The lurid Wedekind play on which Berg based his unfinished 1935 opera Lulu (presented here in Friedrich Cerha’s 1970s completion) was once banned in Germany for being an “inexhaustible flow of sexual filth”. But don’t get your hopes up. In Christof Loy’s wilfully minimalist new Royal Opera production the filth has disappeared, along with practically every other visual trapping that might help us to enter Lulu’s fevered, foetid world (think of her as Lolita’s hyperactive big sister) with its merry round of suicides, murders and lost souls.
Instead the piece is staged, all three hours of it, as a kind of cocktail party for moody German business types in an empty, neon-lit warehouse. True, it’s a strange party. Guests occasionally shoot each other or slit their own throats. (The lucky ones die first, you can’t help feeling.) But, deprived of historical and social context, you have no idea why. Or why Agneta Eichenholz’s sweetly-sung, girlish Lulu should drive men to destruction. This femme doesn’t look fatale enough to pick up a parking ticket.
And since everyone wears business suits yet plays multiple characters, confusion is piled on obfuscation — a disaster in an already complex opera that needs all the clarity it can get. Why does nice Philip Langridge suddenly become Mr Nasty, threatening to sell Lulu to a Cairo brothel? The answer is that he’s gone from being the sympathetic Prince of Act I to the vile Marquis of Act III. But you have to know the story inside-out to get that.
That’s not the only irritation. Why substitute a “symbolic” empty spotlight for the painting of Lulu that should be ever-present, like the picture of Dorian Gray, as a way of measuring her gradual degradation? Why isn’t Jennifer Larmore’s superbly sung Countess Geschwitz, Lulu’s loyal-to-the-end lesbian lover, casually killed by Jack the Ripper, as Berg specified? She is diminished as a character by being robbed of her self-sacrifice.
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And how can we tell that Michael Volle’s impressive Dr Sch?n has become the Ripper, when he looks no different? Loy argues that this doesn’t matter: that by stripping away context the story has been “universalised”. But the truth is that he has turned one of opera’s most steamily action-packed yarns into a glacial, uninvolving yawn.
Yet there is a compelling musical reason for seeing it. Berg’s score has a reputation for tunelessness and density, but with the Royal Opera orchestra meticulously rehearsed and magnificently inspired under Antonio Pappano, it sounds luminous, lucid, luscious, even lyrical — like Mahler, 30 years on, in a more angst-ridden era. And Pappano is expert at ensuring that singers of the quality of Klaus Florian Vogt (the infatuated but weak Alwa), Peter Rose (the grotesquely paunchy Athlete) and Gwynne Howell (Lulu’s pervy dad) come through loud and clear. Pity the staging doesn’t do the same for the story.
Box office: 020-7304 4000, to June 20