Berg’s Lulu
English National Opera

Lisa Saffer

BERG’S Lulu is rarely performed in Britain and this production, first seen in 2002 and now revived, was the first ever at the ENO.
One of the 20th century’s famously “difficult” operas, it is written throughout in the 12-tone system.
Berg fashioned his libretto from Wedekind’s two lurid sex dramas, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, charting the rise and fall of a femme fatale, ending in London where she becomes a victim of Jack the Ripper. Berg died in 1935 leaving the third act unfinished.
Although there were detailed sketches and a complete piano score of act three, his widow refused to allow it to be completed and early performances were of the unfinished two act version. After her death in 1979 Friedrich Cerha completed the third act from Berg’s notes and sketches.
While director Richard Jones keeps more or less to Berg’s stage directions (the omission of the film specified in act two showing what happens to Lulu after she shoots her third husband is no loss), his production is, unfortunately, pitched at a jokey undergraduate level which trivialises and diminishes the opera. The singers are made to rush around the stage almost incessantly, climbing over furniture, to little purpose. Too often they are positioned far up-stage from where their words, (a strong new translation by Richard Stokes) and sometimes their voices, do not always come across the dense orchestration.
Black farce is pointed up at the expense of the tragedy.
However, the musical side is outstanding, showing the ENO at its best. At the centre is a superb performance by Lisa Saffer in the title role, a singing actress of extraordinary talent, with the necessary pure and youthful voice, in complete command of the relentlessly high vocal line demanded by the role, and of the taxing athletic activity demanded by the director.
Surrounding her is a splendid ensemble. The three bass/baritone roles, Robert Hayward as the bourgeois Schon and sinister Jack the Ripper; Gwynne Howell’s unsavoury Schigolch, and Robert Poulton’s Animal Tamer and Acrobat, were all superbly sung.
The tenors, Richard Coxon as the painter and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Alwa, Lulu’s romantic young lover, were convincing in their characterisation but less successful vocally. As Countess Geschwitz Susan Parry manages to rise above the director’s ill-judged sending-up of her character. All the many smaller roles were strongly portrayed.
Paul Daniel conducted with care bringing out the great variety of the score, with its complex instrumental texture, references to jazz and ragtime, and the searing romanticism of the love themes.

020 7632 8300
Until May 13