On Music
YOHALEM, JOHN
On Music lULU'ON THE TUBE BY JOHN YOHALEM T he New York Metropolitan Opera, having survived yet another of its cyclical labor disputes, last month opened the season and its series of live...
...I suspect that a Joan Sutherland, an Eileen Farrell, a Carlo Bergonzi, or a Lauritz Melchior might not have achieved prominence had they been confronted with a TV camera early on, and the world would be much the poorer...
...An unexpected benefit in this, the only country too insecure to insist on librettos in the native tongue, has come from subtitles...
...In fact, the very intricacy of a score without a grand melodic sweep to carry the day requires every phrase and gesture of the singers, players and director to be telling, and this makes Lulu a more suitable candidate for the camera than may be generally realized...
...he Met took on the rigors of Lulu with open eyes...
...Nineteenth-century composers quite consciously wrote to survive bad acting and careless singing, but it is a rare one whose works do not flower under more tender treatment and close inspection...
...Even snobs cannot resist them when a work or language is outside their ken...
...He had a depressive mania...
...Repeated hearings never cease to remind one how directly that style grew from the rich, chromatic excesses of late romanticism, but the virgin listener instantly comfortable with it is rare...
...It remains to be seen whether this growing acceptance will jeopardize opera's uniqueness, reducing it to simply another program, albeit one with odd music sung in funny languages...
...On Music lULU'ON THE TUBE BY JOHN YOHALEM T he New York Metropolitan Opera, having survived yet another of its cyclical labor disputes, last month opened the season and its series of live telecasts with the first American performance of Alban Berg's full Lulu (PBS, December 20, 1980, 8:00 p.m...
...The thoughts of cast members, director and conductor also were more appropriate in this work than has ordinarily been the case...
...Evelyn Lear, the world's reigning Lulu in the '60s and, perhaps asaresult, in mediocre voice ever since, was an astonishingly lyrical and pathetic Countess Geschwitz, a part much enlarged in the full version...
...A viewer ceases to consciously read them, and they distract only when so badly timed that words issue from the wrong throat...
...opera is no longer a bad joke among the vast majority of Americans, fit for nothing but satire...
...From the financial point of view, this approach appears to hold great promise...
...a courageous choice...
...The next Met telecast, a tape of last year's tempestuous production of Richard Strauss' Elektra with the ear-shattering performance of Birgit Nilsson in the title role, should also startle the new operagoers who never leave home and want to sing along with Pavarotti...
...In Europe, where music broadcasts are big business, certain telegenic singers have had their careers boosted by being filmed...
...Given these circumstances Lulu was a step in the right direction...
...Nevertheless, before Lulu televised opera in the U.S...
...In bankrolling music it is far ahead of us...
...They emphasize the repeated, symbolic phrases that correspond to repetitions in Berg's score...
...Symbolically naive and perhaps preposterous, like so much opera, the completed Lulu, like so much preposterous art, is more dramatically satisfying than many a saner plot...
...One might miss the musical references if the score is unfamiliar, but the clues on the screen, hauntingly unrelated to the plot, bring them out: "There is a revolution in Paris...
...The conservative Met has hitherto played it very safe on the tube as well: lots of Verdi and Puccini to attract the multitudes, plus Smetana and Weill because they were done in English...
...The greats of the past first worked their way up on stage alone, and one must ask whether musical values are in clanger of being cheapened by the change...
...The risk is admittedly high because the financial wear and tear of producing television in this country has eroded commercial attempts to appeal to any but the broadest range of viewers...
...Kenneth Riegel made an ardent Aiwa, and Andrew Foldi a wisely sleazy Schigolch...
...restored to chilly self-sufficiency for Jack the Ripper, he was attractively terrifying...
...T .JL...
...Julia Migenes-Johnson did not look the archetypal beauty, but Lulu is above all sensual, and this the singer had no trouble conveying...
...she still looks terrific and acts up a storm...
...Several vaunted stars??one thinks of Ashley Putnam and Neil Shicoff, or, in the previous generation, of Shirley Verrett and Renata Scotto??possess visual advantages but highly imperfect, even second-rate musical qualifications for roles they perform on television...
...Doubts have been raised, too, about the new emphasis on the stageworthi-ness, the looks and poise, of young singers...
...Lulu's frequent, abrupt costume changes in mid-scene, first to evade responsibilities, then to evade punishments...
...she was not marking time in the part the way beautiful Carol Farley often did when the production first appeared...
...Yet it has exposed musical drama to a wider audience...
...The rest of the cast were exceptional, too...
...Here John Dexter's staging also helped, for many gestures deliberately echoed earlier ones: Schigolch fondling Lulu's breast in the casino just as he had two acts earlier in her living room...
...To aim for the least offensive means ignoring the individual achievement requisite to greatness...
...The condescending assumption of PBS and other TV producers has been that audiences can't handle the unusual or the complicated...
...Thus Lulu represented a bold departure...
...Scotto's acting, forinstance, has metamorphosed strikingly from the infamous semaphore distress signals she used on every possible occasion in her plump days, to the refinement evident in her televised Desdemona, Mimi and Elisabeth de Valois...
...On the other hand, there are times when opera does gain something besides money and a mass audience from television...
...Those new to the music thereby suspect connections that subsequent listening will confirm...
...others have retreated to the recital stage in despair...
...The success of the Met's live Lulu ought to make us take a closer look at the example of Europe, where technological advances at once prompt the question: How might this aid the arts...
...Schon had the right Prussian, aristocratic look, and his collapse wrought by Lulu was vocally and dramatically moving...
...In the case of the wordy Lulu, subtitles have the further advantage of keeping you attentive where the music offers no easy earhold...
...Berg expert George Perle may lack the showmanship of a Boris Goldovsky, but his analysis of the complicated musical structures of Lulu and their relationships to characters and events we would see on the screen, was, if elementary, admirably lucid...
...It is now more important than ever to keep the exceptional aspects of opera before an audience too prone to relax, hum along, read the paper, sew, neck before the comfortable tube...
...Since it was incomplete when Berg died in 1935, all we had until recently was the truncated version...
...It is not always too expansive an art for the small screen if singers with the right instincts can calm themselves down...
...It is such money that is today inspiring many American opera companies to think in video terms??a tendency long restrained, curiously enough, because Sir Rudolf Bing of the Met's ancien regime thought it a chimera...
...Although her voice is not equal to Stratas', her rendition of the far from gracious role had sufficient fire...
...Artistically, of course, the televising of opera raises some difficult questions...
...and such spectacular moments as the change of scene in Act III of Otello never quite come off outside the theater...
...Despite the widening audience for Berg and his friends, Lulu shows little sign of becominga standard hummed by all music lovers, with the favorite excerpts applauded as encores and piped into elevators...
...heeded standard taste and concentrated on the familiar and the winning...
...Only Frank Little, the Painter, was guilty of glancing up from the action to check the cameras??even with Lulu in his arms??a pitfall that traps surprisingly few singers...
...The music is in the harshest, most uncompromising idiom of the atonal Second Vienna School...
...The thrill of an unamplified voice filling a vast space??the glory of the medium??is denied the home audience...
...And, as Berg requested, the actors portraying Lulu's three devastated husbands return at the end as the three customers who annihilate her...
...Atonality, though, is not an obstacle for television...
...The performance itself was excellent, despite the illness of the scheduled star, Teresa Stratas (who embarrassingly filled up a great deal of the pre-recorded rehearsal tapes shown during the intermission...
...Most major productions and concerts are broadcast as a matter of course and the profits contribute significantly to defraying the cost of the event...
...Indeed, appreciation is so high that it has commenced a fund-raising campaign to put an end to all fund raising: It is seeking an endowment large enough to keep the place running even if enthusiasm eventually wanes and contributions dry up...
...Obsessed with public relations, companies showed off their most accessible wares: Verdi's La traviata, Puccini's Madama Butterfly and the San Diego Opera's ghastly rendition of Franz Lehars The Merry Widow have been rerun time and again, while such pieces as Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring, Samuel Barber's Vanessa and Jack Beeson's Lizzie Borden have slipped by barely noticed...
...The story, drawn from two curious plays by Frank Wedekind, depicts an "earth-spirit" of amoral sensuality who preys upon men until they finally destroy her...
...Close-ups reveal the care and alertness indispensible to Berg in ways that are frequently missed in the theater, where audiences are often alienated by the angular music...
...The chance to make delicate moments out of what had to be broad enough to fill a gigantic house almost reconciles the purist to hearing voices through the distortion of microphones...
...Hilda Harris was impressive in three small, sexually ambiguous roles...
...Opera is enj oying a popular renaissance in this country, and the Met may be more widely thought of as a national institution than ever before...
...In this atmosphere, the stand-and-deliver types with golden throats may be slighted for an entire career...
...Franz Mazura's Dr...
...True, television has made a Beverly Sills and a Luciano Pavarotti stars beyond their deserts, in the sense that the brilliance of their less visually appealing compeers has thereby been undervalued...
...The intermission features were less frivolous than is customary in televised opera, closer in style to the easily comprehended musicology lessons well-known and highly appreciated in Met radio broadcasts...
...the recent death of his eccentric widow permitted certain devoted followers of the master to finish the work from his detailed notes...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 2
