Berg: Lulu – Rothenberger, Ludwig

There’s a particular sound Hamburg made in the late 1960s — string tone slightly astringent, brass with a rasp that never quite polished itself away. This document, warts and all, captures it in full flight. The engineers weren’t thinking about posterity. They were thinking about getting a live performance down on tape without the singers falling into the pit, and you can hear the difference. Balances shift. The cymbal crash that opens the circus prologue nearly blows out whatever equipment they were using. Somewhere in the second act the sound briefly collapses to mono thinness before righting itself. None of this matters as much as it should.

What matters is Anneliese Rothenberger, an artist nobody in 1968 expected to find at the center of the most dangerous role in the repertory. She was Vienna’s darling of operetta and Strauss, the singer audiences wanted for Sophie and Zdenka, and here she was throwing herself into a part that had already claimed careers and reputations. She only sang it fifteen times before retreating, by her own later admission, back to safer territory: Mozart and Strauss, the composers who loved her voice rather than devoured it. But those fifteen performances included this one. The strain of a singer working past her comfort zone gives the portrayal an electricity that a more settled, studio-manufactured Lulu can lack. She doesn’t sound like a woman born to sing atonal serial music. She sounds like a woman discovering, in real time, what this score demands of her — the stratospheric entrances, the Sprechstimme that has to land as seduction rather than shriek — and finding it.

Around her, the ensemble bites back. Toni Blankenheim’s Dr. Schön has the weight and the barely contained violence the role wants, a man destroyed by the thing he thought he owned. Gerhard Unger’s Alwa is sung, not barked, which some conductors seem to think is an achievement beyond mortal tenors in this repertory. Ludwig clearly demanded it, and got it. Kerstin Meyer’s Countess Geschwitz carries the opera’s one unambiguous reservoir of devotion, singing it with a plush, aching mezzo that makes the final scene land like a blow. And then there is Kim Borg’s Schigolch: filthy, wheezing, magnetic, a portrayal of moral rot that never once resorts to caricature. It’s one of the great assumptions of the role on disc, matched by very few.

Leopold Ludwig conducts as though he has lived inside this score for years, which by 1968 he probably had. Hamburg was a house that took Berg seriously well before most companies dared. This is the two-act version, since Friedrich Cerha’s completion of act three didn’t exist until 1979 — a fact worth remembering before anyone complains this release feels truncated. It isn’t cut short by choice. It’s working from the material available to musicians of that generation, the same fragment Boulez himself would have known when he first approached the score.

Which brings us to the competition. Boulez’s Paris recording for DG, with Teresa Stratas incandescent and terrifying in the title role, remains the version by which all others are measured: cooler, more analytically lit, magnificently played by an orchestra with nothing to prove technically. Stefan Anton Reck’s Oehms set, live and visceral, gives Boulez a real run for sheer theatrical heat. Jeffrey Tate’s EMI version, complete with the Cerha act three, is a genuine bargain but uneven in its casting of the men. Paul Daniel’s Chandos recording, sung in English, is a fascinating experiment that changes the opera’s skin — Wedekind in translation loses some of his cruelty, becomes somehow more Bellows than Grosz, more genteel than the material wants.

This Hamburg document offers something none of those quite manage: the sound of a genuine premiere-adjacent event, singers taking real risks in real time, an orchestra playing a score still considered dangerous rather than canonical. The sonics will frustrate anyone expecting modern clarity. But opera on disc isn’t only a matter of fidelity. Sometimes it’s a document of nerve. This one has nerve to spare, and Rothenberger’s testimony, decades later, still amazed at what she’d pulled off, tells you everything about the courage this reading required. Not a primary recommendation, but an indispensable supplement to anyone who loves this terrifying, unfinished masterpiece.