ABSTRACT
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 Berg's Lulu. It stretches plausibility and even melodrama to the breaking point. 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. Ms. Schaefer's performance perfectly captured the spirit of Berg's female Don Giovanni, hardly needing a "catalogue aria" to brag of her conquests. Berg first saw Pandora's Box, one of Wedekind's two Lulu plays, at an intimate local theater in Vienna in 1905 when he was twenty. He started to work on Lulu in the late 1920s, suffering constant interruptions and frequent despair of ever finishing.
