Anne Sophie von Otter, Vera-Lotte Boecker, Bo Skovhus | Credit: Monika Rittershaus

***

Stunning voices, masterful musical direction – and tedium. The new production of Lulu on stage at the Musik Theater an der Wien suffers from a bad case of visual overload. The Clowns and freak show figures who move in bizarre dance from beginning to end while sharing the stage with the principals are at first intriguing. But their significance remains a mystery that detracts from the complexities of Alban Berg’s work. Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ choreographic overreach comes at the expense of dramatic direction and focus.

Lulu is femme fatale and child-woman, murderess and tragic victim, the incarnation of the snake that drove humankind from paradise. She’s an adulteress, a venus trap engulfing all men who encounter her. She’s the chaos that heralds the end of the bourgeois society of the 1930s and the new order destroyed by war. Like much of Berg’s music, she’s a contradiction, a palindrome that invites the audience to make of her whatever they choose. But this is possible only if she’s presented in all her complexity, something Freitas neglects to do.

Berg’s libretto and music demand a Lulu whose sexuality shimmers through all her personas. We hear what she is, not only from passionate orchestral passages but from her own mouth and those of the men who die for her. But we don’t see it, and it’s not because she keeps her clothes on. She is colorless, left to fend for herself, a victim of Freitas’ dramatic neglect.

The stage setting doesn’t help. Yanick Fouassier sets what action there is inside a space packed with student desks, benches, and shelving that looks like it came from IKEA. Ladders lead to the orchestra on an upper level resulting in some fun as the principals climb to sing almost within jostling distance of conductor Maxime Pascal. A painted red oval approximates a woman’s lips, hinting at Lulu’s sensuality. The sterility of the rest of the set underpins the lack of direction in the main character.

Vera-Lotte Boecker and Bo Skovhus | Credit: Monika Rittershaus

This co-production of the Musik Theater and the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival Weeks) is of the opera’s unfinished version, leaving those new to the work guessing as to Lulu’s fate (killed by Jack the Ripper). At the same time, it provides for a rare staging highlight. As the opera ends to incidental orchestra music from Berg, a crippled Chucky doll in a white wedding dress moves joltingly across the empty stage. It’s Lulu, stripped of her persona as the woman no man can resist to reveal the horridly damaged creature who kills all who love her. 

Vera-Lotte Boecker made the best of a notoriously difficult role given this production’s constraints. Her soaring voice not only made easy work of the high E’s, but it encompassed Lulu’s full persona from self-absorbed brittleness to full-blown passion even over the orchestra’s most crashing passages.

But all of the singing was exceptional. Bo Skovhus was an impressive Dr. Schön in his duality of both Lulu’s adoptive father and tortured lover. Alva, Schön’s son, who also falls for Lulu’s charms, was well portrayed by Edgaras Montvidas as was Cameron Becker as the Painter. A shoutout goes to Kurt Rydl as Schingolch in the ambiguous role of the beggar who might be both Lulu’s father and ex-lover. Also worth mentioning: Anne Sophie von Otter as the Countess and Katrin Wundsam, Martin Summer, Paul Kaufmann, Andreas Jankowitsch, and Franz Tscherne in their supporting roles.

Rounding out the evening’s musical pleasures were Maxime Pascal and the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien. They conveyed the full range of the music’s emotional complexity that moves freely from richly orchestrated romantic segments to strident atonal sections reflecting the characters’ inner landscape.