The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (29 page)

What to listen for

Like
Wozzeck,
Lulu
is a score of incredible formal intricacy, organized round classical forms and the twelve-note ‘serial’ system pioneered by Berg’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.
The musical material is tightly interwoven and thematically coherent, but the effect is of great agitation and volatility.
Underpinning the nervosity is a sense of overwhelming sadness, which finally gushes out in Countess Geschwitz’s lament over Lulu’s dead body.
The role of Lulu lies very high.
The score specifies several top E flats and Fs, but sopranos like Teresa Stratas often take the lower options which Berg mercifully allows them.

In performance

The fascination of this opera lies in the character of Lulu herself – is she prey or predator?
A symbolic embodiment of the obsessive and amoral nature of male sexual desire or a selfish but suffering human being with the potential for something better?
The opera can seem simply a bitter satire of a decadent bourgeoisie, populated with two-dimensional caricatures, but a good production such as Patrice Chéreau’s in Paris (the first staging of Cerha’s three-act version) will
reflect the emotional complexity of the music and at least pay tribute to the sincerity of the love which Countess Geschwitz doggedly lavishes on Lulu.

Recording

CD: Teresa Stratas (Lulu); Pierre Boulez (cond.).
Paris Opéra production.
DG 415 489 2

Kurt Weill

(1900–50)

Die Dreigroschenoper
(
The Threpenny Opera
)

Prologue and three acts. First performed Berlin, 1928.

Libretto by Bertolt Brecht

An updated version of John Gay’s
The
Beggar’s
Opera,
banned by the Nazis in 1933, but hugely popular on account of its black humour and irresistibly slinky score.
The band for the first performance consisted of seven jazz musicians; later Weill revised it for a more conventional band of twenty-three. Brecht also made several different versions of the text.

Plot

In London’s sleazy Soho, the disreputable Mr and Mrs Peachum are appalled to hear that their daughter Polly has married the gangster Mack the Knife.
Mrs Peachum bribes the prostitute Jenny to betray Mack to the police, but he is helped to escape from prison by Lucy, daughter of the corrupt police chief Tiger Brown.
Peachum threatens to disrupt the coronation if Mack is not dealt with, so Mack is arrested again and led to the gallows.
At the last minute, Mack is pardoned.

What to listen for

Composed in reaction to the pomposity of post-Wagnerian opera,
Die
Dreigroschenoper
was aptly described by Hans Keller as ‘the weightiest possible lowbrow opera for highbrows and the most full-blooded highbrow musical for lowbrows’.
Like
The
Beggar’s
Opera
(with which it otherwise shares only one tune), it consists of a number of discrete, short musical numbers, interspersed with dialogue, including the famous ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’ which opens the show.

In performance

Conceived as ‘a play with music’, this piece requires a rough,
sharp ironic edge to make its full effect, and cabaret singers are often imported to create the right vocal atmosphere.
Brecht didn’t want the performance to be polished or genteel, and the characters are not meant to be sympathetic or attractive; this is socialist satire, not grand opera.
But Weill did not want the music approximately rasped, in the inimitable style of his wife Lotte Lenya – he always hoped that opera singers would take it seriously and sing his notes precisely.

Recording

CD: Ute Lemper (Polly); John Mauceri (cond.).
Decca 430 075 2

Aufstieg
und
Fall
der
Stadt
Mahagonny
(
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
)

Three acts. First performed Leipzig, 1930.

Libretto by Bertolt Brecht

In 1927, Brecht and Weill collaborated on a twenty-five-minute ‘anti-opera’ entitled
Mahagonny
Songspiel.
It consists of a series of musical numbers (sung by six soloists) linked to the theme of Mahagonny, the city dedicated to pleasure and vice.
Orchestral interludes separate the songs and ensembles; there is no connecting dialogue or plot.
Such was its success, however, that Brecht and Weill decided to expand this cantata into a full-length opera.
It caused a riot at its first performance on account of its debunking cynicism and obscenity.

Plot

Fatty, Widow Begbick and Trinity Moses, white-slave traders on the run, arrive in the city of Mahagonny in the American desert.
Its values are based on dollars, whisky and sex: crime
and prostitution are rampant.
A lumberjack called Jim Mahoney buys the mulatto girl Jenny for thirty dollars and hopes for a lifetime of total selfish freedom and ‘every man for himself’.
A hurricane threatens to destroy Mahagonny, but it passes the city by.

All the vices flourish, until Jim loses all his money and even Jenny refuses to help him out with a loan.
Jim is thrown into prison.
In Mahagonny, not having money is the worst of crimes and Jim is sentenced to death and executed.
God descends on Mahagonny.
The city burns and Jim’s relics are paraded before the audience.

What to listen for