Lulu
July 2004 Reviewed by: Wes Marshall Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

For anyone who thinks opera is a staid divertissement for old ladies and their bored husbands, a quick look at this DVD of Lulu will demonstrate that there is still life in the art form. With a story as bizarre and monstrous as some of today’s most abstractly weird films (think of The Cell or Abre los ojos), there’s nothing conventional about Lulu. The composer, Alban Berg, wrote using all 12 tones of the Western scale, a device that lends an eerie feeling of never resolving, mirroring Lulu’s descent into a hellish life that ends with her being slashed to death by Jack the Ripper!

Berg wrote his own libretto, and it is writhing with barely hidden, Freudian deep-id nightmares, from slashing razors to dismembered bodies and fetishes built around women’s makeup. Even today, this is strong stuff. When it was originally written in the 1930s, it was appalling. I can only guess what the head of the Nazi party, himself a ball of Freudian confusion, must have thought of Lulu.

Director Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s production is an upsetting, even traumatic experience. He found a group of very good singers, not the least of which is the alluring Laura Aikin as a superb Lulu. Besides her enticing voice, she is one of the few opera singers today with enough earthy sexiness to make you believe she could fuel masculine mayhem with just a come-hither look. She’s also brave enough to spend a good part of the first act running around in a see-through outfit. Conductor Franz Welser-Möst pounces on the score, ripping any neo-Romantic tendencies away, and making the piece sound closer to Webern than the usual Mahler-esque romanticizing it usually receives.

Fans of the version of Lulu completed after the composer’s death and against his family’s wishes should be aware that all we get here is the part Berg completed. The director’s decision was to use some of Berg’s other music with an expressionistic black-and-white film that has a higher gore quotient than most of the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Again, like the rest of the production, none of this is for the nervous.

Both sound and visuals are superb, and there are 34 minutes of extras, including one of the most penetrating dissections of an opera by its principals I’ve ever seen on a DVD. Until we get a high-definition version, I can’t imagine this DVD being surpassed.

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