page_title: Lulu (opera)
section_title: Serialism
hierarchical_section_title: Lulu (opera) / Analysis / Musical / Serialism
caption_attribution_description: English: Berg's Lulu basic tone row on C.
context_page_description: Lulu is an opera in three acts by Alban Berg. Berg adapted the libretto from Frank Wedekind's two Lulu plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora.
  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. 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."
context_section_description: Cell z (also one of the basic cells in Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 4) is the basic cell of Lulu and generates trope I:
  Although some of Lulu is freely composed, Berg also makes use of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Rather than using one tone row for the entire work, however, he gives each character his or her own tone row, meaning that the tone rows act rather like the leitmotifs in Richard Wagner's operas.
  From this one tone row, Berg derives tone rows for many of the characters. For example, the tone row associated with Lulu herself is: F, G, A♭, B♭, C, D, F♯, D♯, E, A, B, C♯. This row is constructed by extracting one note (F) from the basic row's first trichord, then taking the next note (G) from the basic row's second trichord, then taking the third note (A♭) from the basic row's third trichord, and so on, cycling through the basic row three times.
  The tone row associated with Alwa is arrived at by repeating the basic tone row over and over and taking every seventh note;
  this results in the following tone row: B♭, F♯, E♭, G♯, F, B, E, D, A, C, C♯, G
  Similarly, the tone row associated with Dr. Schön is arrived at by repeating the basic tone row (as in the previous example) and taking the first note, missing one note, taking the next, missing two, taking the next, missing three, taking the next, missing three, taking the next, missing two, taking the next, missing one, taking the next, missing one, taking the next, missing two, taking the next, and so on; this results in the following tone row: B♭, E♭, G, G♯, D, F, E, A, B, C, F♯, C♯
caption: Berg's Lulu basic tone row[32] on C
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