Opera Scotland

Lulu 1975Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Read more about the opera Lulu

The 1975 Festival had a promising programme, with four operas on display. Scottish Opera gave the premiere of Robin Orr's Hermiston, based on Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished masterpiece. The Deutsche Oper from Berlin paid its second visit to Edinburgh with classic productions of Salome and Lulu. The Festival followed up its production of Don Giovanni, with Geraint Evans and Daniel Barenboim, which had been the centrepiece of the 1973 and 1974 programmes, with a new staging, by Evans himself, of Figaro, which would return in 1976. Like the Don Giovanni, it was recorded for posterity.

Gustav Rudolf Sellner's production of Lulu was almost dominated by Filippo Sanjust's elegant black and white designs. When new, a decade earlier, the staging had been the basis of a notable recording by Karl Böhm, with Evelyn Lear and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Some of that original cast remained. Josef Greindl's career as a Wagnerian bass at Bayreuth went back to the early fifties. Patricia Johnson had sung Carmen and other major roles with Sadler's Wells, but now rarely returned from her home in Berlin. The American coloratura Catherine Gayer had also established her base in Berlin, but was now a firm favourite with Scottish audiences, and her interpretation of Lulu was quite charismatic.