Music: Provocative Lulu

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The most luridly erotic of all opera heroines has yet to appear on any opera stage. Beside her, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk would seem a rural innocent (TIME, Feb. 11). The adulterous Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck is a colorless nobody compared with Alban Berg's Lulu, a symbol of insatiability conceived in the tortured mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist, Die Büchse der Pandora). Sooner or later Lulu is bound to make her operatic appearance because of Composer Berg's reputation, the power of his music. Orchestral excerpts from Lulu have been played at the Berlin Staatsoper where extra police squads governed the crowds. Last spring fragments were played by the Boston Symphony (TIME, April 1). Last week the New York Philharmonic-Symphony took its turn at Lulu, under Conductor Otto Klemperer.

In the opera's prolog Lulu is represented by a fearsome wriggling snake, an eternal destroyer, according to Composer Berg who makes her just as horrid in every scene which follows. She destroys one man after another, commits a murder which lands her in prison, weasels her freedom only to philander in Paris with gamblers, procurers, swindlers. End comes in a sordid London attic where Lulu is brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Berg's orchestra then sounds out a shuddering scream. The New York Philharmonic took the cue faithfully, startled half its subscribers who still had to hear Soprano Agnes Davis emit a wailing postlude. Strapping young Agnes Davis, who has made her mark at Philadelphia Orchestra concerts, was supposed to be a Countess Geschwitz, as bewitched by Lulu as were the many men who loved her. The whole story seemed revolting in its episodic outline. But Berg's music was not to be discounted. Murky, rumbly drums actually suggested an evil, brooding power. The entire orchestra chattered over one gruesome death, grew lyrical when the composer wanted sympathy for his heroine, reached an awful climax when Lulu was slain. Austria's Alban Berg is one of the few real modernists who has been able to write effective theatre music, subduing atonality and the twelve-tone scale to a truly urgent feeling. Critics were unable to agree on Lulu's worth last week. Olin Downes of the New York Times pronounced it "involved trash," while Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune went the whole hog in the other direction by saying: "The layman, if he can accustom himself to a doubtless indisposing idiom, will find in it a lacerating beauty, a piercing expressiveness often overwhelming which reveals Berg for what he is: a poet, a man of tormenting sensibility. . . ."