The Hellish Drive

For days, out-of-state cars had been rolling into Santa Fe, N. Mex. Director John Crosby of the Santa Fe Opera had been preparing for them for three years while he played "the chess game of getting my men into position on the board."

As he worked through the logistical gambits of mounting the U.S. premiere of Alban Berg's atonal, macabre, erotic opera Lulu, Crosby collected a power ful king and queen: Conductor Robert Craft, a devotee of Berg, and brilliant and beautiful Coloratura Soprano Joan Carroll, who had sung the leading role 39 times before, yet never in English. But the chess game only began with the big names. Scene shifters had to be taught to handle six sets ranging from a wealthy home to a brothel; dressers had to learn how to zip Joan Carroll in and out of ten costume changes with about a minute for each change.

Spellbinder of Sex. For all the complications, though, Crosby came out ahead. With standees all the way back to the parking lot, the largest audience in the seven-year history of the Santa Fe festival saw all the preparation pay off in a mesmerically compelling performance. Many in the audience were so overwhelmed that they never left their seats at intermission, and those who did refrained from the customary chatty socializing, as if unwilling to break the opera's strange spell.

Lulu is indeed a spellbinder, a power ful, unrelenting tragedy of sex. Berg wrote the opera in the early '30s and shaped his libretto from two plays by the great German Dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), who was obsessed by the fury, the brevity and the desolation of the pursuit of sexual pleasure. As Wedekind's translator put it, "he dealt in 'the hellish drive out of which no joy remains alive.' " In both of his plays, Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) and Die Buechse der Pandora (Pandora's Box), Wedekind centered this hell in a promiscuous woman, Lulu.

Lulu derives from the legendary folklore of the succubus, a female demon who was thought to have intercourse with sleeping men. Lulu destroys men wholesale. Early in Act I, Lulu's aging husband surprises her in the arms of an artist and would-be lover (Stanley Kolk), and dies of a heart attack. She marries the artist, but he, in turn, commits suicide when he discovers that Lulu is still in love with Schon, an abusive former lover. Schon tries to escape the Lulu hex with another woman, but Lulu later shoots him to death. And the round of grasping, joyless love goes on. Thoroughly depraved, Lulu even becomes involved with her stepson and a lesbian named Countess Geschwitz. Eventually she destroys both of them.

Singer of Assurance. While the first half of the opera focuses on Lulu as predator, the second half marks her for prey. Symbolically, she is destroyed by the moral cant of the bourgeois mind, which condemns in others the vices it refuses to acknowledge in itself. Lulu's actual death is horrifying; she is disemboweled by Jack the Ripper in a London garret. At this event, Berg's music erupts in an agonizing holocaust of atonal sound, the musical equivalent of the howl of the blinded Oedipus.

Far from being the sordid shocker it might seem, Lulu contains some of the most lyrically tender passages in all of Berg's music. And Joan Carroll has an actress' gift for tactful understatement that keeps the sexy from becoming the squalid. As Joan Carroll says: "Lively is the word for Lulu.'"

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