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Soprano Marlis Petersen Is Saying Goodbye to Lulu

Marlis Petersen is singing the title role in Berg’s “Lulu” in a new production by William Kentridge at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Richard Termine for The New York Times

Quitting while ahead is never easy, but walking away while on top is truly rare. So it was startling to hear Marlis Petersen, the German soprano who reigns in the daunting title role of Berg’s “Lulu,” disclose this week that she plans to retire the part after she sings it in the eagerly anticipated new production by the artist William Kentridge that will have its premiere next week at the Metropolitan Opera.

After all, the current issue of Opera News describes Ms. Petersen as an interpreter of Lulu who has made the part “hers and almost hers alone,” adding that “only a few other sopranos have made a similar impact in the role.” The German magazine Opernwelt recently named her its singer of the year for her performance last spring in Munich as Lulu, an object of relentless desire who is cruelly used by a series of men, kills her husband, becomes a prostitute and is finally killed by Jack the Ripper. The new “Lulu” coming to the Met will be her 10th production of the opera — and, she said in an interview, her last.

“It’s good to stop on a good high point,” Ms. Petersen, 47, said on Monday afternoon after rehearsing the role onstage at the Met and changing out of her costume and makeup, which had helped transform her into a beguiling, vulnerable and, of course, tragic Lulu, who recalled the silent film star Louise Brooks with a dash of Marlene Dietrich.

“It’s been 18 years now, with 10 productions, and I have a feeling it’s time to put her to sleep,” said Ms. Petersen, an intense singing actor. “I’m sad about that. It’s not that I can’t do it anymore; it’s just that I think I need to — how can I put it? — it has sneaked so much into my system that it rules my life somehow, this part.”

She explained that she had already been thinking of giving up “Lulu” to focus on other roles when she hit a wall with it last spring in Munich — literally.

It was the opening night of a new production at the Bavarian State Opera conducted by Kirill Petrenko and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, who also designed the set of glass walls. As Ms. Petersen rushed onto the stage in the second act, she recalled, a trick of the light made it difficult for her to see just where the entrance was, and she misjudged it — and ran full-speed into a glass wall.

“I was gone for like half a second, and I woke up again, and I saw the conductor, and I ran out and I sang, bleeding, bleeding, in a white dress,” she said. “When these things happen suddenly the adrenaline is so high, you step out of yourself and control yourself. Can I still stand? Can I sing? Are my eyes O.K.? Is my brain O.K.? Everything was there.”

She finished the performance — a towel was brought onstage to stop the bleeding, and cool compresses were applied at the breaks — and only learned later that her nose was broken.

“I think when you start running against walls, it’s a sign,” she said.

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Daniel Brenna and Marlis Petersen rehearsing for “Lulu,” a much anticipated staging by William Kentridge that is Ms. Petersen’s 10th production of the opera.Credit...Richard Termine for The New York Times

But abandoning a signature role is not easy for any singer. “There will be phases of grief,” the singer Waltraud Meier said in an interview this summer, the morning following her final performance after 22 years singing Wagner’s Isolde.

As Ms. Petersen finished the run in Munich, she said, she grew emotional at the thought that it would be her last “Lulu” in Europe.

“I didn’t know that it was so deeply rooted in me,” Ms. Petersen said. “Of course, when you say goodbye to something it’s never easy. But it’s really like taking out something, an organ of mine, you know? I cried a lot, and I’m sure that I will cry here, too.”

Ms. Petersen — a coloratura who has had successes at the Met as Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” and as Susanna in the production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” that opened the 2014-15 season — said that she had been adding bel canto parts to her repertory recently, including Bellini’s “La Straniera,” and that she planned to sing Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.”

The Met said that she would appear there as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in a future season. And Ms. Petersen said that she planned to sing the title role in Strauss’s “Salome.”

While she said she was sad that James Levine, the Met’s music director and a longtime champion of “Lulu,” had withdrawn from the run, Ms. Petersen said she was excited to work again with Mr. Kentridge, noting that she sang the role of Pamina in his production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” several years ago at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. And she said that after years of appearing in productions that alternately viewed Lulu as a femme fatale, a victim or both, it was refreshing to take part in a staging that sees the character as more of an enigma, a young woman onto whom the other characters project their desires.

“It’s a white canvas, and you can paint on her what you want,” she said — a fitting metaphor for a production in which Mr. Kentridge projects a rapidly changing set of images inspired by the woodcuts of Max Beckmann, Max Pechstein and Otto Dix onto the opera’s versatile set, in ways that illuminate the action and the characters, and even their thoughts.

“This piece is always new,” Ms. Petersen said. “It has never been, in all of my 10 productions, that I had a double feeling of any moment.”

“I could do another 10,” she added with a smile. “She’s really quite a girl.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Soprano Calls an End to Her Reign as Lulu . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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