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Opera music has become something new on the stage

Jacques COULARDEAU | OLLIERGUES France | 01/16/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This opera has become mythic in the world of the opera because it deals with a subject that is outrageous and frankly immoral. It starts like a circus with the presentation of the menagerie by a master of ceremonies, the most beastlike beast being the woman, Lulu of course.

This woman is a femme fatale so common in the clichés of the Belle Epoque from the Eiffel Tower to just before the Black Friday. She is an easy woman, not really a prostitute, at least at the beginning. A woman who wants to be free and finds her freedom in the love, meaning sex of course and derangement of the mind, she inspires in men around her and she has no limits, no sense either. She is absolutely crazy in her hunger for victims falling to her sex appeal. Even a Prince is caught but she cannot choose and runs away to one more and one more and one more. Some actually die along the way and she becomes the beast to be hunted and tracked down. The police is coming. She is helped out and suggested to disappear in Egypt or locked up in a house for the sole pleasure of one man who would cover the trip or pay for the refuge. She refuses in the name of her freedom in a way. Then we follow her descent into hell that is represented by the last three men she will get. A dealer in religious goods that has lost God. A black man clearly called a N**** (sorry for the word but such characters were common in European culture in that period due to the colonialization of Africa and the still pending experience of nazi racism) in the libretto and the opera, and finally the anachronism of all centuries, Jack the Ripper who will of course rip her up and finish her up forever. But what is most interesting in this opera is the complete transformation of the role of music.

A turnaround seems to have taken place in the music as well as in the opera in these 1930s. The music is no longer a "decoration", a beautiful virtuosity, which it became at the end of the Middle Ages and with the Renaissance. It does not go back to the religious finality it had before of expressing the divine beauty of God's creation and God's teaching or message. But it is not either any more some entertaining element that had to please the senses as represented in the evolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. It has become part of the plot and the libretto. An opera is all sensory because it is synesthetic but this synesthesia is expressed by the merging of the various levels of the opera: the music, the singing, the language, the meaning, the plot, and of course the stage production. Music is not there to embellish the scene, or to enable the singers to glow and shine. The music builds the density of the plot, of the opera. The "instrumental and vocal" music is only part of the vast all-mediatic and all sensory music of a modern opera from plot to stage.

The end comes from Lulu's own hands. Lulu introduces Jack the Ripper as her latest street conquest and she negotiates her deal or trick with him but she is a novice and Jack is actually paid by her for the business that is in no way shady at this moment but a pure suicide or execution. A complete reversal. She takes him to the bedroom. The Countess then sings the dirge that announces Lulu's death that comes after her four "nein" and her death-cry. Jack comes out and washes his hands, like Pilate in another situation. The Countess closes the story with a call to Lulu the angel, which reminds us of her commitment just before Lulu's death to the rights of women. This opera then becomes an archetype by this very story.

Aren't women who want to be free reduced to prostitution and death? Is the future of women's rights in the fake freedom these prostitutes represent? Is the end always death in the hands of some perverse sex addict? Can such a woman only bring death and ruin to the men who love her? Can she only satisfy murderers like Jack the Ripper?

And the music builds the whole story. The contradictory tendencies, interpretations, the play in the play. What we see - voyeurs that we are - is not what it means. Life is a stage on which human beings strut and play their parts. But music on the stage turns the actors into actors of themselves, twofold, double, dual actors or marionettes that are playing a mental play inside the superficial visible play, and that mental play is revealed by the music and the singing. The music reveals the second depth of the play.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

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