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Clara Hunter Latham, How Many Voices Can She Have? Destabilizing Desire and Identification in American Lulu, The Opera Quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 3-4, summer-autumn 2017, Pages 303–318, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbx030
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Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu reinterprets Alban Berg’s Lulu against the backdrop of the American civil rights movement. White European characters are recast as African Americans, and the drama is interspersed with spoken excerpts from the writings of Martin Luther King. Even more radical, perhaps, are the gender politics of Neuwirth’s revision—and, specifically, its approach to the character of Countess Geschwitz, Lulu’s steadfast companion and would-be lesbian lover. In Berg’s opera, Geschwitz’s unrequited love can easily seem peripheral to the larger plot. Neuwirth, however, seizes on this relationship. Geschwitz—now “Eleanor,” a Blues singer—emerges as the hero, choosing a path of moral good (and evading her original fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper), while Lulu herself remains mired in a sexualized subservience to men. American Lulu premiered at Berlin’s Komische Oper in 2012, where it was dubbed a “Jazzy BlackPower Bergwerk.” Subsequent performances have taken place at the Bregenz Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, and London’s Young Vic, yet it has also been met with mixed reviews, leaving some listeners baffled by the meaning of its transformations.1
