Animal passion

ENO’s production of Berg’s Lulu, first mounted three years ago, is one of its outstanding successes. Richard Jones, the director, seems to feel a special affinity with Berg, to judge from his recent and wonderful Wozzeck for WNO. Yet Berg’s two operas couldn’t be more different. Stravinsky complained, as many people have, about the big orchestral interlude just before the final brief scene of Wozzeck, that it seems to be telling us how to feel. ‘As if there were any question about how we should feel!’ Stravinsky added. And, however much one loves that stretch of music on its own terms, it’s hard to disagree. Whereas the over-riding feeling I always have at a performance of Lulu is exactly, ‘How should I be feeling?’

On stage we see a variety of incidents, sexual and violent, generated by or around the central figure, about whom there is no agreement even as to whether she is active or passive.