Berg-Fest Part 1: Junkyard

If one closed their eyes, it was perfectly obvious why Alban Berg is regarded as one of the finest musical dramatists of the twentieth century. The score of his incomplete second opera, Lulu – performed as part of the Staatsoper’s much-welcome Berg-Fest – is a densely constructed, theoretically rigorous work that also manages to delineate the emotions and actions of Frank Wedekind’s drama(s) with clarity and immediacy. On this evening, a generally excellent cast and a dedicated performance from the orchestra under Daniel Barenboim had little trouble articulating the unconventional genius of Berg’s final work for the stage. When it comes to opera, however, music is only half the story, and anyone who kept their eyes open would have left the theatre that evening with any number of unresolved questions. Why, for instance, was there a man on…