Lulu at the Met

I've just come back from a performance of Berg's Lulu, at the Metropolitan Opera. It's a great piece, of course, although weirdly much of the audience didn't seem to think so: it was noticeably thinner by the end than it was at the beginning. I don't really understand this: it's not like people buy tickets to Lulu thinking they're getting Puccini. And the crowd was definitely younger than normal at the Met, something else I found surprising: I don't see why Lulu should attract a particularly younger audience than, say, Moses und Aron or the newly-commissioned version of The Great Gatsby I went to see there.

I also had a piece of luck; whether it was good or bad I wasn't sure to begin with. The eponymous role was meant to have been sung by Christine Schäfer, who got rave reviews. But she was ill, and instead her golden stilettos were filled by Cyndia Sieden, someone I shouldn't imagine one audience member in a hundred had heard of. I did a little web search on her when I got back home, and as far as I can make out she's a coloratura Mozart specialist who has never done anything like this at all.

And this wasn't just outside her natural Mozart turf, it was also her Metropolitan Opera debut: imagine walking out onto the stage of the Met, a nerve-racking experience in the smallest of rôles, and then having to sing Lulu! Understandably, she was a bit shaky to begin with, and even towards the end she found it quite hard to project in the spoken parts. Also, while Lulu is certainly romantic, it's not mushy, and she did have a tendency to heap on the syrup a little bit when it came to the high bits.

That said, however, Sieden grew enormously in confidence over the course of the evening, and by the harrowing end she was Lulu.The cast, the audience and James Levine all gave her an enormous round of applause, which was very well deserved.

It's at times like these that you remember that opera is a theatrical art, and that the audience and the performers really do connect. Especially in this production, which had a fair few Brechtian touches such as the singers referring directly to the Concertmeister Levine, by the end the successful staging of this performance, with this lead soprano, was an individual triumph.Sieden might not be one of the world's great Lulus, but she touched us, here, tonight.

Posted by Felix at 1:56 EST