Berg's femmes fatales.

In The Dyers Hand (1962), W. H. Auden noted that implausibility is the stuff of opera. Librettists revel in shopworn stage conventions--selected villains and nobles, cross-dressers and crossed identities, fluently managed hide-and-seek, violence and the rough stuff just at the right moment. Few operas take this to the extreme of Alban Bergs Lulu. It stretches plausibility and even melodrama to the breaking point. But Lulu is more than just an expressionist experiment; it is also a commentary on opera's melodramatic cliches, ironically gesturing toward many an opera past. In a very low bow to Da Ponte and Hoffmansthal, for example, Lulu features a "trouser" role.

The libretto was drawn from two dramas by Frank Wedekind. Lulu is a young low life from some German city, without genealogy or credentials. She is called Lulu most of the time, but is also known variously as Eve, Nelly, and Mignon. She exercises the hypnotic, sultry allure commanded by Dietrich's Blue Angel, but is less throaty and mannish; the role is for a coloratura, reaching up to a high "D." On the way up in society, her stage demeanor is implacably thoughtless and flighty; on the way down, she is robotic, with ever more perceptible traces of the tragic.

The opera begins in a painter's studio. Lulu is posing. Dr. Goll, her first husband (the first we know about, that is), forces his way into the studio, catching his wife with the aroused portrait painter. The doctor collapses and dies. Lulu promptly marries the painter, who is then apprised by Dr. Schoen, a newspaper tycoon, that Lulu has been Schoen's mistress. The painter, beside himself with jealousy, cuts his throat. Desperate to free himself from Lulu's charms, Dr. Schoen takes his fiancee to see her dance at a cabaret, hoping that Lulu will relinquish her hold on him. Instead, she stalks off the stage and, as a sign of her hypnotic power over him, dictates a letter for Schoen to write out, announcing that his engagement is over.

Lulu is now married to Dr. Schoen. Their menage includes his son Alwa, a composer besotted with Lulu; the mysterious, decrepit Schigolch--Lulu's protector and a mythic "Father Time" figure--and the Countess Geschwitz, a potential lesbian lover of Lulu (at least in her own mind). In gruesome but comic exasperation--"Thirty years I've labored, and this is my life at home!"--Schoen hands Lulu a pistol for her to kill herself. Instead she finishes off Schoen with five shots. Lulu is arrested and sent to prison. But Countess Geschwitz replaces her. Alwa and Lulu come together, embracing on the same couch where his father bled to death. Lulu hints that she also poisoned the first Mrs. Schoen, Alwa's mother.

The third act begins in Paris in a luxurious salon flail of bankers and gamblers. Lulu, more penurious than ever, is in danger of being sold as a prostitute to a Cairene brothel. She and Alwa barely escape from the police. The final scene: a London garret, Lulu, accompanied by the remains of her retinue, has become a streetwalker. She returns successively with a silent professor, a black African prince (who, on his way out, crushes Alwa's skull), and Jack the Ripper, who slashes Zulu and (also on his way out) the ever anguished Geschwitz, who has made futile moves to aid Lulu and who utters a final cry: "Lulu! My angel! Appear once more to me! For I am near, I'm always near. For evermore!" ("Im Ewigkeit!").

This Spring the Metropolitan Opera revived John Dexter's 1979 production. (The first complete performances of the opera at the Met had been given the season after the completed three-act version was first staged in Paris on February 24, 1979). At particular moments during the performances (the sudden death of Dr. Goll right at the beginning of the opera, for instance), titters were heard from the Met audience. Some serious Bergians were perturbed at this disruption of mood, but the grotesqueries of the libretto demonstrate Berg's belief that true seriousness embraces the comic. It is full of slapstick moments, such as Schigolch's wheezy asthma as he climbs the stairs or his banana-peel pratfalls on Dr. Schoen's slippery parquet floors ("Diese Parketten!!").

Given the demonic, stringent nature of the musical organization of the work and its heightened expressive musical vocabulary, the settings must anchor themselves realistically in the atmosphere and Stimmung indicated by Wedekind and Berg. The highest compliments must be paid to the Met for its realization. The painter's studio, Lulu's dressing room, the Parisian salon, even the London garret brought home to the audience the nasty and gruesome happenings. The sets at the Met give off that "sticky, perfumed, sultry, unhealthy atmosphere" which Stefan Zweig recalled in his memoir of old Vienna, The World of Yesterday, and that is all to the good.