Lulu
By Alban Berg
(Third-Act Orchestration by Friedrich Cerha)
At the Opéra Bastille in Paris
Produced by Opéra national de Paris
Conductor, Michael Schwønwandt
Director, Willy Decker
An essay on Berg's music and a review of the performance on Oct. 21, 2011
(Cliquer pour lire la critique en français)
From various corners of the auditorium came the voices. No, not those of the singers, but rather those of dead philosophers who were daring me to react to Berg's music. From Kant came the question, "Does everyone agree that this music is beautiful?" My answer: don't be ridiculous. From Schopenhauer, "What are Berg and his disciples telling us about their Wills?" My answer: they've given up trying to escape. From Plato, "Of what thing is this music an exemplar?" My answer: arrogant cacophony. From Hegel, "Is this spiritual freedom?" My answer: if it is, then oppression is worth a second look. And from Adorno, "What's the truth-content?" My answer: that society should be chaotic. Berg doesn't invite neutrality. And those who champion his music, or, for that matter, the music of Schoenberg or Webern, have a tough time defending their advocacy by means of the same reasoning that they derisively say elevates it above the traditional bourgeois tonal fluff of days gone by.
Their fallacy is one of irrelevancy. Should we also shun fine wine because the bourgeoisie enjoys it? Should we abandon our children because the bourgeoisie promotes "family values"? Should we reject vegetarianism because Hitler embraced it? Should we repudiate paintings by Picasso because art dealers have profitted from buying and selling them? Ultimately, despite twelve-tone arguments for chromatic egalitarianism or appeals to liberation from conventionality, music should stand on its own merits or fall on its own demerits. Social context should not enter into our evaluation of music qua music, because doing otherwise denies the existence of the many and various personal factors that determine the psychological impact of music on a given listener.
I dislike Berg's music. And without apology. Nevertheless, I do find it interesting to study. In other words, it offends my ears but engages my intellect. Two listeners can disagree over Berg's music, but there always remains the question why one of them "likes" it even as the other doesn't. The former listener, whom we'll call the contrarian, might choose to investigate this question by listening to Berg more academically, perhaps while following a score. But even if he does so, he'll eventually have to decide when he's invested enough time and energy before concluding that it doesn't move him or interest him. An alternative is to force himself to change his expectations in view of the radical difference between Berg and Mozart, Berg and Rossini, or Berg and Stravinsky, expectations more in line with the jolting nature of twelve-tone music.
Needless to say, either course of action could be a waste of his time. Berg may just not resonate with his psychology -- another way of saying that the music may not be to his taste. And this explanation, like it or not, implies another explanation, one that secretly pleases me because of the smugly self-congratulatory defense of dodecaphony that so often sets fire to otherwise civil discussions of music among friends and colleagues. That explanation is that perhaps Berg's music isn't as good as its advocates claim. Let's face reality: novelty exploits weariness. Even savants who are looking for something fresh can deceive themselves into blindness toward the decidedly clear difference between rigidity and flexibility, and between mastery and facundity. Self-plaudits harden like concrete.
If our contrarian chooses to listen while following a score, or to modify his expectations, then the connection between knowledge and esthetics will require an epistemological recalibration. As he learns more about dodecaphonic music, Berg in particular, the work might begin satisfying his esthetic sensibilities. This isn't at all unreasonable, but I still have to wonder whether the taste of my favorite cognac would suddenly improve were I to know the vintage of the original grapes. It wouldn't, of course, but the totality of the experience might be more gratifying, more meaningful. Who would deny that germane information affects the appreciation of a work of art? Cursory listening misses much of what informed listening catches.
Therefore, if musical taste is a function of information (and other factors), then exchanging information might cause two disparate musical tastes to converge. But even if that information heightens the contrarian's appreciation for the skill without capturing his esthetic sense, then his response to the music -- i.e.,, his dislike of it -- has a different origin than mere ignorance of certain facts. Everything "taste" comprises -- emotions, psychology, values, etc. -- has somehow blocked Berg's music from resonating with our contrarian.
While Berg's music may be interesting, a good example being the symmetry (the palindromic structure) of Lulu and its integration into the drama, it doesn't resonate with me at all. In fact, it repels me. Berg's contemporaries Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, either in spite of or because of their own dissatisfaction with conventional music, brought together the familiar elements of tonality with some uncomfortable elements of newer styles into a music that retained a tonal center while shimmering with a fresh, modern sound; it engages both emotionally and intellectually. Likewise Martinu, Janácek, and Milhaud. Even Varèse and Ives seemed to understand the power of tonal anticipation and fulfillment. There is indeed emotional intensity in Berg's music, especially Lulu, along with severe structuralism, but that intensity fails to move me probably because of extreme tonal ambiguity that my ear interprets as dissonance without resolution. If he does suggest tonality, he denies it to the listener. There's no unifying tonal architecture, no center that pulls. Despite the opera's rigorous musical organization within the twelve-tone system, an organization that challenges the mind and stirs respect for the skill involved in creating it, it remains outright ugly. The impressiveness comes not from beauty but from structure.
[I hesitate to use the term "progressive" to describe dodecaphony because it assumes the change in question to be an improvement, a move forward. We might argue that to be progressive, the music only has to move away from the existing system, not that it be an improvement. The philosophical shift rejected what it considered the bourgeois strictures of traditional Western music (largely tonality) in favor of innovation that eventually proved to impose just as many, if not more, strictures on music. The "new music" was intolerant, inflexible, and stifling, worse than conventional Western music.]
In my opinion, the most rational refutation of twelve-tone music comes from Diana Raffman in her essay "Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVII, 2003). She sees dodecaphony as an instance of atonality, defined as the absence of a "center of gravity", an "abandonment of the traditional pitch framework". One major criticism of dodecaphony, she points out, is that it isn't "perceptually real". No one, not even the composers themselves, can hear the twelve-tone structures in the music; it's "indecipherable". Wrong notes and rhythms escape detection. Consequently, she argues, twelve-tone music is defective. "[A] competent listener", Raffman writes, "understands an utterance of a natural language by unconsciously applying grammatical rules to...the incoming acoustic string. These rules analyze the...structure of the utterance". A musical feeling arises, she believes, from the "listener's recovery of musical structure, without the mediation of rules", a process that we're hard-wired to execute. Accordingly, Raffman argues that twelve-tone music must allow the composer to communicate with the listener and stir within the listener an emotional response. To support this claim, she cites Schoenberg himself, who wrote ironically that twelve-tone music must satisfy both the emotions and the intellect.
In his philippic ("How Talented Composers Become Useless", The New York Times, Mar. 10, 1996) against this kind of music -- a rather brutal diatribe, I have to admit -- Richard Taruskin draws a very helpful analogy. He invites us to imagine an assembly of mathematicians in a room listening to a lecture on an esoteric topic in their discipline. A layman walks into the room, listens, and then at the end leaves with a dismissive "I didn't like it". That layman's dismissal probably means that he failed to understand the lecture. But, Taruskin suggests, consider the difference if an accomplished actress had delivered the same lecture -- word for word -- with "all the expressive resources of voice and gesture" that she'd bring to a Shakespearean role. Our layman would likely find something moving, something beautiful, in her performance, even while the disconnect between content and delivery irritated both him and the mathematicians. In the end, all parties concerned would find the performance "silly and gratuitous", whatever their reasons.
Taruskin is pointing to pomposity and artistic fraud. While advocates of dodecaphony would dismiss objections from laypeople as their inability to understand its complexity, Taruskin says that "the expressive gestures, unsupported by the music's syntax or semantics, are primitive and simplistic in the extreme..." In that review, he's actually criticizing a then-newly-released compact disc from Donald Martino; he continues his denunciation by saying that "Martino can be expressive only in essentially inarticulate ways, the way one might communicate one's grossest needs and moods through grunts and body language. Huge contrasts in loudness and register, being the only means available, are constant. The combination of gross expressive gestures for the layman and arcane pitch relationships for the math professors...fatally undermines the esthetic integrity of the music". If Taruskin's right, and I believe he is, then expressive gestures in twelve-tone music are hollow -- feigned and contrived. The performer himself or herself becomes superfluous. Indeed, if the music predicates its value on intellectual organization, then why does it need to be performed at all? Why isn't studying it on paper sufficient for coming to an understanding, and an appreciation, of it? Raffman extends this reasoning to the point of declaring twelve-tone music incapable of communicating "pitch-related meaning". Twelve-tone music, Raffman concludes, is counterfeit art.
One's own voice is the final arbiter. Logic, decency, and political expediency keep us from forbidding a proponent of Berg's music to "like" or "enjoy" it. But we can, and should, respond to the fanatical and dogmatic evangelism of dodecaphony's self-appointed paladins. And vis-à-vis twelve-tone music, there never existed an ideologue more rabid in his zeal for the cause than Theodor Adorno, despite his brilliance (see his book Philosophy of Modern Music, Mitchell and Blomster, trans.). Dodecaphony serves as a revolution against the "culture industry", which he sees as a dangerous habitus pacifying the masses toward the capitalist system. But one of his philosophical errors lies in restricting music to only one legitimate function, namely, that of social change. The intensely personal power of music he ignores -- the power of tonal music to meet an individual's emotional needs or to challenge his or her mind. What function, I wonder, would Adorno assign to music after the social change he seeks has occurred?
Adorno's famous contempt for American popular music creates an incongruity that reinforces my point. Such music is nearly always tonal; furthermore, it sometimes catalyzes social change, calls on religious feeling, and afflicts the bourgeoisie. Consider, for example, the many protest songs during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, songs such as "Go Tell It on the Mountain", "We Shall Overcome", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "If I Had a Hammer". Moreover, Ragtime (1900s), Jazz (1920s), Swing (1930s), and Rock (1950s) were all derided in their time for upsetting the social order. The fact that Adorno's "culture industry" promotes certain styles of music over others, and profits from doing so, does not nullify the music qua music. And I say this as a self-confessed snob who himself eschews some of those styles.
As much as the music was ugly and self-righteous, this production of Lulu by Opéra national de Paris was arrestingly beautiful to the eye. The giant parabola created the impression of two worlds on stage, one within the cone and the other without. Inside the cone, the illumination was bright and the colors were bold; outside, however, the ambience was dark, the colors were muted, and the shadows were heavy. Moving between the two worlds was effected by ascending or descending a small ladder, which, being precarious, made us nervous whenever someone used it. All the activity in the outside world took place around the parabola's focus, making the symmetry so strong that any asymmetry introduced by activity on stage was very noticeable. That symmetry paralleled the symmetry in Berg's score.
Lulu is a seductress with limitless sexual allure, who kills her men or drives them to suicide. Arrested for the murder of one husband, she begins her descent. By the end, she's a prostitute in London, her last client being Jack the Ripper, who murders her and her lesbian lover, Countess Geschwitz. Because Lulu is both the victim and the victimizer, she's more complex than Salome, but Laura Aikin went further in giving Lulu two personalities between which she could switch in a flash. Her Lulu wasn't just cold, but arguably sociopathic, though there were a few ephemeral moments when something resembling a conscience materialized. Sometimes I even detected solipsism, but I may have been extrapolating from the very sharp distinctions the geometric symbolism cut among the characters. We must believe that Lulu can seduce almost anyone, male or female; her high tessitura and aggressive coloratura are intended to achieve that effect. Aikin soared on those lines as though Berg had written them expressly for her voice.
But I have to wonder whether even the conductor would have noticed a wrong note.