Friedrich's ‘Lulu’

Abstract

On 16 February the complete Lulu was heard in a live performance in Great Britain for the first time. It was heard, not seen. What was shown on the stage of the Royal Opera House was a farce by Götz Friedrich, superimposed on Alban Berg's music and libretto. Friedrich is an outstanding example of a type characterized by Arnold Schoenberg more than fifty years ago: ‘Producers who look at a work only in order to see how to make it into something quite different’. Operatic production today seems increasingly to be based on the assumption that composers—who are inept, naïve, and indifferent to the dramaturgical aspects of the operatic theatre—compose music in a vacuum which it is the producer's responsibility to fill. But the music of an opera is not composed in a vacuum. The productive aspects of the work—entrances, exits, lightings, groupings, curtains, movements, the very thoughts and feelings of the characters—have their correspondences in the music. This is what it means to compose an opera.