If one were to bake a birthday cake for Alban Berg, one would be forgiven for rendering a handgun in icing and hollowing out the layers to make room for prostitutes and madmen.
When Berg came to write his sordid, darkly humorous, ultimately bloodcurdling masterpiece “Lulu,” he based it on the plays of Frank Wedekind. However, significantly, the influence of film also permeates the work.
I don’t know that it’s ever been proved, but the composer had to have seen Louise Brooks’ sensational performance in G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” (1929). The scandalous silent film classic, based on the same material, was an international triumph, and to this day, stage Lulus frequently emulate Brooks’ iconic style.
Also, at the very center of the opera is a filmed interlude. The composer was obsessed with symmetry and palindromes. They pervade the opera, so much so that in the cinematic centerpiece, a silent film that dramatizes the events surrounding Lulu’s incarceration and escape, the music reads the same backwards and forwards.
In a piece that’s so aggressively contemporary in its decadence and cynicism, it’s unsurprising that Berg would embrace modern technology. One wonders what he would have made of the digital age.
Love, eroticism, and death were nothing new to opera, but there is something about “Lulu” that’s especially disturbing and transgressive. It’s subversive, sleazy, squalid, and calculated to shock. It’s not for nothing that Lulu, the protagonist, is introduced by a lion tamer!
But Lulu is just being Lulu. The title of the first of Wedekind’s plays is “Erdgeist” – “Earth Spirit.” Lulu is plucked from the streets, and her raw sexuality has devastating effects on both the men and women in her life. Moral confusion abounds. Sure, she makes some monstrous choices. But we’re left to wonder, as with Jessica Rabbit, is she bad, or did society just draw her that way?
Lulu in her amorality is the product of in an inauthentic world. After three acts of unfettered destruction, she dies at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Serialism’s greatest heroine falls prey to history’s most notorious serial killer.
Berg composed his opera between 1929 and 1935. The ‘30s were a fraught time in Europe. It goes without saying, the Nazis did not like “Lulu.” Berg himself may not have been Jewish, but his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, high priest of dodecaphony, was. Berg’s twelve-tone idiom alone would have been enough to get his opera banned. And his reputation had already been made with the equally disturbing “Wozzeck,” given its first performance in Berlin in 1925. He was added to the Nazi catalogue of “entartete” composers in 1933.
The composer did not live to see the Führer’s furor over “Lulu.” He died of blood poisoning, the result of an insect sting, on Christmas Eve 1935. He was 50 years-old.
At the time of his death, the opera was not yet quite complete. He was well along on the piece when two things occurred:
First, he learned from Wilhelm Furtwängler that the climate in Berlin was unfavorable to a performance there. So he broke off on orchestrating the opera to develop some of the music into a “Lulu Suite,” which he hoped to have played in concert. Erich Kleiber, who had introduced “Wozzeck” in 1925, programmed the suite at the Berlin State Opera. After the performance, he was forced to resign and basically run out of the country.
Berg paused a second time to compose his Violin Concerto for Louis Krasner. This he dedicated to the memory of 18 year-old Manon Gropius, one of Berg’s muses, whom he and his wife had come to view as their own daughter. Manon’s birth parents were Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and Walter Gropius. The concerto would go on to become Berg’s best-loved work.
At some point, the composer wrote to Anton Webern to let him know that “Lulu” was essentially complete. He anticipated he would need only two or three weeks to overhaul it before he started in on its orchestration.
After his death, it was found he had managed to complete most of it. The parts he did not were left in short score, with detailed indications as to his plans for filling out the orchestration. Nevertheless, Schoenberg, Webern, and Zemlinsky, all friends of Berg, declined to take up its completion. Berg’s widow was left with the impression that the task must have been impractical, if not impossible. It was only after her own death in 1976 that Friedrich Cerha moved ahead with plans to finish it.
“Lulu” received its premiere, incomplete, in Switzerland, in 1937. Cerha’s edition was first staged soon after its publication in 1979. This was rapturously received, and it is now the preferred version.
Berg was always considered the Romantic among serialists. One critic dubbed him “the Puccini of twelve-tone music.” “Lulu” is freely-composed, but makes use of the twelve-tone technique promulgated by Schoenberg. Fascinatingly, each character in the opera gets his or her own tone row, so that each of the rows serves the purpose of a leitmotif – a fragmentary slip of music, bearing extramusical associations – as in the works of Richard Wagner. But if there is an opera further from Wagner’s Valhalla than “Lulu,” I don’t know it!
Interestingly, there was nothing at all sordid about Berg the man. There was no violence or scandal in his life. He was intellectual and well-spoken, and he didn’t consort with criminals and prostitutes. He just knew a good succès de scandale when he saw one.
“Lulu” has long since taken its place in the standard repertoire, alongside Berg’s “Wozzeck.” I can’t say it’s the most pleasant night at the theater, but it is an absorbing one, and it still retains its modern edge.
Happy birthday, Alban Berg!
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Berg’s “Lulu Suite”
The Violin Concerto
Louise Brooks as Lulu
“Lulu”… by Lou Reed and Metallica?
