Where would opera be without dead women? It is hard to think of any other art form more umbilically dependent on female mortality. The casualties stretch from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, written at the end of the 17th century, right through to Peter Eötvös's Love and Other Demons, premiered at Glyndebourne less than a year ago. Thirty years ago, the French writer Catherine Clément wrote an entire book on the subject. The list of core repertoire operas in which the central female character dies includes works such as Bellini's Norma, Verdi's Rigoletto, La Traviata and Otello, Bizet's Carmen, Wagner's Tristan, Ring and Parsifal, Puccini's Tosca, Madame Butterfly and La Bohème, Strauss's Salome and Elektra, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Janacek's Katya Kabanova and Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu—and many more besides.
The deaths to which these women are subjected can be morbidly ingenious. Sometimes they sacrifice themselves. Sometimes they are sacrificed by others. They die in childbirth and in illness; they are murdered, crushed, asphyxiated, drowned and executed. Among the more bizarre are a dive into the erupting Vesuvius (Auber's La Muette de Portici), a leap into an Alpine avalanche (Catalani's La Wally) transformation into a laurel tree (Strauss's Daphne) or into a constellation (Cavalli's La Calisto). There's even, in the ultimate self-referential finale, singing oneself to death (Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann).
In terms of performance, the statistics are still more startling. Out of the 23 operas in the Royal Opera House's 2008-09 season, which runs until the end of July, 15 involve the deaths of women in one form or another. As a proportion, this is probably not untypical. So it surely invites the question: why? Why do women have to die so often in opera? Why is opera, in the title of Peter Conrad's compelling book, "a song of love and death" and of female death in particular?
Alan Berg's Lulu (1937), restored to the Covent Garden repertoire this summer for the first time in more than quarter of a century, is a hugely important work in this tradition. On the surface, Lulu is a stereotypical work. The eponymous Lulu, dancer, mistress and prostitute—born to entice and seduce, as the animal tamer in the opera's prologue puts it—could almost be an operatic first cousin to the courtesan Violetta in La Traviata, also revived by the Royal Opera this summer. Femmes fatales in every sense of the words.
But the gulf between the two works is vast. Verdi's opera sentimentalises Violetta's humiliations. Surrounded at her bedside by those who once spurned her, Violetta dies of tuberculosis amid a shimmering halo of poignancy and noble suffering. Berg's opera, by contrast, refuses to sentimentalise at any point. Lulu's lovers are not reconciled; instead they take their revenge. She is murdered by Jack the Ripper. Her final words are not serene, like Violetta's, but a scream of "No, no." Instead of Verdi's consolatory string harmonies, Berg unleashes a massive orchestral discord of immense violence.
Lulu, in other words, is unambiguously a victim and a victim of men. The opera, while superficially about an amoral "woman of the world" like Violetta, is actually in direct opposition to Verdi's. Karl Kraus said Lulu was "the tragedy of the hounded and eternally misunderstood grace of woman." Misunderstood by men, that is. But not, as every visit to this great work underscores, misunderstood by Berg. Berg's Lulu is the most unflinchingly honest male depiction of women on the operatic stage. And its bleak honesty is never more searing than in the abruptness of Berg's final bars. Lulu has no neat ending, tidy moral or rounded conclusion. The music merely stops, leaving the audience to supply its own answer in silence.
