The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta

ACT II The villagers are on their way to the castle to ask for Rodolfo’s help in restoring Amina’s reputation. Elvino and Amina come face to face, but he cannot believe she is innocent and furiously wrenches his ring from her finger. Back in the village square Elvino is preparing to marry Lisa when Rodolfo arrives to try and convince him of Amina’s innocence. At that moment Amina herself appears, sleepwalking on the roof before crossing a dangerous bridge, and carrying the flowers, now withered, that Elvino had given her. She speaks of her sadness at her lost love. Elvino, finally convinced, kneels before her and begs her forgiveness; Amina wakes and they are joyfully reconciled.

Music and Background

La Sonnambula is generally considered Bellini’s first true masterpiece, and a fine example of the vocal style known as bel canto: a term which literally means ‘beautiful song’ but implies far more, including an extreme refinement of tone and technique, and an ability to deal with decorative embellishment. For a bel canto composer, Bellini’s embellishments are actually rather restrained – he preferred to write in long, elegant phrases – and La Sonnambula is remarkable above all for the lyricism of the music provided for the original incumbent of the title role, Giuditta Pasta, one of the supreme singers of her age and a continuing champion of Bellini’s work.

Highlights

Amina’s opening cavatina ‘Come per me sereno’ has beguiling charm; her sleepwalking ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’ in the closing scene is a touching example of Bellini’s extended melody; and her final ‘Ah! non giunge’ is a brilliant showpiece arguably unsurpassed in all bel canto writing.

Did You Know?

Bel canto heroines commonly go mad, a device used to generate a sense of pathos in the character. Amina’s somnambulism is a less extreme equivalent.

The ‘dangerous bridge’ over which Amina sleepwalks was reputedly added for Jenny Lind.

Recommended Recording

Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, National Philharmonic Orchestra/Richard Bonynge. Decca 417 424-2.The second of Sutherland’s two recordings, made in 1980 when her voice was still fresh but more expressive than before. Pavarotti is a hard-to-beat partner.

Alban Berg

(1885–1935)

Wozzeck (1922)

Lulu (1935)

Born in Vienna, Alban Berg was a pupil of Schoenberg who began writing in the opulent post-Mahlerian manner of European composers early in this century and then adopted his teacher’s controversial method of making music out of ‘tone rows’: a technique using sequences of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a way that allows no one note greater prominence than any of the others and denies the possibility of a key-centre to anchor the music ‘in C’, ‘in F sharp’, or whatever. Berg was never as strict an exponent of this ‘serial’ method as his teacher, or as his fellow-pupil Anton Webern, which makes him the most accessible of the so-called Second Viennese School of composers. Wozzeck and Lulu have accordingly acquired the status of modern classics, although they were banned in Berg’s own time (the Nazi Third Reich) as degenerate. Berg’s other work includes a Violin Concerto written in memory of Alma Mahler’s daughter, and the Lyric Suite which contains in cryptic number-code a secret love message to his mistress.

Lulu

FORM: Opera in three acts; in German

COMPOSER: Alban Berg (1885–1935)

LIBRETTO: Alban Berg; from two plays by Frank Wedekind

FIRST PERFORMANCE: (Complete) Paris, 24 February 1979

Principal Characters

Lulu

Soprano

Dr Schön, a newspaper editor

Baritone

Alwa, his son

Tenor

Schigolch, an old man

Bass-baritone

Lulu’s admirers and lovers

Countess Geschwitz Mezzo-soprano

The Painter

Tenor

The Athlete

Bass

The Schoolboy

Mezzo-soprano

The Marquis

Tenor

The Banker

Bass

The Prince

Tenor

Synopsis of the Plot

Setting: Setting: Germany, Paris and London; late 19th century

ACT I Lulu is having her portrait painted as a present, but is caught in a compromising situation with the Painter by her husband, who drops dead from shock. Lulu marries the Painter and is living in some luxury; she has, as Schigolch points out, ‘come a long way’. Dr Schön, one of Lulu’s lovers, comes to tell her that they must stop seeing each other as he is getting engaged, at which Lulu protests vehemently. After she has gone Schön tells the Painter all about her colourful past and the many names by which she was known to her former lovers. The Painter is so distressed that he kills himself. Free again, Lulu compels Schön to call off his engagement.

ACT II Schön and Lulu are now married, but Schön is consumed with suspicious jealousy over Lulu’s many admirers, including his own son, Alwa. Schön overhears Alwa declaring his love for his stepmother and suggests to Lulu that she should end her own life. Lulu, almost distractedly, takes up the gun and shoots Schön.

In a silent, filmed interlude, we learn that Lulu has been jailed for murder. She has contracted cholera, transmitted to her on purpose by Countess Geschwitz, to enable her to escape from the hospital. Lulu, Schigolch and Alwa leave for Paris.

ACT III Lulu is surrounded by a crowd of disreputable characters in a Parisian casino. The Marquis, having failed to blackmail Lulu into joining a Cairo brothel, informs the police of her whereabouts but she manages to escape just in time. Her final home is a dingy attic in a London slum where she supports herself, Alwa and Schigolch by prostitution. They are joined by the faithful Geschwitz. In this final, dark episode of her life Lulu sees Alwa killed by one of her clients before she herself, together with Geschwitz, is murdered by Jack the Ripper.

Music and Background

Lulu is a difficult, abrasive and altogether demanding piece, written for a large orchestra, with a bizarre assortment of characters who give the otherwise dark plot a surreally comic edge. It is constructed entirely from a single row of twelve notes in the closest Berg came to total Serialism. However anarchic it sounds in performance, the score actually works according to meticulously organised formal principles, and for ears accustomed to its sound-world, it presents a curious kind of beauty. Berg died before finishing the orchestration of the last act, and his widow prevented completion of the score by other hands during her lifetime. As a result, Lulu had no complete staging until 1979.

Highlights

For anyone less than steeped in its idiom, the big moments of Lulu will be dramatic rather than musical, including the pivotal film sequence in Act II (where the second half is supposed to be a palindromic mirror-image of the first), and the horrendous death of Lulu at the end (a gift for directors with a lurid imagination).

Did You Know?

Berg’s widow forbade completion of the score for personal reasons: she believed Lulu – probably correctly – to be an oblique portrait of that same lover who features in the code of the Lyric Suite.

Recommended Recording

Teresa Stratas, Franz Mazura, Kenneth Riegel, Paris Opera/Pierre Boulez. DG 415 489-2. A lucid account of the complete score by the cast and conductor responsible for the 1979 premiere.

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