Just an Old-Fashioned Melody

We went to Wiesbaden this evening to hear (and see) Lulu.   It's astonishing how much of a period piece it has become, with the touches of alto sax and bar-room piano in the orchestra, the redundancy and charateristic curves of the various Lulu tunes and — still, best of all, as far as I'm concerned — the silent movie in the middle.  I imagine that in the 1930's, anything remotely like Lulu would have been shocking, even dissonant, in the Neo-Baroque digs of the Hessisches Staatstheater, but now, and even with a highly stylized production (read: lots of wet paint), it's just another night at the opera, and a night without Otis B. Driftwood at that.

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