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Olga Neuwirth
Notes on American Lulu (2006-2011)

Extremes have always fascinated me, sensual and abstract extremes, and both can be
found in Alban Berg’s Lulu. Yet it was not my aim to recreate an authentic Alban Berg,
but to take a fresh look from the perspective of a woman, a composer of my
generation, at this mystical female figure (who has been seen as an “enigmatic
woman”, a “serpent”, “demonic woman”, “sphinx” or “child woman”, and characterized
by famous scholarly interpreters of women, such as Krafft-Ebing, or Sigmund Freud
and his associates). The female character of Lulu has always been seen through the
eyes of men. This male view of leading female characters in operas has often puzzled
me.
While the Second Viennese School is well known for their adaptations of works by
other composers, it seemed natural for me to reconsider in particular the opera figure
of Lulu. I believe that precisely this unfinished, famous 20th-century music theater and
its characters lend themselves to being rethought by each generation. For in his music,
Berg sounds the depths of the story in all its psychological nuances and offers musical
solutions for everything.
___________________________________

Stirred by a film I had seen as a child – namely, Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones from
1954, in which the director took the opera Carmen and set it in the South of the USA,
and cast all the roles with African-Americans – I decided to transplant Alban Berg’s
Lulu to New Orleans and New York. Drawing on Berg’s idea of putting Wedekind’s
drama, which was originally set around 1900, in a new social context around 1930, I
moved my reinterpretation of the opera to the US in the 1950s and 1970s, that is,
against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, counterculture and diverse liberation
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 movements. My father is a jazz musician, and I grew up with jazz and jazz musicians.
It was the enthusiastic accounts of my father’s US colleagues about African-American
Edward Bland’s documentary The Cry of Jazz (1958) that motivated me, at the early
age of twelve, to write a theater play revolving around African-American jazz musicians
in Harlem. To my pleasure, it was then performed at a school theater festival in 1980.
Though with regards to a “relocated Lulu”, I was also interested in exploitation films.
From the 1930s onwards, they were often low-budget films that, due to their desire for
lurid subject matters, dealt with violence, sexual acts and other kinds of delicate
issues. The fluid boundary between trash, kitsch and counterculture is what I find
especially fascinating in blaxploitation films like Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet
Sweetback's Baadasssss Song or Jack Hill’s Coffy.
___________________________________

In the opera Lulu, the formal structure of Berg’s rich musical language includes not
only a number of absolute forms, such as sonata, arietta or cavatina, but also English
waltz and ragtime. Due to the spreading popularity of jazz in the 1920s, Igor
Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek, and others, all wrote compositions
influenced by jazz. And apparently this did not go unnoticed by Berg. These influences
were mentioned in a correspondence between Alban Berg and Erwin Schulhoff, who
had become acquainted with jazz, ragtime and American dance music in the early
1920s via his friend George Grosz, who collected phonographic recordings of
American music. This is why I chose to have the passages in Berg’s score that were
marked “film music” and music for a “jazz band” performed on a Wonder Morton organ.
For Berg’s use of film and composition of Lulu began in 1929, and this coincides with
the heyday of this special theater organ. One of the only still functioning Wonder
Morton organs which is used to accompany screenings today is at Loew’s Jersey
Theater in Jersey City. When I was living in New York in 2007 and exploring ideas for
American Lulu, I began researching theater organs. I discovered there was a Wonder
Morton organ that, after years of meticulous work, had been restored and reinstalled at
Loew’s Jersey Theater. The Robert Morton Pipe Organ Company had originally built it
in 1928/1929 for one of its so-called Wonder theaters in the New York metropolitan
area. In 2010, I contacted the Garden State Theater Organ Society, which is
responsible for this organ, and was eventually allowed to record Alban Berg’s “film
music” and music for a “jazz band” on this fascinating, gigantic theater organ.

I have set a major part of the story of American Lulu in the social context of the white
racist South and the civil rights movement. For this reason, between the deliberately
hard cuts I made in Berg’s music, the audience hears fragments from speeches by
Martin Luther King and poems by June Jordan, one of the most important
contemporary African-American poets. Consistent with this relocation to New Orleans
in the 1950s, Lulu, Geschwitz (in my adaptation, Eleanor, a blues singer) and
Schigolch (Clarence, to whom I have assigned ragtime music in Act Three) are
African-Americans.
In analogy to the music for a “jazz band” in Act One, with its clarinets, saxophones,
trumpets, trombones, percussion, banjo, piano, double bass and sousaphone, I have
reorchestrated Alban Berg’s music in the first two acts for a brass and woodwind
ensemble, and electric guitar, electric piano, percussion as well as a small section of
strings. I took this course because it is the music of Lulu’s flashback to New Orleans in
the 1950s, the birthplace of jazz and blues. As a reference to this music, which
originated along the Mississippi Delta, a melody played on a calliope is heard
introducing “Recollection” (the flashback) that is set in New Orleans. The calliope is a
steam-driven keyboard instrument with whistles. Invented in 1855, calliopes were later
often installed on the rooftops of Mississippi steamboats, and played repeatedly
throughout the voyage. Louis Armstrong, who was born in New Orleans, also started
his career playing the trumpet in a jazz ensemble on a Mississippi steamer.
As Berg emphasizes in his essay “The Problem of Opera”, published in 1928, the use
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 of cinema as a cutting-edge medium does not in itself generate modern music. Rather
for him it was more about formal analogies, which was why it became important for me
to find a meaningful analogy for the transformation of sound in my reorchestration of
Act One and Act Two of Alban Berg’s music. It is because of this reorchestration that
Berg’s music has a different sound and, in my opinion, had to be presented, as already
mentioned, in a formal analogy: in “Recollection”, a flashback into the past.
My Act Three takes place in 1970s New York. Lulu has come up in the world and is
now a high-class whore who appears to be completely trapped within herself. With
contacts to important business people and politicians, she is entrusted – unasked –
with matters both private and public. I have always found Berg’s deus-ex-machina
ending with Jack the Ripper rather silly: after great trials and tribulations, two women
are simply slaughtered by a serial killer and: The End. Which is why I decided to
conceive my new Act Three as an unresolved murder case.
______________________________________

Perhaps I see the female figure of Lulu less exaltedly and romantically than the men
who “conceived” her or those who have reinterpreted her over the years. In my
version, Lulu is a rather “cold woman”, a narcissist, who gets whatever she wants at
any one moment. And yet due to the emptiness inside of her, she remains dissatisfied
and turns herself into a market commodity whose value is sometimes higher and
sometimes lower. Lulu alternates between humiliating and pampering others in such
quick succession that it seems like a form of brainwashing, rapidly hammering away.
Such behavior is alien to me and not particularly likeable. In my opera, Lulu and
Eleanor come from similar backgrounds. They have spent their lives surrounded by
racism, as well as white and black machismo. Both of them were victims of abuse in
childhood, a circumstance that has worked towards trying to rob them of their sense of
self and to make them mere objects.
I would like to think people have the option of self-determination, even if this path is
more strenuous than letting themselves be kept and allowing others to go all goo-goo
eyed over them. Tortured and torturing Lulu, whether an exterminating angel or bringer
of happiness – as she has often been described – lives off and through men. She
becomes entangled in a web of dubious intrigues and power games. Eleanor, that
other woman, insists on the inevitability of pain and her subjectivity. She struggles for
freedom and treads a difficult but self-determined path. She confidently searches for
her own form of expression, her own identity. But once again, what ultimately counts
for us today is: Whose voice is heard?

This commission from the Komische Oper Berlin, one of the city’s opera houses,
means a great deal to me because of the production history of Alban Berg’s Lulu. The
opera was supposed to premiere under the direction of Erich Kleiber in Berlin during
the 1934/35 season. By 1930, the Nazi Party already held 107 seats in the Reichstag
(in comparison: the Social Democratic Party of Germany held 143). After Kleiber’s
premiere of Berg’s “Lulu Symphony” with the Prussian State Orchestra in 1934, a
vicious press campaign was launched against Berg and Kleiber. Paul Zschorlich from
the “Deutsche Zeitung” railed, for instance, against the “glorification of vice”, sick
“cocaine-clouded music” and “musical Bolshevism”. He especially attacked the “typical
Kleiber audience, in which the proportion of Jewish listeners was, as always at Kleiber
concerts, unmistakably large”. He ended by stating “there’s no place for cultural
experiments like the Alban Berg concert”. Four days after the concert, and under
pressure from the Hitler regime, Erich Kleiber resigned from his post as general music
director. In January 1935, Kleiber left Germany in protest of Nazi cultural policies.
Berg’s music was not performed in Germany again until after 1945. Alban Berg’s Lulu
– albeit in modified form – will now have its premiere in Berlin after all.
(New York, March 2011)
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 Translated from the German by Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon

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