Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Alban Berg’s Lulu is generally acknowledged as one of the master pieces of twentieth century opera. However, because of its many musical and theatrical challenges, it is seldom performed. The last time Lulu was seen at the Metropolitan opera was in 1980.
The San Francisco Opera has undertaken the enormous challenge of mounting Berlioz’s The Trojans. It consists of two complete operas, The Capture of Troy and The Trojans at Carthage. They are being performed together, which is most unusual, but is how Berlioz envisioned it. The forces involved are enormous. In this production there are 72 instrumentalists in the pit and 23 backstage including 4 trumpets.
First of all, gratitude. Gratitude to Opera Parallèle for its consistently high quality productions of contemporary works, and for their extensive educational outreach program; more specifically, for its new production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, featuring revised scoring for smaller orchestral ensembles—a revision that loses nothing and makes the piece more accessible for smaller companies.
The question is not whether it was appropriate for the Metropolitan Opera to stage this important and controversial piece, but rather, did they do it right? Did they mount it so that its poetic, dramatic and musical potential was well realized?