunting men about their sexuality - until the point at which she’s shot, when she goes a step too far perhaps?


Well I have analysed this point in the past and it’s quite clear why she’s shot, in the sense that she herself has been corrupted by her contact with human beings. Having received, as she says, her primary education at the hands of the Forester, she meets this figure the Poacher who is, in my view, a kind of satyr, being halfway between man and animal - which is why he’s able to kill her of course. When she meets him, she gets carried away by an entirely human preoccupation which is spouting a whole lot of bullshit about justice and cruelty to foxes. Whereas she should have remembered that when she spouted the same stuff to the Hens, it was a prelude to her murdering them! And so, what she forgets in this moment of being distracted into human moral bullshit, is the essential rule of self-preservation; she hangs around to harangue and politicise at the Poacher and therefore gets killed - well quite right too! That’ll teach her to get on her soapbox!

She gets on her soapbox quite a lot in the opera doesn’t she?

Mostly to entirely spurious ends. I mean, she harangues the poor Badger about his plutocrat accommodation and promptly uses that to evict him and move into his sett herself! So she’s absolutely shameless in that way and that’s why it isn’t a tragedy when she’s shot. It’s just part of the ongoing battle between different sections of the natural order, of which the men and women are also part.

Terynka never actually appears in the opera but the men spend lots of time sitting around wishing she was in their lives.


Another stroke of extraordinary originality! Terynka is a leading character, but she never appears! She is the fantasy figure that haunts all these men in their mid-life crises, their impotence. The piece is a paean to the urges of nature and how essential they are and as part of reproduction and all of that. So the Forester’s epiphany is in no way a resignation in any kind of bogus religious way of giving up on stuff.

No, it seems pantheist in a raw, primeval sense. And, again, optimistic but not sentimental!

Yes, I think the whole, last act is absolutely amazing compositionally. Because, first of all, you get Sharp Ears’s death and then Janáček composes a kind of elegy which manages to be very moving without being in the least bit sentimental. This builds into a celebration of life and death - and I think also of hunting; of one of the primary human instincts - or, of course, animal instincts. And the hunter and the hunted are there as two poles of that. Then this moment of joy rooted in the truth of nature morphs into an extraordinary final Inn scene, which is a scene of farewells and resignation, full of human repression. So we’ve had this wild man of the woods, the Poacher, who’s shot his gun off, with Sharp Ears lying dead as a result, and then we meet these morbid, repressed men sitting around regretting things they’ve not done or missed or women they haven’t slept with or whatever. Again, Janáček succeeds in taking this sort of banal and rather despicable, trivial scene and elevating it into an extraordinary musical expression of compassion for these rather pathetic human beings and the way they talk about the past and about who’s no longer in the parish. Just one word is used to describe the absent Parson when the Innkeeper’s wife says he’s ‘lonely’; just one word - and there’s a moment of silence where they look at his empty chair. It’s incredibly poignant and brilliantly done - and all in twelve bars or something! Then it erupts into this magnificent final epiphany for the Forester. It’s an amazing achievement to have packed in that amount of perfectly judged emotion and understanding about human nature and about nature itself.

You know, the more full of bullshit we become about animals the more significant the piece becomes. We used to have what I would describe as a great ritual about the truth of human beings and animals, which was our whole visual pageant of fox hunting. But we vandalised that in the most pathetic way for totally spurious reasons. Whether you like hunting or not is irrelevant; the fact is, it did express a truth that cannot be found on a supermarket shelf with a plastic-wrapped chicken - that we are in a cruel universe! Behaviour in nature is not perfect and is not politically correct - it’s not sanitised, it’s predatory, that’s the way it is. If you’re so fastidious that you can’t put up with those truths, then you try to suppress them and I think, you know, that’s dishonest.

For me, that deeper, amoral essence of human and animal nature comes across very powerfully in the opera and there’s certainly none of that ‘animals - good, humans - bad’ nonsense that you get when people sentimentalise about animals or nature generally. I wonder, too, if there’s something here about Janáček’s use of what’s been described as ‘speech melody’; whether his pithy use of simple, repeated phrases and musical ostinati coming out of the Czech language is also somehow part of his getting to the crux of things?


Well, I’ve often used this idea that the cellular development of Janáček’s music starts from these speech patterns - he really uses that to create the DNA of his characters; it’s as if he’s writing down a sort of DNA code of who these people actually are! The originality of his work as an opera composer is just staggering. If you take the first scene - even putting aside the way in which it moves in and out of ballet and so on as a way of laying out the opening of an opera - it’s incredibly astute dramaturgically. When the Forester comes on, he’s tired and hot and wants to lie down and have a nap, and he talks about how his rifle has become his sweetheart. So the whole idea of the atrophy of human erotic activity is right there in the very first few words of the opera. And the interesting thing is that the music doesn’t accompany the Forester at all! The music is furiously energetic, sparkling with detail like a sort of Bartókian insect world, describing the forest buzzing and heaving with life and energy. And here’s this guy who comes on and sort of says ‘oh my God, it’s hot and [yawns and stretches] I want to lie down and my missus won’t notice, she’s a good wife, and anyway my rifle’s really my sweetheart....[snores]’. And so he’s in a completely different tempo to the whole orchestra. If that was Berg, people would have written essays and chapters about it - but it’s just Janáček’s instinctive way of describing two things at once in the way he’s setting the scene!  

Janáček has still not really been admitted to the ‘great pantheon’ of the modernists has he, despite his extraordinary innovations?


Well it’s taken Boulez many many years to get round to Janáček. Finally he has done some in the last few years!

It’s taken him a long while indeed and, from a music-history point of view, there’s still a lingering, ridiculous sort of idea that anybody outside a perceived central Austro-German strand is somehow peripheral to musical development.

Oh it’s a kind of racism. The Germans don’t think anybody Czech can be serious - that they’re sort of whimsical.   

I think Sibelius suffers from this problem too.


Definitely. Certainly, in Vienna people still don’t take Sibelius seriously because Mahler didn’t.

No, and nor did Adorno. And, despite his tremendous creative developments it seems to me that Janáček’s worth is still in some ways not fully appreciated, operatically. I was wondering who, of contemporary composers - if anyone - might be said to be taking up his dramatic mantle in any way do you think?


Yes - I don’t know. I wouldn’t know who to point to. But we in the UK, as a peripheral operatic nation, have done much better by Janáček than many of the central operatic nations. I guess that we have an innate sympathy - though it is of course ridiculous to regard the Czechs as peripheral, when you think of the richness of their operatic repertoire - but in terms of this Germano-Austrian issue he is peripheral of course. I remember arguing that was one of the reasons why it was really necessary for John Tyrell to write his massive two-volume tome on Janáček. Because it was necessary to thump these great books onto the table and say ‘this is a composer who deserves this amount of space on your library shelves’!

So, in terms of putting Vixen alongside Lulu, that makes for a very interesting dialogue it seems to me.

Well that’s part of the point of twinning them and actually of asserting as I think I have - probably unwisely! - that of the two I think Janáček is by far the superior composer - in operatic terms at any rate.

Even with Wozzeck? I mean, putting aside Lulu perhaps?

Well, as you know I think Wozzeck is a kind of perfect opera so I mean obviously Berg is a very very good composer. But what Lulu exposes is that he is not a dramatist in the way that Janáček is. Because, faced with intractable material he doesn’t know how to sort it out, whereas look at what Janáček did, with Vixen coming from a cartoon and with House of the Dead being based on a great, rambling Dostoyevsky novel about people in a prison; how he just grips that and turns it into a musical-dramatic text.

Actually I have a sort of leap-frogging theory about Janáček’s operatic development. He wrote a series of what I call conventional works - conventional for Janáček anyway - with Jenůfa, Kát’a and Makropulos; although Makropulos has an odd content, it’s structure is a straightforward three-act play and it has a beginning and a middle and an end and tells a narrative story. Similarly, Kát’a is based on a play - it could be an Ibsen or other bourgeois play - and Jenůfa is also structured in a linear fashion and is a kind of final installation in the Czech tradition of operas about village life. But in between these operas come much stranger works, with Osud and The Excursions of Mr Brouček, which are hugely ambitious following Jenůfa. Osud still today is a hugely ambitious piece of dramaturgy, with flashbacks and a kind of collage drama pulling together choruses and a massive cast and little fragments - I mean it’s a film script really. And Brouček of course is a very complex double satire structure in which the satirising person, Mr. Brouček, is himself satirised. But Janáček encountered such trouble in composing and structuring these two pieces, let alone getting them performed and accepted, that he thinks, ‘oh crikey, I can’t go on like this’ - so then comes Kát’a, which was a retreat in dramaturgical terms. Then he thinks ‘ok now I’m ready to try again’ and then comes Vixen. Then he retreats again with Makropulos before having a last, final fling with House of the Dead. Well, I don’t suppose it worked out quite so neatly as that! - but you can see that sort of leap-frogging movement in his life.

Yes, that’s really interesting - you can see a real alternate leap and retrenchment there. And, in that way, Janáček’s hugely innovative drive just kept going right to the end.


You know, by the time he’d written House of the Dead, Janáček had pushed the genre as far as it was ever going to go in the twentieth century - there’s nothing in Benjamin Britten that’s as ambitious. So, apart from Shostakovich - the other person who pushed the genre in the same period with the Nose - nobody in the twentieth century went beyond what Janáček wrote; nobody.

David, thank you very much for speaking with me, it’s been a fascinating discussion.





Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.8: http://www.walesartsreview.org/interview-david-pountney-part-two/

Interview in Two Parts: David Pountney, Artistic Director of Welsh National Opera. 1: Alban Berg's 'Lulu'

David Pountney is an opera director and producer of international distinction and was appointed Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Welsh National Opera in September 2011. He won renown for his pioneering Janáček cycle in collaboration with Welsh National Opera as Director of Production for Scottish Opera (1975-80) and his subsequent staging of over twenty operas including  Rusalka, Osud, The Midsummer Marriage, Doctor Faust and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for English National Opera, where he became Director of Productions in 1980. He has directed over ten world premieres, including three by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for which he also wrote the libretto, and has translated many operas into English from Russian, Czech, German and Italian. As a freelance Director from 1992 he has worked regularly in Zürich, at the Vienna State Opera, at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich as well as opera houses in America and Japan, and in the UK has a long-standing association with Opera North. He has won numerous international awards and is a CBE and a Chevalier in the French Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
 

In the first of two interviews, David spoke about Alban Berg’s Lulu, his significant first staging of the complete, three-act work in Wales, ahead of opening night at Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre.



SP: David, Lulu is your first new production for Welsh National Opera as Artistic Director. I was wondering what attracted you to the piece. What drew you to Lulu?

DP: Well Lulu is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century opera. First of all, it’s a fantastic play and a fantastic concept of a central character - which comes from Wedekind, obviously. Berg is one of the leading thinkers about opera of the twentieth century, so it’s amazing to have that combination with the invention of a really strikingly individual character. Actually, there are not many stories in the world - didn’t somebody say there are only seven basic plots?

Yes - the bases for myths. 

But you know Lulu comes close to being the invention of a new character - although she obviously has very clear connections with Carmen and Don Giovanni; they’re all trying to do the same thing in a way. But no, it’s fascinating to have that combination of Berg’s re-thinking about musical language and his espousal of what was then very revolutionary dramatic ideas of Wedekind. So it’s a very exciting piece to do. Fun actually, a lot of fun.

Where do you feel that Lulu sits on that continuum between, say, post-Romantic tragedy, black comedy and quite serious social critique? 

There is quite a lot of black comedy in the piece and I would say that it observes society in quite a cynical way, but without necessarily being a critique of it; at least, it doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve and there’s not much attempt to make you feel sorry for Lulu. Lulu is at the same time a victim and a perpetrator and that’s one of the interesting things about combining this opera with The Cunning Little Vixen this season. Because the vixen herself, like any predatory animal, is potentially a victim - of us, for example - and also a predator of all kinds of other, less powerful creatures. And Lulu inhabits very much the same kind of world.

I quite often see Lulu as a mirror for those characters around her. I don’t know if you agree with that? It’s as if she’s a huge character, and yet she’s not a character in her own right.


I think that’s absolutely correct, yes. To me she’s a spirit. The first play of Wedekind’s is called Earth Spirit and Lulu is not really a person - and that’s made clear in a way by the fact that nobody’s quite sure what her name is and nobody knows where she came from. There’s a lot of discussion about who her father might be.

Whether he’s Schigolch?


Yes, exactly. So she’s a mythic being really and I’ve made that quite clear in the production. And, as you absolutely rightly say, you learn what she is by watching everybody else go crazy around her. So I’m deliberately adopting a strategy in the production of not making her too extravagant. Sometimes people play Lulu by throwing their legs around and taking their clothes off; that, to my mind, is not what erotic power is - it’s much more to do with suggestion. Just simply the magnetism of somebody walking into the room and everybody thinking ‘I want to sleep with that person’. There are people who have that without flaunting it or doing anything or being overt about it.

In terms of the piece as a dramatic whole, it’s quite notorious really for being paradoxical, in that the dialogue, the plot and the intensely emotional music are quite often juxtaposed.

Well, Wedekind was deliberately protesting against the kind of bourgeois drama where everybody takes themselves terribly seriously.

The whole naturalist, realist movement?

Yes - and I think you can sense that. I think what really destroyed that - and the entire pretension of taking almost anything seriously - was the First World War, which was a gigantic catastrophe. All those things like patriotism and religion and politics - all those ground bases of society up to that point - were shown themselves to be involved in the First World War in a totally disgusting way. That created such a tide of reaction, and one of the things that reaction produced was Dada. The point about Dada is that it sees everything as absurd; and so Dada took everything that people had taken seriously - like religion and politics and belief in your country and morals - and revealed them to be, in a certain sense and in certain circumstances, absurd. Wedekind very much picks up on that idea - so that’s why you have in Lulu that amazing gallery of absurd figures.

- The ‘freaks’.

Freaks, caricatures. Because he’s saying it doesn’t matter who you are - a bit like Leporello’s catalogue. It doesn’t matter whether you’re thin, fat, tall or rich, poor, ugly, beautiful - Lulu’s erotic power possesses all those people equally. And that destroys the whole edifice of importance or class or respect; all those orders of society are completely subverted by this power which treats them all with equal indifference. I suppose, in that sense, Lulu has the same function as the famous play by Schnitzler, La Ronde, where, in a group of people, the prostitute sleeps with the soldier, the soldier sleeps with the countess, the countess sleeps with the farmer, the farmer sleeps with the tax collector, the tax collector sleeps with the prostitute and so on. By the end, everybody’s slept with everybody else by a distance of one or two or whatever. And it’s that same kind of feeling with Lulu; a leveling of all these things that have separated everybody into a kind of hierarchy.

And so, pulling apart the social hypocrisy.


Yes exactly. But, alongside that, there’s also another reason for the consistent element of humour, clowning, circus and cabaret; this world of popular entertainment is important in Lulu, partly because of that idea of not taking anything too seriously. Though it has to be said, the music takes itself very seriously!

It does!

And that’s another story in a way! But, picking up on the Dadaist tendency, that is something that’s reflected right across the art of that period. If one thinks of all those paintings of harlequins and circuses - of all those Picasso circus paintings and of Max Beckmann - and all the people who were fascinated, in that period, by popular art. That was very much a move away from seriousness, or pretentious seriousness.

The whole idea of the pierrot figure is present in Lulu with her portrait - which, in the score is described by Berg as a portrait of her dressed as a pierrot. Do you incorporate the portrait into your production?

I’ve done the portrait in quite a different sort of way. First of all, it’s a sculpture and, secondly, it’s based on - or really is a copy of - the work of a very eccentric artist called Hans Bellmer. Bellmer made all kinds of constructions of nearly always female limbs, so that he objectified the body, if you like, in a very provocative way. Because, again, he’s saying: these are just limbs. The whole idea of the portrait or the nude has been the embodiment of a sort of beauty; of nature, or the goddess within man, or whatever. But Bellmer deliberately subverts all that - also in a kind of Dadaist, rather absurdist way - by producing these kind of assemblies of parts; actually, he started out by working with doll parts and there’s a whole series called Bellmer’s Dolls. So he very neatly captures that feeling of an absurdist vision mixed with an element of perversion - which is undoubtedly also lurking there in the Lulu story. I mean, part of the Lulu story is a story about a young woman who’s been groomed for under-age sex - which, of course, strikes a very powerful chord with us today.

Yes, very much so - and which goes right back to the questioning of sexuality and identity that happened across fin de siècle Vienna, running right through to the Anschluss really.

Yes, absolutely.

In terms of Lulu as a second opera, do you see it as having moved on, as it were, in dramatic vision from Wozzeck - which, in some respects, is a much more straightforward depiction of someone who’s a victim of circumstance?


Strictly in terms of pure operatic achievement on a very high level, Lulu is a decline from Wozzeck - and there’s a very simple reason for that. The author of the Wozzeck play, Georg Büchner - who lived a great many years earlier - was an incredibly revolutionary writer. He devised a completely new way of structuring a play, with very short scenes making a kind of collage that add up to a story. And he constructed these short scenes out of amazingly economical, pithy sentences. This was the most perfect opera libretto that you could ever imagine, as one of the things that you most want from a libretto is for it to be incredibly concise - because music always multiplies the length of time it takes to say any sentence by four! So the Büchner was an amazing libretto, both in terms of its concision and in terms of its scenic structure, which allowed Berg to create a kind of string of pearls; short moments which absolutely define the progress of the story. But when he came to Wedekind, he was facing somebody who had really no structure at all.

Very sprawling actually.

Yes, Wedekind wrote two incredibly sprawling plays that are pretty much unperformable even today as they stand, in that everybody has to cut them in some way. And, you know, Berg did cut a great deal of the plays. But I think actually, in order to have achieved another opera as compelling as Wozzeck, he would have needed to cut another third of the text. And that’s one of the reasons why he didn’t finish Lulu. It’s tragic really. I always say that if he could have got on a train and taken a short trip to Brno and gone to Janáček and said ‘excuse me Leoš, how would you cut this play’, Janáček would have got his pen out and gone like this [makes large crossing-out motions].

Yes I can imagine that!

Then you’d end up with a few little lovely sentences here and there! You know, Berg was much too in awe of Wedekind, and too respectful of him. So, with each scene you think, ‘there are five sentences unnecessary in this scene’.

Of course, having said that, we are talking on a very high level and it’s still a fantastic piece. But it just doesn’t get to the very hard to reach level of absolute perfection that Wozzeck arrives at. Nonetheless, it is a fantastic experience to do and to watch and to listen to.

Somehow I think it’s flaws make it compelling in a way - that sense of wondering what Berg was striving for, which is so fascinating.


Well, Wedekind did create this character who is, in the last analysis, absolutely unknowable. Whereas in Wozzeck, you end up being very clear about who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator and about what’s gone wrong. Lulu is deeply ambiguous because it’s examining an aspect that is within all of us and which we all suppress - which we need to suppress because otherwise we’d all destroy each other! Hopefully, each of us finds one or two moments in our life when we can let that out; run rampage for a bit. But you couldn’t go on like that for very long.

No, society would fall apart!

Yes!

Coming back to the idea of cuts, I understand that you’ve chosen to use Eberhard Kloke’s new completion of the Third Act. Could you say something about that? What led you not to use the Cerha?

Well you know the Cerha is, from a scholastic point of view, utterly worthy, and done with indefatigable attention to detail. Cerha probably got as close as it was possible to get to exactly what appeared to be the case regarding the state in which Berg left the score when he died. But, particularly with a piece as dense and as complicated as Lulu, none of us can really know what Berg might have done had he gone on to revise it. And he did say himself that he needed to start again from the beginning and revise the whole piece - he was aware himself that it wasn’t perfect.

I think the fact is that the Paris scene - which is the main difference in Kloke’s revision - is, in its full-blown Cerha version, something which completely defeats the audience’s energy and ability to concentrate, and so to sustain their interest through to the magnificent final scene - which is one of the great scenes of all opera. So I think the Paris scene as Kloke has it is considerably shorter - or, at least, it opens options to making cuts, which we enthusiastically embraced! It’s just much more transparent and fluid and fast-moving and gets us through what is a kind of cabaret scene in itself, without overburdening that scene with too much detail and too much portentous significance so that we’re all ready - I think the final scene will make a much greater impact on the audience because they’re not being inundated with density and complexity beforehand. So I hope that it will really work in a positive way. I mean, nobody can say necessarily ‘yes, Mr Kloke’s version is much better as a scholar of Berg than Mr Cerha’s version’ but I’m not really bothered either way about that argument - I’m bothered about what makes it a good evening for the audience.

In terms of another aspect of where Lulu sits within early Twentieth Century opera, there’s recently been growing interest in composers like Franz Schreker and Zemlinsky and Korngold. Do you think that that interest, and the growing awareness of their work, opens up an avenue for reassessment of where an opera like Lulu might sit within that?


Well I suppose to some extent, the survival of certain masterpieces in each generation means that you lose the context in which they were created. Most of the time, that’s a pretty good thing because there are a certain number of first-class operas and a certain number of second-class operas - and you don’t really want to be bothered with the third-class operas! The second-class operas can often be extremely interesting. But always, you’re left with these tips of the iceberg that survive down into history and you don’t know - and probably don’t want to know - about all the stuff that’s sunk.

But there was a particularly artificial reason why we got cut off from the early twentieth century pieces - which was a staggeringly creative period. I mean, people tend to think the 19th Century with Verdi and Wagner was the great period but, if one looks at what was written in the twenties and thirties, it’s absolutely amazing what an inspirational outburst of creativity there was, centred mainly in Germany of course. And what really happened was that, first of all, the Nazis banned them all - which, in a way, wouldn’t in itself have mattered very much since the Nazis didn’t last very long. But then, in reaction to the Second World War, the whole modernist element of musical taste banned them again! So all the post-Romantic or late-Romantic composers first of all had to suffer Hitler - and then they had to suffer Boulez! - There was a very damaging kind of hardline view. And one only has to look at what happened to Goldschmidt at the BBC; he’d written one or two really splendid operas but he was relentlessly ignored by the BBC because it thought we didn’t want to go back into that late-Romantic quagmire, out of which people claimed - I think quite wrongly and unfairly - that the whole poison of Nazism had arisen.

So in a way those composers suffered doubly and so, yes, there is a good case for re-evaluating those pieces - and Lulu - within the whole period.

Thank you very much for your time David. I’m really looking forward to Lulu and to continuing our discussion with The Cunning Little Vixon.






Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.6: http://www.walesartsreview.org/an-interview-with-david-pountney-artistic-director-of-wno/


Sunday 10 March 2013

Interview: Soprano Marie Arnet

Soprano Marie Arnet was born in Sweden and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at the National Opera Studio. Her repertoire spans ancient and modern. Recent operatic appearances have included Eurydice in Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, and Pamina and Despina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Così fan tutte respectively, as well as Harey in the world première of Detlev Glanert’s Solaris at the Bregenz Festival. Amongst many other roles, she has also appeared as Mélisande in Debussy’s Pelleas and Mélisande and Sophie in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and is now winning critical acclaim for her performance as the central character in Alban Berg’s Lulu in a significant new staging for Welsh National Opera by Artistic Director David Pountney, conducted by Lothar Koenigs.

Lulu is one of the most challenging roles in the entire operatic repertoire and Marie spoke with Steph Power about that and about the ambiguous nature of Lulu herself the day before opening night at the Wales Millennium Centre.


SP Marie, you’ve sung lots of Mozart, you’ve sung Eurydice recently and also Sophie in Strauss’s Rosenkavalier - as well as Debussy’s Mélisande - but I believe this is your first tackling of a Berg part. How are you finding it?

MA Well it’s been probably the most difficult thing I’ve done so far! You always say that when you start learning a part but I had such little time to learn Lulu [two and a half months! - S] and I have cursed poor Alban Berg so many times for making it so difficult! Having said that, when you arrive at the end result of course you know it is the work of a genius. But he is a control freak and everything - even the pistol shots - have to be done in tempo. He even wrote a complete set of diagrams showing where people are supposed to be on stage at particular moments - it’s in the score - it had to be structured how he wanted! It’s so perfectly done that you can see why, but it does leave you feeling slightly straitjacketed at times.

Do you think that feeling relaxes as you get into the production?


I think it already has, yes. You learn to live with it and to trust that there’s a reason why he did it that way. It’s a bit like working with a director; you may not initially agree with his ideas but if you trust him - or her - you will go with it because you know there’s a reason. And so I do trust Alban Berg in that sense and yes, it just takes a bit of time to let it sink in I think.

Technically it’s a tremendously varied role isn’t it, with lots of different weights of voice needed.

Yes - I mean, who did he write that for?! I also think there is a problem in that Berg didn’t finish the opera, because I think if he had had time to finish it, he would have revised it. Not necessarily the tessitura but the whole structure of the opera because it feels imbalanced - Act 1 is no longer than Act 2 but it feels longer and slightly schizophrenic - as opposed to Act 3 which almost feels like a different opera. I mean you recognise the music but vocally it’s in a completely different tessitura and it feels like a different part.

The ending of Lulu is controversial; Friedrich Cerha made the completion that’s been standard until recently and WNO opted to use Eberhard Kloke’s new version of Act 3 for this production. But vocally, that first scene of Act 3, the Paris scene, has always been tremendously difficult because of the thickness of the textures and the chaotic ensembles I believe?

Yes it’s absolutely mad - a cacophony of voices really! But also I think Berg would have revised the first two acts to match Act 3 had he lived. I mean Acts 1 and 2 are perfect in their own right, but I think if he had finished Act 3, he would have looked over the whole thing. Because, if you think about how he intended the opera to be a mirror piece, at the moment it’s going to here [makes a peak] then somehow it drizzles down at the end. Act 3 should in a sense balance Act 1, but it really doesn’t. Not musically, not vocally, it’s just not the same and has a different drama. 

All the big set pieces, if you like, for Lulu’s character are in the first half of the opera.


Yes, the most difficult is Act 1.

That’s where you have Meines Mannes, which is spoken. That in itself is interesting because that’s the first time we hear Lulu actually say who she might be.

Yes, she gives a glimpse of herself and the relationships she might have. It’s weird - every time she’s with Dr Schön, they argue. They never have a scene where you see the loving connection; she says at the point she kills him that he’s the only person she’s ever loved, but you wonder what kind of a relationship they have. You only see the arguments - and actually all the romantic stuff is with Alwa. All their music together is really lush and romantic - although I don’t think she’s in love with Alwa! - but with Schön, they’re fighting all the time. She’s very ironic, very sarcastic with him.

Do you think Lulu means to shoot Schön?


Well, in this production, no. I think Lulu lives from her instincts and I think it’s a question of survival - if it’s him or her then it will have to be him. But I don’t think it’s something that she’s planned - the shooting comes out of him being really threatening towards her and, boom, there she goes.

To some, Lulu’s a myth, or perhaps a symbol of womanhood, and all agree she’s extremely complex. How do you see her as a character?

I think we all have a bit of Lulu in us. I think she’s a mirror - and not just for women but for men as well. Through her people see themselves - whether they like it or not - and then act from that. In a way, in her company you will be what you decide to be. But perhaps Lulu also shows you what she decides you should see of yourself; and if that’s something you don’t like, then you’ll take it out on the mirror as it were - you’ll smash the mirror.

We also view Lulu very much through the other characters’ eyes. Do you think that affects the way that the audience reacts to her?

Do you know, it’s so weird with this role, because I have no idea about the way I come across! With most roles you know whether you’re playing the bad or the good girl and you know where you belong in the drama. With this role I have no idea! Is the audience going to think Lulu’s a complete bitch? Are they going to feel for her, are they going to think she’s just cold or are they going to think that there’s something in there that could be human - I have no idea!

She’s totally ambiguous isn’t she?

Yes!

And not just going from one pole to the other, but inhabiting the extremes at the same time.

Yes! That’s why I can understand that people think she’s more of a myth than an actual human being - because it’s so complex. For me, she reminds me of Mélisande; like Mélisande, you’re not quite sure where she’s coming from, you’re not quite sure what she’s been through. When I started looking at the role, I had all sorts of images of Lulu; what she’s been through, why she is the way she is. Then I arrived here and the production didn’t reflect that at all - but actually, that can be another world of Lulu. She can be so many people depending on what situation you put her in. So I don’t know whether it’s up to the audience then to decide for themselves - I don’t think Lulu herself can show you who she is.

In terms of the vocal part, do you find it very wordy?


Oh God it drives me insane! All the romantic, Alwa scenes are very lush; fantastic scenes, Straussian in their tessitura, lovely. All the scenes with Dr Schön are vocally quite difficult you know, sitting high and then low - it’s an argument so she’s in the extremes. And you have also Schigolch, where Lulu’s part moves in semi-tones - impossible to find the pitch! - and quite a lot of text. And then there are some scenes, like the scene with the Marquise, which just go on and on and on! The problem is it’s so well constructed with the mirror symmetry that you can’t make many cuts. But much of the dialogue doesn’t do anything for the drama! - There’s no, why are they here? Why do they want to say this at this point?

Do you feel that that’s somehow part and parcel of how Berg conceived the vocal writing, working together with the orchestra?

Maybe. But sometimes you’ll find every single note playing in the orchestra, except your own!  That means you’ll hear all the notes around yours, so trying to find your own note in that is hard! I think he does write well for the voice, so I would say that although it’s not easy to sing, it’s less hard than you might think at first. But I wonder if Berg was more focused on the orchestra - the sound, the images and the colours.

Berg’s pupil Theodor Adorno saw Lulu as being an instrument herself, like a flute. His theory was that Berg had, in a way, given Lulu a part like an instrument in order to show that she was literally an instrument of the people around her. What do you make of that?

That’s interesting, that makes sense. Because you could do anything with an instrument like that -and it would fit into the way the music is different, depending on what person she’s with; like with Schigolch, in semi-tones always going chromatically quite fast. Yes I can see that.

Schigolch’s music seems to permeate the whole opera.

Yes - and seems to start in the middle of nowhere pitch-wise and end up in the middle of nowhere and you’ve no idea whether you’re in the right place or not! It’s actually more difficult to sing those kinds of semi-tones than it is to sing in leaps between pitches.

Is there any particular part of it that you really enjoy vocally?

All the Alwa music! I find that gorgeous and it just sits well in the voice - it’s just in the right place.

People often refer to the coloratura in the Lied der Lulu but there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of it.

No there isn’t really any coloratura. There’s some ‘twiddling’ but I wouldn’t call that coloratura. The way Berg’s written it, because it’s so incredibly fast, I think it has to be seen more as ornamentation than coloratura. It’s so quick that you can’t actually hear every single note - my metronome has been my best friend for the past three months!

It’s very intriguing that we don’t actually see Lulu’s murder do we - so we don’t see her beginning and we don’t actually see her end  - we hear the shriek but we don’t actually see it.


He couldn’t bear to kill her off!

That on the one hand, and on the other she’s killed off when she should be in her prime.


Yes and in a way he’s doing her a favour! - She’s almost asking for it, to end it now because of her circumstances by then.

People make quite a lot of her rise and fall socially but I’ve often seen the ending of Lulu as bringing out what’s always been there from the beginning; she’s treated like a whore right from the beginning!


Again, I think you’ll find that, in the production, it feels like we’re actually going back to her first meeting with Dr Schön; that last scene re-running the first meeting between them. So I think that’s a very beautiful image because then you understand the situation she’s in; how she got there.

Right, so her story comes full circle.


Yes, it’s like a horror version of Pygmalion. In Act 1, Schön tells the Painter that he found Lulu selling flowers in the street, and I always think of Eliza who gets picked up in the same way. Obviously Lulu’s story doesn’t end positively, but I think she has the same ambitions - but, somehow, she overdoes things because, once she gets to the top, she’s so desperate to hold on to that status. You know if you’re born into money you never have to prove that you belong in that society but if you come from underneath, you’re always going to have to prove your worth. And she goes too far.

How do you see Lulu as an opera for today. Is it still relevant?


Yes, and I think it can be seen by anybody, but you have to be prepared to be challenged - that goes for everyone. Everyone in this show is challenged by it - the orchestra, the conductor, the singers, the stage crew - we’re all challenged. It’s not an easy opera on any level. There’s no point where you can relax. It’s full-on all the time - and it must be tiring for the audience too because there are so many questions, so much you can ask yourself. But then, that’s interesting as well! If you go home from a show and have all the answers, then what’s the point really? Though I don’t know if that’s what people seem to want - the whole package with the answers!

Quite often I think they do!

They want the easy way I think! In terms of the story, is it relevant today? It is, in that it’s about humanity, it’s all about how we see ourselves and how we relate to ourselves. Actually, because I had to think about the character and where she was coming from, I’ve been thinking a lot about women and about how women are viewed and are treated in society - because the subject is quite raw at the moment. It still happens - that little girl who was shot in the head because she said we want education for women.

Which is what Geschwitz pleads for at the end of the opera -


Yes. We sat discussing this and someone said, what are they so afraid of these men? What is it in women that is so dangerous that you have to quiet them by violence and by oppression? What’s so dangerous? What can we do? It’s the same thing - what can Lulu do when she seems to drive men so crazy that they behave like they do in this opera?  And what drives men to rape or to buy prostitutes? So, yes, in that sense the opera is still valid today with those questions. They’re very very hard questions!

And she’s very young isn’t she?

Yes and a lot of young girls are being abused and used still today. And it’s quite frightening and it’s stuff that you don’t want to think about and actually this opera has really brought up some of those subjects and, you know, it’s really uncomfortable. I was raised in Sweden - you know we’re supposed to be the equal society - so I’d never questioned the fact that I can do what I want, never doubted my freedom - but what would you do if you were in Lulu’s situation?

Lulu literally gets squeezed into that corner doesn’t she - where she has no choice. She’s pushed and pushed.

Then she has a gun in her hand - what’s she going to do? Is she going to kill herself? I don’t think so. What’s the choice? She has to kill Schön. And in that sense I think the opera - if you dare to look that far, if you dig deep down below the surface - the subject is raw, really raw, still today.

Marie thank you very much for talking with me and best of luck for the performances.


Posted by WALES ARTS REVIEW 2.7:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wnos-lulu-in-conversation-with-soprano-marie-arnet/




Interview: Conductor Lothar Koenigs

Conductor Lothar Koenigs was born in Aachen and studied piano and conducting in Cologne. From 1999 – 2003 he was Music Director in Osnabrück, Germany. Since 2003 his guest engagements have included the Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera New York, Munich, Dresden, La Scala, Hamburg, Brussels and Lyon in a wide repertoire ranging from Mozart to Berg, with a particular emphasis on the operas of Wagner, Strauss and Janáček. He worked for the first time with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera in January 2005, and was appointed to the position of Music Director in 2008, with effect from the beginning of the 2009/10 season. In 2010 he conducted the company’s highly acclaimed new production of Die Meistersinger which he also led in a televised concert at the 2010 BBC Proms.

He spoke with Steph Power about his passion for German opera, WNO and Alban Berg’s
Lulu between the opening and second nights of the significant new production at the Wales Millennium Centre.

SP Lothar, you joined Welsh National Opera as Music Director in 2009 and I believe the first production you conducted as Music Director was Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Now you are conducting a new production of his complete Lulu.

LK Yes, and WNO was the first company I think to perform Lulu in the UK.

Yes, the British première of the two-act version in 1971.


I think the company always had an edge and renown to be very curious and adventurous in doing new things - if you think who has been here over the years, with Peter Stein and so on. I’m really happy we have Lulu directed by David Pountney, following a wonderful production of Wozzeck a few years ago by Richard Jones. And we will follow Lulu with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron in 2014 in the summer. You know I think it would be a sin not to programme these pieces when you have such a great company, such a chorus. Of course, extra people will be needed for the large chorus of Moses und Aron, but we have such a strong foundation here - it’s a dream for me to do these pieces with this company. I hope that people do realise that there is something really going on here, that we invite all the people of Wales to celebrate this!

Is your aim partly to bring us the heart of German and Austrian opera?

Yes, of course it’s very close to me, and I’m conducting many other composers, including Janáček too - I love Janáček. But of course I became Music Director to conduct Meistersinger, Tristan, Lohengrin, Lulu and Wozzeck and hopefully some more Strauss - and so this is very exciting.

And Henze too?

Yes, and I think this is a very nice opportunity as our seasons now have themes; it will be very exciting to have Manon Lescaut by Puccini alongside its opposite, Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude - because somehow they have the same story. Maybe Henze looks at it with more modern eyes and so the theme gives them both a great context.

So you are setting up a dialogue between the two operas in each case?


Yes and also with the concerts, which are part of our themed seasons. So we will have Lohengrin to celebrate Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary in 2013 and we also have a view on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring which was premièred a hundred years ago - I think it’s fantastic!  I’m not wanting to ‘educate’ people you know, I just want to show the richness of this music and this period. After Wagner, you have Mahler, Zemlinsky, the Second Viennese School, Stravinsky, Bartók - and the same explosion in art and literature - it’s endlessly fascinating.

I was wondering, with Lulu in particular, what you find to be the biggest challenge of the score - or perhaps the unique challenge of the score - from the conductor’s point of view?

For me the biggest problem is the third act, which Berg wasn’t able to complete before he died. What do you think about this version by Kloke that we are using may I ask?

I like your cuts to the Paris scene, which I’ve always felt Berg would have revised - I just can’t see how he would have left it as quite such an ensemble of perplexity, with so much going on and such thick textures. He was too much of a dramatist at heart I think to leave it like that, ultimately. But with the final scene, I’m not so sure as you omitted the Quartett. I’m going to have to see it again!

Yes we did but, you know Berg never wrote the Quartett, he just wrote Alwa’s line. All the other vocal lines there are by Cerha.

Yes, Cerha did embellish what Berg wrote there.


You know with both versions, I don’t want to judge. I think Cerha worked for twelve years on the third act and did a brilliant job. People complain about the Paris scene, but we have to realise that the first almost 300 bars are original Berg - so if the music is not so good it’s not Cerha’s fault, it’s Berg’s! But you know you said you’re sure he would have revised it; I’m sure he would have revised the first and second acts as well. Because you know, the theatre scene in Act 1, especially at the end with Schön and Lulu - it never stops! If you look at how perfect Wozzeck is, where no one note is too much - and Berg wrote a letter to Webern saying not only about the third act but that ‘I think I should start again from the beginning’.

He did, yes. And certainly, looking at Wozzeck as you say and also the Lyric Suite and the Violin Concerto - the way he worked, so meticulous, so detailed, and his obsession with tightness of structure - these pieces were so perfectly constructed that for Berg not to have gone back over Lulu wouldn’t make sense.


Yes exactly, I agree. So I’m sure he would have revised Lulu. And do you know, with this new version of the third act, I am sure this is not the end of the matter! Somehow this also doesn’t work - but just to do two acts and to miss the music of Geschwitz at the end! We can’t miss this music - we can’t miss the Negro or Jack the Ripper!

I agree! But how to do the third act? It’s a dilemma.


A dilemma, yes, but there were big voices like Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern - all of them said it was possible to finish the piece although they didn’t want to do it themselves. And we, as Berg admirers, we have to accept that the Paris picture music is not his best! I think in the end, to compose an almost three hour piece on one twelve-tone note row, it’s really staggering. And it’s good to know about this serial aspect too. But I think as the performer, you put the serialism away and just make the music - I think it is important for the audience to know that they can expect an overwhelming, sensual evening, with the music as well as with the show. I have to confess I would never sit at home listening to Lulu on CD. And it’s fantastic to read the score and marvel at what Berg did but I think at the end you have to go to the theatre. It needs the stage you know, the same with Wozzeck - and even more so with Moses und Aron.

Yes, Berg didn’t just write the music - let alone some exercise in serialism - he wrote an extraordinary piece of music-theatre which has to be seen! What is it like to conduct such an intensely emotional piece?

I think Berg’s music is so human; you suffer so much with this as well during Lulu! You know, it’s hard - but on the other hand it’s so natural. And, talking of technical difficulty, everyone was panicking about how difficult it would be, but now they’ve discovered it’s completely natural to play!

Is that because Berg writes so well for the instruments and voices?

Perfectly yes - it’s just a matter of becoming familiar with his sound-world I think. That’s where one should really forget about it’s being twelve-tone music because at the end it’s very Romantic music. He was so smart with his tone rows but - the Interlude before the theatre scene after the Monoritmica -  I mean, it’s really late Mahler! But it’s so brilliantly done, if people can just be open to it, and I think anyway the approach to Berg’s scores is always very Romantic.

It strikes me that you have a particular sensitivity to the extraordinary colours of Berg’s sound-world; in bringing those through with the orchestra.

Oh thank you. Well you know the musicians as well, they have to listen to each other and then they understand; if you don’t play this music kind of very pure, it’s the worst music in the world but if you can bring these colours and voices out - suddenly it’s a universe! I strongly believe in this. In Wozzeck, Berg uses the whole orchestra I think just two or three times, but for the rest, it’s almost chamber music. It’s a little different in Lulu but still the players really have to listen to each other. He used Schoenberg’s score markings of Haupstimme and Nebenstimme to indicate main voice and accompanying voice, but I think this was to help at the time when he wrote the piece as it was all so new. Today I think it’s very obvious what’s the main voice or what’s accompanying voice and I think we just have to trust the score. And on the one hand, Berg was such a control freak - he even composes how exactly Schön has to write down what Lulu sings at ‘Sehr geehrtes Fräulein’! It’s ridiculous but also charming!

He notates in detail so many aspects of the action - every asthmatic breath of Schigolch!

Yes it’s all written down. And, on the other hand, we are working on The Cunning Little Vixen, this chaotic score of Janáček’s! If you look at how Janáček puts things together, you realise he often uses different notation for the same tempo or rhythm and so you somehow have to help the score. But I think with Janáček, you listen for three to five seconds to his music and you know it’s Janáček! This is his genius and his music is so honest. And of course, if I think of Strauss, he was just brilliant in his scores - the instrumentation, everything is perfect - but it doesn’t speak to my heart in the same way. With Janáček, each note, even if it’s a screaming high violin or piccolo, it speaks so directly to the heart.

But with Berg, in terms of control and detail, he even adopted what Schoenberg did in Pierrot lunaire in asking for Sprechstimme for the voice at times, meaning half-sung or ‘sung speech’. But, I have to say, I don’t believe in it. You know I think half singing, even with the way the notes are written, it doesn’t work somehow.

In Pierrot it’s different in a way because the Sprechstimme suits the poems and Schoenberg’s setting, especially with the smaller ensemble, but, yes, difficult in a big score like Lulu - is it intended to be an effect do you think?


Yes an effect perhaps. Still it’s not satisfying you know - at the end, you either sing the pitch or you don’t sing the pitch! But maybe this comes from the way actors spoke at the time - at least in Germany - the way they declaimed everything. But I’m not 100% convinced by it.

It’s always intrigued me that Meines Mannes is spoken. This is the first time we hear Lulu show who she might be but she doesn’t sing, she speaks.

Well I think maybe the spoken dialogue is another aspect of the way Berg uses colour overall. But also, if you think of the first dialogue between the Painter and Lulu, there, they just talk in an everyday manner about ‘oh die post ist da’ and so on. So I think this is part of Berg’s wanting somehow to include what was new at the time - like with the film interlude you know.

So the dialogue is intended to be very naturalistic as if from the theatre?

Yes, very matter of fact.

 I was intrigued by the Wanderer image in the production, alluding to Wagner’s Siegfried, and which puts Schigolch into the dramatic centre in a way I haven’t seen done before.

Yes, this image has a very personal source. And, at the end, we don’t know who Schigolch is. What’s his relationship with Lulu? Is he her father? Did they have an affair? Was she abused by him? We don’t know - and the same with Schön. What is their history, Lulu and Schön? Again, we don’t know - but to think of Wotan and Brünnhilde, yes, it’s very clever. And also in the production, during the Filmmusik when Lulu has been taken away, the other characters become old - this refers to Freia! So when Lulu is gone -

- Ah, of course, yes, everybody ages! Because Lulu is the spirit of eternal youth - in a way, like Freia, she keeps everybody young.

Yes! We had been struggling to make sense of the less interesting music that comes after the Filmmusik and before Lulu returns from prison. Then we realised that, when Lulu comes back with her fantastic ‘O Freiheit’, everything changes - that’s the release! In a sense, that’s when we get the music back; only with her return.

Speaking of personal sources and references, with the many subtexts that Berg composed into his scores about himself and the people in his life, I was wondering whether that informed your preparation of Lulu or whether you put all of that aside?

Well of course I read a lot about it, but I have to say when you do this piece you can put a lot aside - but you shouldn’t put away Hannah Fuchs [with whom Berg had an affair - S]. I think he was so attached to her and Lulu somehow - and it’s there, like it’s in the Lyric Suite. I think you can’t put Hannah Fuchs aside even if Helene [Berg’s wife - S] always ignored this!

And, again, with the Violin Concerto, of course he was mourning the death of Manon Gropius [the eighteen year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius], but he also broke off writing this passionate score of Lulu, with all that meant to him, to compose the Concerto.

Yes I agree and you know it’s really sad that even biographies from the seventies or eighties just ignore Hannah Fuchs. She’s not really mentioned you know. The same with his child, with Albine [who Berg fathered with a serving girl when aged 17 - S]. I think we just have to accept that maybe he suffered a lot that he didn’t have children with Helene - but we don’t know!

There’s such a huge story there with Hannah and others - and it’s all in Lulu.

Yes and I think also - this is not just my opinion but others have also said this - that Lulu was the last Romantic opera. You know, I really can’t think of another Romantic opera that’s been written after that. No. That’s it - Lulu was the last. 

That’s quite some thought - very poignant. Lothar, thank you so much for speaking with me.


Posted by WALES ARTS REVIEW 2.7:
http://www.walesartsreview.org/wnos-lulu-in-conversation-with-music-director-lothar-koenigs/