Lulu (opera)

Lulu
Opera by Alban Berg
Sketch of the composer by Emil Stumpp
Librettist	Berg
Language	German
Based on	Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora by Frank Wedekind
Premiere	2 June 1937 (1937-06-02) Zurich Opera

Lulu (composed from 1929 to 1935, premièred incomplete in 1937 and complete in 1979) is an opera in three acts by Alban Berg. Berg adapted the libretto from Frank Wedekind's two Lulu plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904).^[1]

The opera tells the story of a mysterious young woman known as Lulu, who follows a downward spiral from a well-kept mistress in Vienna to a street prostitute in London, while being both a victim and a purveyor of destruction. It explores the idea of the femme fatale and the duality between her feminine and masculine qualities.

Berg died before completing the third and final act, and in the following decades the opera was typically performed incomplete.^[2] Since the 1979 publication of the version including Friedrich Cerha's orchestration of the act 3 sketches, it has become standard. Lulu is especially notable for using serialism at a time that was particularly inhospitable to it. Theodor W. Adorno wrote, "The opera Lulu is one of those works that reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it."^[3]