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The opera Lulu is a work of epic magnitude. It is based on two Frank Wedekind plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora. These two plays celebrate the sensual aspect of the human experience and helped pave the way for Expressionist theater and the work of Berthold Brecht.
The formal structure of the work continues along the evolutionary path introduced in Wozzeck while at the same time formally regressing almost a century. For example, the work's largest divisions are subdivided, those subdivisions are further subdivided, and those divisions are subdivided yet again. The largest division is in half, dividing the two plays, with each play receiving one and a half acts. The act divisions are of secondary importance. Each act, as in Wozzeck, has a veiled underlying structure that is drawn from another genre: Act I contains a sonata allegro, Act II a rondo, and Act III a theme and variations. However, the acts are further divided into "numbers" (arias, duets, recitatives, etc.), as traditional operas had always been. There are also musical interludes that divide the scenes of each act, including "Film Music," which falls at the division of the two plays (between scenes i and ii in Act II). This "Film Music" is organized as a musical palindrome, moving toward the center, then reversing itself and moving in retrograde to the end, thus creating a mirror of the first half.
The plot of the opera is as complicated as the music that provides the setting (George Perle's synopsis of the opera is 15 1/2 pages long). The character of Lulu exists solely as a sensual spirit who is made flesh by men, who create her as an ideal without substance. All the men in her life know her as a different woman, and even call her by different names. In the first play, she murders the man who has most recently "created" her, and she goes to prison. In the second play, she is out of prison, but her life is spinning out of her control. Living a high but empty life in Paris for a while, she winds up a prostitute and is murdered. Berg arranged the characters of the drama so as to allow the same singers to play multiple roles in the same performance. As well as being efficient, this feature is thematically appropriate, for it illustrates the consistencies of influence within Lulu's many disparate settings. Lulu is a brilliant work, an unmitigated masterpiece of the operatic repertoire.
There are many wonderful recordings of this work, but only a few exist of the completed Lulu. Among these, there is a 1997 Chandos recording by the Danish National Opera and a wonderful 1979 Deutsche Grammophon recording with Pierre Boulez conducting the Paris Opera and featuring Teresa Stratas.
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