Lulu (Work - Alban Berg/Alban Berg) | Opera Online - The opera lovers web site Description Prologue Act 1 Act 2 Act 3 When it was created in Zurich in 1937, Lulu had just two acts. The orchestration for the third act remained incomplete because of the premature death of the composer in 1935. After the death of Alban Berg’s wife, who was hostile to any attempt to complete it, the Viennese composer-conductor Friedrich Cerha, using the various materials left by Berg, managed to create the three-act version staged in 1979 at the Paris Opera with Teresa Stratas in the title role, Pierre Boulez conducting and Patrice Chéreau designing the sets. This new, almost legendary creation at the behest of Rolf Liebermann, then director of the Opéra Garnier, was an obvious success and became the definitive version. Lulu presents a complex portrait of a destructive femme fatale coveted by all men. At once executioner and victim, perverse and innocent, she resembles Manon and might well say, like Carmen, “that she never lied”, always following her instincts.

Called an “exterminating angel” by one of her prey, she is nonetheless a slave to forces that crush her and reduce her to a demeaning existence whose ineluctable outcome is a cruel and sordid death. A critique of a decaying world, a gallery of corrupt characters, the rise and fall of a heroine whose moral freedom hides a profound subservience to men’s desires, Lulu is one of the most significant works of the 20th century. It is a serial or dodecaphonic opera in which Berg takes certain liberties with the technique devised by Schoenberg, to whom the work is dedicated. Showing great formal mastery combining symbolism and symmetry, the arching design pivots on a long interlude entitled “Filmmusik”, a scene not shown – Lulu’s imprisonment – that divides the work into two, like the fate of the heroine, split between rise and fall. Summary Lulu is initially married to a professor of medicine. She spends time with Dr Schön and his son, the composer Alwa, who come to attend a posing session in the studio of the Painter who is doing her portrait. The Painter cannot resist her wicked charm.

Her husband surprises them and collapses, stricken by a case of apoplexy. Now a rich widow, Lulu marries the Painter, who now calls her Eva. She receives into her home a mysterious beggar by the name of Schigolch; it is not known whether he is her father, lover or protector. Dr Schön, Lulu’s true lover, wanting to rid himself of her in order to marry into wealth, reveals her unsavoury past to the Painter, who slits his own throat. Once again free, Lulu manages to marry the weak Schön, whom she kills after seducing his son, Alwa, who turns her over to the police. Schigolch and a countess who is completely devoted to Lulu, Countess Geschwitz, decide to arrange her escape from prison. They enable her to resume her troubled life as femme fatale in Paris, where she now lives with Alwa. When a marquis threatens to turn her in, she convinces Alwa, who is now ruined, to flee with her to London where she prostitutes herself to provide for her lover and Schigolch. One of her clients turns violent and kills Alwa, who had intervened.

The next client is Jack the Ripper. He kills Lulu and then the Countess Geschwitz. Prologue An animal trainer introduces his menagerie to the public. He asks a stagehand to bring on the snake. It’s a woman, Lulu, created to “cause misfortune”. Act 1 At the Painter’s studio in Vienna, Lulu is posing in the presence of Dr Schön, her “protector”, the editor of a major newspaper, and his son, Alwa, a composer. When they leave, the Painter makes advances towards Lulu. She gives herself to him, at which point her husband enters and then dies of apoplexy when he surprises them. The Painter is struck by the young woman’s indifference in the face of this sudden death. He marries Lulu who, for him, becomes Eva. In her elegant salon, she receives a visit from a poor old asthmatic, Schigolch. Is he her father, her protector or her lover? No one knows. Dr Schön, Lulu’s lover, wants to leave her in order to marry into wealth. He reveals to the painter his new wife’s despicable nature and her sordid past.

Unable to bear it, he slits his own throat. Lulu becomes a dancer in a revue conceived by Alwa. She refuses to dance for Schön and his fiancée. Then, realising that Schön is still fond of her, she triumphs by dictating to him a letter breaking things off with his fiancée. Act 2 Lulu has succeeded in marrying Schön, who is tormented by jealousy. She receives a visit from an admirer, Countess Geschwitz. Schigolch reappears with two new individuals, an athlete and a student. But Alwa now seems to have Lulu’s favour and declares his passion for her. Schön surprises them and threatens the young woman. She ends up killing him with five bullets to the back, shouting: “the only one I’ve loved!” Before dying, Schön warns his son against Lulu, who is arrested and imprisoned. Countess Geschwitz and Schigolch arrange Lulu’s escape. Once again under her spell, Alwa readily forgets his father’s murder and agrees to run off with her. Act 3 In a sumptuous salon in Paris, under a false identity, Lulu is celebrating her birthday in the company of her guests.

Gambling and stock-market speculation are the main concerns. Threatened with blackmail by a procurer-marquis, and the demands of the athlete whom she would like to have murdered, Lulu is also confronted with the reproaches of Countess Geschwitz, who loves him. Exposed as a murderer, Lulu manages to flee with Alwa, now ruined by his speculations. She is forced to prostitute herself in a London hovel in order to provide for her lover and Schigolch. The first client is a professor, the second a violent black man who kills Alwa with a club when he attempts to intervene. The last client is Jack the Ripper. Lulu seems desperately to expect some sign of affection from this disturbing character. He stabs her and does the same to Countess Geschwitz, leaving the sordid garret where Lulu ended her life.

Alban Berg's LULU: Decadence, Decay and Myths of Freedom - Wales Arts Review Written by: Steph Power Posted in: Recommended , The Big Read , Music , Performing Arts Alban Berg’s LULU: Decadence, Decay and Myths of Freedom Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming new production of Alban Berg’s Lulu (commencing Feb 8, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff) is the first ever staging of the completed, three-act work in Wales and the first new production for the company by recently-appointed Artistic Director and CEO, David Pountney. Berg started work on the opera in 1928 and all but parts of Act III were finished by the time of his death in 1935. A completion was made by Friedrich Cerha but the opera was heard only as a two-act ‘torso’ until 1979, when the world première of the entire three-act work took place in Paris, conducted by Pierre Boulez. WNO’s production will feature a new completion of Act III (2008) by Eberhard Kloke.

In the first of a series of Wales Arts Review features on this momentous production, Steph Power examines the opera and Berg’s dramatic intentions in cultural context. An obsession with sexuality – and womens’ sexuality in particular – dominated the arts and high culture of fin de siècle Vienna into which the composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) was born. On the surface, social interaction for wealthy Viennese obeyed strict, mannered codes of behaviour but, underneath, the clash of rigid aristocratic tradition with bourgeois opulence made for a dangerously hedonistic cocktail. With the gradual collapse of political liberalism and a simultaneous awakening to social issues and injustice, many artists and cultural commentators set out to expose the decadence and moral hypocrisy of the ruling classes – to whom many, like Berg, ironically belonged. Thus ensued a modernist whirlwind in Vienna; a backlash to the corrupt status quo encompassing a new and radical questioning across the arts and sciences about the nature of the human psyche and the core significance of so-called animal instincts – questioning which was as often triggered by deeply personal trauma as by wider cultural crisis.

‘Wally in roter bluse mit erhobenen knien’ By Egon Schiele Creative life in Vienna was characterised by a striking cohesiveness across the spectrum as artists mingled with cultured professionals in the many coffee-houses and salons, stimulating a shared preoccupation with the problem of the individual in a degenerating society. In the visual arts, a sense of looming catastrophe drove the Expressionism of painters such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (who is also credited with the first Expressionist play, Murderer, Hope of Women). Both artists drew upon desire – and not a little fear – to depict women as powerful creatures of raw sexuality which, according to Kokoschka, amounted to ‘the female principle’. This conflation of women with sex became prevalent amongst the Viennese intelligentsia as women began slowly to gain social emancipation, challenging the existing patriarchal order.

Hence the ambivalence of Schiele’s mentor Gustav Klimt, whose intense sensualism and obsession with sex and death reached apotheosis in the Beethoven Frieze; on the one hand, his myriad women subjects were worshipped as symbols of erotic power, but, on the other, as Angelica Bäumer has noted, they were ‘stylised into figures of fantasy divorced from harsh reality’. Such ambivalence would be taken to devastating extremes and lethal conclusion in Berg’s Lulu. Klimt’s ‘stylised… figures of fantasy divorced from harsh reality’ would be taken to devastating extremes and lethal conclusion in Berg’s Lulu. Berg was keenly aware of developments in the visual arts (his revered – if intimidating – teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, was an accomplished painter as well as an epoch-making composer). But he was particularly drawn to literature and read widely from an early age, becoming passionate about the writings of social critics as diverse as Gerhart Hauptmann, the earlier Georg Büchner and, crucially, Frank Wedekind (1864-1918).

Berg’s first opera Wozzeck (1914-22) drew upon Büchner’s controversial play Woyzeck (1837, unfinished at his death), a ‘working-class tragedy’ much admired by later Expressionist writers and depicting the mental fragmentation of its central character; a soldier dehumanised by military life and the experiments of cruel medical doctors. His second opera, Lulu, was an altogether more problematic and complex proposition. ‘Der rote blick’ By Arnold Schoenberg Starting work on his new libretto at a time well into the Weimar period (1919-33), in which dark political shadows were lengthening from neighbouring Germany, it was Wedekind to whom Berg eventually turned; a culmination of life-long respect for a playwright whose withering political scorn and brutal (sur)realism were often subject to censorship. In 1905, Berg had attended the first, private performance of Wedekind’s banned play Pandora’s Box (1904), in which Wedekind himself appeared as the character Jack.

It turned out to be Berg’s first encounter with a vehement supporter of Wedekind, the political satirist Karl Kraus, whose introductory speech had an equally profound impact on him, and which sparked the formation of a close friendship based on a shared cultural outlook (with Berg taking a keen interest in Kraus’s highly influential, boldly critical newspaper Die Fackel – The Torch). Two years after this inspirational performance, Berg wrote to Frida Semler in 1907 that Wedekind was: ‘the really new direction … at last we have realised that sensuality is not a weakness but an immense strength. Only through an understanding of the sensual, through a profound insight into the depths – or rather, perhaps, the heights – of mankind can one arrive at a true idea of the human psyche’. Many years later, Berg set about compressing the twin, consecutive dramas Earth Spirit (1895) and that same, formative Pandora’s Box into two halves of one seamless libretto – managing to retain all Wedekind’s major characters and plot devices and, crucially, remaining true to Wedekind’s conception of his central character Lulu, despite needing to cut four-fifths of the dialogue.

The enormous care Berg took in adhering to the spirit of the original plays is of key significance regarding his dramatic intentions with the opera, as Lulu is by no means a straightforward social tragedy but a heavily ironic, complex critique of the culture of decadence and illusory social freedom which – notwithstanding the primary and utter catastrophe of increasingly rampant Nazism – was still relevant in the 1930s and remains so today. Lulu is by no means a straightforward social tragedy but a heavily ironic, complex critique of the culture of decadence and illusory social freedom… relevant in the 1930s and today. The plot charts the social rise and fall of Lulu, a figure of immense desirability and mysterious origin and, hence, a magnet for the sexual obsession of all who come into contact with her. Most who do so end up dead through a series of farcical but tragic events and she herself is eventually murdered by Jack the Ripper. The first half of the opera, as in Earth Spirit, charts Lulu’s apparent rise as she outlives two husbands finally to marry Dr Schön, her long-term lover/‘protector’.

The second half, based on Pandora’s Box, depicts her downfall, following her incarceration for the apparently accidental murder of Schön during a jealous confrontation. She escapes from prison with the help of an entourage of besotted misfits including the Countess Geschwitz, Schön’s son, the composer Alwa, the tramp Schigolch and others, running the gauntlet of would-be blackmailers and pimps only to end up as a prostitute in London where she meets her sordid death. A key component of Berg’s dramatic design is his employment of symmetry, through which he not only tightens Wedekind’s narrative structure, but maximises the social critique with a particularly savage, ironic twist. For, in Berg’s libretto – but not in the original Wedekind – Lulu’s three husbands are directly mirrored by her subsequent three clients through role doublings involving the reiteration of both dramatic and musical material. Thus, the Doctor returns as the Professor with the same musical motifs; similarly, the Painter returns as the Negro and – crucially for the dramatic dènouement – Dr Schön returns as Jack the Ripper, thus exposing the toxicity of Lulu’s primary, troubled relationship and taking it to an extreme, fatal conclusion.

This is no simple case of male revenge on Lulu the femme fatale for supposedly ‘luring’ men to their destruction, but a direct correlation by Berg of the social elite with a dark, amoral underworld; not least through the Jekyll and Hyde conflation of a successful, wealthy businessman with psychopathic sex-murderer, leaving no doubt regarding Berg’s desire to brutally rip aside the illusion of his society’s respectable veneer. That the outwardly mild, shy and bourgeois Berg should have set out to deliver such devastating critique of his own privileged class may seem at first surprising. But he himself had fallen foul of hypocritical convention, attempting suicide at the age of eighteen after fathering an illegitimate child with a local serving girl. His sister Smaragda was openly lesbian, embarking on a relationship with a prostitute upon deserting a disastrous marriage, and he held views on homosexuality that were very liberal for the time (nevertheless seeing it as a ‘condition’ necessitating sympathetic understanding).

In common with Berg’s entire output, Lulu is saturated with personal references, many of which remain fully to be explored, but which hint at the tremendous difficulties in Berg’s life beneath the happily married surface (he had a frustrating affair with Hanna Fuchs for years). But certainly, Geschwitz, Lulu and others have personal resonance (the Painter’s suicide perhaps echoing that of the artist Richard Gerstl, lover of Schoenberg’s first wife Mathilda), whilst the composer Alwa is often taken to represent Berg himself. Louise Brooks In any case, at the dramatic dead centre of the opera (so to speak) lies another key to Berg’s dramatic purpose. In the Wedekind, Lulu’s incarceration occurs off-stage, ‘between’ the two plays. But Berg chose to depict her trial, imprisonment and escape by means of a silent-film interlude, probably inspired by GW Pabst’s 1929 silent movie Pandora’s Box starring the celebrated Louise Brooks (though we don’t know for sure and the original 1937 Lulu film no longer exists).

Berg’s film is underpinned by an orchestral accompaniment comprising a sophisticated musical palindrome in which the music pauses on a held chord before quite literally running backwards note for note as Lulu “escapes” – straight (back) into the beginning of Act III, with a recapitulation of the opera’s introductory music. Thus, the sense of overall déjà vu and cyclical entrapment could hardly be more painfully ironic as Lulu re-emerges on stage after her prison breakout to deliver her famous ‘Freedom’ aria. the very notion of freedom is, on many levels, shown to be a chimera in this opera. Indeed, the very notion of freedom is, on many levels, shown to be a chimera in this opera. By the time Berg started work on Lulu, Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking psychological theories had long since shattered the façade of bourgeois respectability, demonstrating how subject we all are beneath the layers of so-called civilisation to the drives of our unconscious and the psychological imprints of past experience.

But these two Wedekind plays are not intended to be Freudian in any sense of exploring psychological motivation, unconscious or otherwise (although of course the plays are open to Freudian interpretation like any drama and, indeed, the opera itself has often been directly interpreted thus – not always helpfully). The original Lulu dramas were submitted for publication before Freud’s revolutionary work The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, emerging later only due to censorship problems. Moreover, Kraus was noted for his vehement opposition to psychoanalysis whilst Berg himself, despite briefly consulting both Freud and Alfred Adler, later described psychoanalysis as a ‘confidence trick’. Wedekind’s preoccupation was with the socially excluded to whom the bourgeoisie habitually turned for entertainment; underworld figures such as the prostitutes, pimps, circus performers, cabaret artists, crooks and con-men that he himself mixed with. But his social outcasts are not presented as victims or suffering individuals with whom we are meant to sympathise. On the contrary, they are displayed as crude caricatures through dialogue in which they talk not to – or even at – but past each other.

They are simultaneous puppets and manipulators in a ‘menagerie’ of celebrated, debauched outsiders; their activities depicted in grotesque and savage parody in order to ridicule the hypocritical vanity of their wealthy clients. In the opera, Berg essentially sets out to do the same, utilising Wedekind’s brutal dialogue, black humour and farcical plot devices, but setting these deliberately and paradoxically against a sumptuous and highly-charged post-Romantic musical language to added – and devastating – emotional effect. The opera is full of situations in which the crude, cold dialogue seems bizarrely at odds with the intensely emotional music and often horrifying but absurd action. Just one example can be found in Act II Scene 2, when Lulu has escaped from prison, still wearing Geschwitz’s clothes and suffering visibly from cholera. Alwa is preparing to make love to her with ecstatic declarations of desire – despite her having murdered his father in that very place – crying ‘Oh … oh … I‘ll write a dithyramb to your glory’, to which she coolly and farcically replies, ‘I’m just annoyed by this hideous footwear’.

At other times, the high seriousness of her predicament is seemingly swept aside by the buffoonery of other characters, as in Act II Scene I, in which her fraught appeal to Schön – the ‘Lied der Lulu’ or ‘Lulu’s Song’ – takes place against a background chaos of sundry admirers attempting to hide. So who, exactly, is Lulu? What is her significance and what is she supposed to represent, if anything? Lulu is neither a straightforward character nor a simple caricature. Indeed, she barely exists as a character in her own right, having no life of her own beyond her existence as a mirror for others. She is intended as a symbol of womanhood and her story is an exploration of what this means in a sex-obsessed, corrupt bourgeois world. By taking her name as the title of his opera – or, at least, one of the many names by which she is called in the text – Berg focuses attention on her from the start. The opening of both opera and play presents the dramatis personae as a circus of ravening beasts into which Lulu is introduced as that classic creature of temptation, the serpent.

Wild and untamable, she is an ambivalent and lethal mix of apparently adult sexual allure and child-like innocence; on the one hand, beautiful, pure and available – the ultimate object of desire – and, on the other hand, corrupted, evil and unattainable – refusing to be possessed even as she appears to respond to others’ demands. In other words, she is entirely a product of male fantasy, into which trap the lesbian Geschwitz also falls. Lulu is… wild and untameable, an ambivalent and lethal mix of apparently adult sexual allure and child-like innocence; on the one hand, beautiful, pure and available – the ultimate object of desire – and, on the other hand, corrupted, evil and unattainable However, the symbolism does not stop there. According to the narrative, Lulu is far from being a mature, adult woman in age but is shockingly young – around fifteen years old in fact. Treated like a whore from the beginning, her story is, in essence, that of an abused child, whose eventual ‘fall’ into actual prostitution is no more than a realisation of her true plight all along, completing a full and appalling circle.

Having ‘rescued’ her from the streets as a young urchin, Schön has raised her alongside his son Alwa but cannot shake off the fascination she exerts despite marrying her off, firstly to the Doctor and then to the Painter. Schön apparently excepted, Lulu shows not the slightest concern towards any of her suitors but simply plays with them, or goes along with their desire like a ‘seductive’ child. So, whilst on one level she may appear as both victim and tormentor – the architect of her own and others’ destruction – at a deeper level, she is entirely a product of the corruption around her; a target for others’ lust, rage and frustration and blamed for their delusions and weaknesses in ways that are even more shocking given her age. Only at the simplest level is it possible to read Lulu as a so-called ‘free spirit’ for, ultimately, she is as trapped as are those besotted with her in a hell of their own making.

Central to the themes of voyeurism, objectification of the ‘other’ and visibly-realised degradation, is the portrait of Lulu which the Painter makes in the first scene and which remains a constant presence throughout her rise and fall (an oblique nod, perhaps, to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, 1890-1). Lulu herself is often appraised alongside this much admired, static representation; indeed, the Painter, who Lulu describes as ‘blind’, clearly confuses the captured pose with the real ‘woman’. He is not the only one. Geschwitz also becomes fixated, eventually taking the portrait to London, only to direct her final, heart-rendingly ironic Liebestod to it before she too follows Lulu into oblivion at the hands of Jack the Ripper. The Schön/Jack characterisation is clearly instrumental to the drama. His twin characters embody the violent abuse of power, paradoxically rendered powerless by the very creature of his own decadent design and whose ultimate recourse is to rape and destroy that which he cannot control.

But it is, perhaps, the mysterious and often overlooked Schigolch who represents the rotten core lurking at the heart of the drama – of which he is the sole survivor. Indeed, the score itself suggests his fundamental significance; in writing the music for the opera, Berg utilised a highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg’s (in)famous ‘serial’ methods to generate webs of inter-related motifs and character-associated ‘tropes’ so complex as to have occupied music analysts for years in the unravelling. Put simply, each character and some objects (like the portrait) has a unique motif associated with them specifically, in ways not unlike Wagnerian Leitmotiv. But Schigolch’s trope alone permeates the entire opera as an architectural device embedded within the musical structure, and closely related to Berg’s overall ‘basic series’; in the words of George Perle, Schigolch’s music is, therefore, ‘a representation not only of Lulu’s origins but also of the ultimate source of the tone material itself’ . Schigolch appears as a blackly comic, wheezing beggar, who has clearly known Lulu for years.

He is variously said to have been her lover and pimp, which latter role he reprises before her London demise. But, crucially, he is also said to be Lulu’s father; revealing the dark heart of incestuous abuse beyond even the implied incest of the Schön-Lulu and Alwa-Lulu couplings. Hence, the opera holds up a truly shocking mirror of Berg’s society which, to our shame – and as demonstrated by countless contemporary cases of abuse, grooming and the sex trafficking of children and adults – is still relevant today. With Lulu, Berg composed arguably the most significant operatic masterpiece of the twentieth century. Its complex ambition, scale and sheer musical virtuosity rank it as an achievement of the highest order – let alone Berg’s literary genius in compressing Wedekind’s sprawling dramas into one, brilliantly cohesive libretto.

However, it is not without its flaws – and the fact that most analytic and historiographic attention has focused on the musical score and aspects of related biography rather than the work as a music-dramatic whole says a great deal about the opera’s problematic nature; for the many, deeply paradoxical layers, often appearing to set dialogue, plot and music against each other, seem at times to have left commentators grappling for ways to unravel the opera as social critique as well as post-Romantic tragedy. Berg left very little room for redemption at the opera’s close and this may, perhaps, put off those determined to find human positives in a frankly gut-wrenching piece. I am glad to say that none of this has deterred Welsh National Opera from mounting Lulu at last.

Angelica Bäumer: Gustav Klimt – Women (London, 1986) Mosco Carner: Alban Berg – the Man and the Work (London, 1975) Christopher Hailey, Ed: Alban Berg and his World (USA, 2010) Carl E Schorske: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna – Politics and Culture (USA, 1961) George Perle: The Operas of Alban Berg – Volume 2, Lulu (USA, 1985) Met Opera: Lulu | Classical MPR Classical MPR Feb 27, 2016 A scene from Berg's Lulu. Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera Saturday at noon, we're presenting a special broadcast of one of the most important — and some might say notorious — stage works of the 20th century. Join us for a Met Opera production of Alban Berg's Lulu, starring Marlis Petersen in the title role. SYNOPSIS The Animal Tamer invites the audience to visit his menagerie — featuring "the serpent Lulu." ACT I Lulu is sitting for her portrait, observed by Dr.

Schön, a wealthy newspaper publisher and her long-time lover. Alone with Lulu, the Painter tries to seduce her. Just then her husband, the Physician, forces his way into the room and collapses in shock from a heart attack. Lulu, seemingly unmoved, realizes she is a rich widow, while the Painter wonders what will happen to her. Lulu and the Painter have married. She is surprised to learn that Schön — who years earlier had found her on the streets, given her an education, and then made her his mistress — has become engaged. Schigolch, an old man and friend of Lulu's who may be her father or a former lover, pays her a visit and she gives him money. Schön now wants Lulu out of his life so that he can marry. He reveals the story of her past to the Painter, who is so horrified by it that he cuts his throat. Schön is shocked by Lulu's cold reaction but she, dismissing his protestations, replies that he will eventually marry her anyway. Weeks later, Lulu is appearing in a ballet composed by Schön's son, Alwa. In her dressing room, she tells Alwa of her latest admirer, the Prince.

After she has gone on stage, the Prince talks to Alwa of his love for Lulu. Suddenly she storms back in: she has seen Schön in the audience with his fiancée and refuses to dance for her. Schön soon follows and demands to be left alone with Lulu. He asks her not to stop his marriage, but when she mentions her plans to marry the Prince, he realizes that he is incapable of letting her go. At Lulu's dictation, he writes a letter to his fiancée to break off the engagement. ACT II Schön and Lulu, now married, live in a luxurious home, but she continues to attract admirers, among them the lesbian Countess Geschwitz. Schön is distraught that such people are now part of his life. The Countess, Schigolch, an Acrobat, and a Schoolboy gather at the Schön house and all three men declare their love to Lulu. Alwa appears and, thinking himself alone with Lulu, also declares his love. Schön, who has observed the scene, drives his son away, then hands Lulu a revolver, demanding that she shoot herself to protect his reputation.

Lulu justifies herself by saying that she has never pretended to be anything but what she is. Schön forces her to her knees but is distracted by the Schoolboy's cries for help. Lulu fires five shots into her husband's back and begs the returning Alwa not to turn her over to the police. An orchestral interlude depicts Lulu's arrest, murder trial, imprisonment, illness with cholera, commitment to the hospital, and the plans for her escape: the Countess, who has allowed herself to be infected with the same disease, is to take Lulu's place in the hospital. Alwa, together with the Countess and the Acrobat, awaits Lulu's return in Schön's former apartment. When she arrives on Schigolch's arm, the Acrobat is appalled by her wasted appearance and leaves, threatening to betray her to the police. Alone with Lulu, Alwa again proclaims his love and agrees to go to Paris with her. ACT III A crowd has assembled in Alwa's Paris mansion in honor of Lulu's birthday. A number of the company have invested in a new cable railway and question the Banker about their prospects.

The Marquis, threatening to reveal Lulu to the police as Schön's murderer, tries to blackmail her into working in a brothel, but she defies him. The Acrobat also tries to blackmail Lulu, then Schigolch appears, asking her for money. Lulu breaks into tears. Together with Schigolch, she plots to dispose of the Acrobat by having him killed. There is uproar as the news spreads that the railway shares have collapsed — everyone is ruined. In the confusion Lulu escapes, just as the Marquis arrives with the police. In a shabby garret in London, Alwa, now syphilitic and a derelict, and Schigolch await Lulu's return from her first night as a prostitute. She arrives with a client, the Professor, who remains silent throughout the proceedings. As he leaves the now destitute Countess appears, bringing with her Lulu's portrait. Lulu and her three admirers contemplate its beauty and how their fate has been bound up with it. Lulu goes into the street again, followed by the Countess, while Alwa reflects on the mess he has made of his life. Lulu returns with another client, an African Prince.

In a clumsy attempt to protect her, Alwa attacks him and is killed by him. In despair, Lulu rushes out into the street again. Schigolch drags Alwa's body away and disappears. The Countess returns. Gazing at the portrait, she considers suicide when Lulu arrives with yet another customer, Jack the Ripper. They argue about money, then go into her room. Suddenly Lulu is heard screaming — Jack has killed her. The Countess tries to help but Jack stabs her as well. He leaves as the dying Countess cries out for Lulu. Gallery Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast: Lulu Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast: Lulu Radio Broadcast of Saturday, February 27, 2016, 1:00 P.M. (ET) Marlis Petersen as Lulu in William Kentridge’s Met production © Beatriz Schiller The 2015–16 Metropolitan Opera broadcast season is sponsored by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®, with generous long-term support from The Annenberg Foundation, The Neubauer Family Foundation, The Vincent A. Stabile Endowment for Broadcast Media, and through contributions from listeners worldwide.

Music by ALBAN BERG Libretto by the composer, based on the plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, by Frank Wedekind PERFORMANCE FROM NOVEMBER 21, 2015 THE CAST (in order of vocal appearance) Animal Trainer Jonathan Khuner, Jonathan C. Kelly, Bryan Wagorn Assistant stage directors: Gregory Keller, Sarah Ina Meyers Stage band conductor: Gregory Buchalter Prompter: Jonathan Khuner Metropolitan Opera, Dutch National Opera, and English National Opera THE SCENES Timings (ET) Drawing room of the Painter’s house Dr. Schön’s drawing room Music producer: Jay David Saks Producers: Ellen Keel, William Berger Executive producers: Mia Bongiovanni, This performance is also being broadcast on Metropolitan Opera Radio on SiriusXM channel 74. Send quiz questions to Metropolitan Opera Quiz, Metropolitan Opera, 30 Lincoln Center, New York, NY 10023, THE STORY PROLOGUE. The Ringmaster invites the audience to view his side show. He orders his assistant to bring the star attraction — the "serpent" Lulu, the root of all evil. ACT I. Lulu — a dancer, rescued from the gutter by Dr.

Schön — is having her portrait done by the Painter. Schön presents his son, the composer Alwa, to Lulu, then father and son depart. The Painter tries to make love to her, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Lulu’s husband, a Professor of Medicine; outraged, he collapses and dies of a stroke. Lulu realizes she is now a rich widow. Shocked at her detachment, the Painter questions her about her moral beliefs and finds she has none. He prays for strength. The Painter — now married to Lulu — prospers from commissions initiated by Schön. An announcement, in the morning’s mail, of Schön’s engagement to a society girl disturbs Lulu. The doorbell announces a caller — Schigolch, an old derelict who is part of Lulu’s past. Alone with her, he asks for money and compliments her on her good fortune, but she reveals she is bored. As she shows him out, Schön arrives and asks her to remove herself from his life now that he is engaged. Lulu replies that if she belongs to anyone it is to Schön, the only one who has given her real attention.

When the Painter comes in, Lulu leaves, and Schön enlightens the Painter about Lulu’s checkered past. Shocked, the Painter locks himself in the next room. When Lulu appears, followed by Alwa, the three break down the door and discover that the Painter has killed himself. Schön calls the police. In the confusion, Lulu coolly tells him, "You’ll marry me in the end." Alwa pours champagne for Lulu in her dressing room, recalling how he first met her, shortly before his mother’s death, and hoped his father would marry her. An African Prince appears after Lulu leaves for her next cue; he hopes to marry her. There is a commotion: Lulu has pretended to faint onstage after seeing Schön in the audience with his fiancée. Schön appears, indignantly ordering her back onstage. Alwa tells the theater director to go on with the next number, then leaves Schön with Lulu, who suggests that he has not yet married the society girl because he really loves her. Defeated, Schön begs for Lulu’s command, and she dictates a letter of renunciation to his fiancée. ACT II.

Lulu, now married to Schön, is saying good-bye to an admirer, the lesbian Countess Geschwitz. Schön, irrational with jealousy, decries the shame and misery of his life. Complaining of his recent neglect, Lulu coaxes him into their bedroom. Geschwitz reenters and hides, as other hangers-on file in — Schigolch, an Athlete, a Schoolboy — to wait for Lulu, who comes in and says she is expecting someone. When a Manservant — himself infatuated with Lulu — announces Dr. Schön, the Athlete and Schoolboy hide; her visitor turns out to be Alwa. Schön watches from a distance as Alwa passionately declares his love, though Lulu murmurs she poisoned his mother. Schön escorts his son out of the room, then returns to look for the Athlete, who he knows is hiding. He thrusts his revolver at Lulu, telling her to use it on herself.

Lulu declares herself blameless for what others may have done on her account; Schön turns the pistol toward Lulu, but he is distracted by the emergence of the Schoolboy from hiding, and Lulu empties the revolver into Schön’s back. As Schön dies, he warns Alwa that he will be her next victim. Though Lulu pledges to love Alwa if he will help her escape, he bars her way until the police arrive. Alwa, Geschwitz and the Athlete, planning Lulu’s escape, wait for Schigolch, who takes Geschwitz to rescue Lulu from prison. The Athlete plans a marriage of expediency to Lulu as his show partner. The Schoolboy appears; to convince him that Lulu is dead, the Athlete shows a clipping that says she was hospitalized in prison with cholera, then throws him out. Lulu, leaning on Schigolch, appears wearing Geschwitz’s clothes. Angry at her apparent weakness, the Athlete leaves, threatening to go to the police.

When Schigolch goes to pick up train tickets, Lulu rejoices in her freedom, telling Alwa how Geschwitz infected herself, then Lulu, with cholera to effect the escape through the prison hospital. She asks Alwa for a kiss, to be sure he will protect her. Though she remarks that they are lying on the sofa on which his father bled to death, Alwa is carried away with passion. ACT III. At a party in Paris, guests discuss the booming market in Jungfrau Railway stock. Wanted for murder by the German police, Lulu is blackmailed by the Athlete and a Marquis, who means to sell her to a brothel. Lulu protests she cannot sell herself — the only thing that is truly hers. A telegram comes for the Banker, saying the market in Jungfrau shares has crashed. Schigolch appears and learns of Lulu’s predicament; he offers to push the Athlete out the window if Lulu can arrange for the Athlete to come to his apartment. Since the Athlete has been offering Countess Geschwitz his services as a gigolo, Lulu persuades him that Geschwitz is waiting for him at Schigolch’s address.

He agrees and goes into the dining room; Lulu summons Geschwitz to ask her to submit to the Athlete, who reappears to escort her out. The gamblers come in, and the Banker reveals the worthlessness of the Jungfrau shares. During the confusion, Lulu escapes by switching clothes with a Groom. The fugitive Lulu is reduced to streetwalking in London, where she shares a garret with Schigolch and Alwa. Schigolch hustles Alwa out of the room when Lulu returns with her first client, an eccentric professor. Next to arrive is the faithful Geschwitz, who has salvaged Lulu’s portrait. Alwa hangs it on the wall. Lulu goes to find another client and returns with the African Prince. He tries to take Lulu by force and deals Alwa a fatal blow when the latter tries to restrain him. After Schigolch removes the corpse, Geschwitz contemplates suicide but realizes that her death would mean nothing to Lulu. Lulu returns with a third client, who haggles over the price and is about to leave, but Lulu, feeling a desperate need for him, settles for less.

As they go into her room, Geschwitz resolves to return to Germany and start anew as a champion of women’s rights. Lulu’s death shriek is heard, and when Geschwitz frantically tries to open the door, the murderer — Jack the Ripper — stabs her as well. As he leaves, the dying Geschwitz murmurs that she will be near Lulu in death. THE BACKGROUND Alban Berg (1885–1935), along with his friend Anton Webern and their teacher Arnold Schoenberg, made up the so-called Second Viennese School. Each pursued in his own way the consequences of atonality. Berg’s music, which harks back to Wagner, Brahms and Mahler, at the same time looks ahead along the paths of modernism that Strauss had suggested in Elektra (1909), only to retreat thereafter. Though Schoenberg tried to dissuade him from undertaking such a major project, Berg felt drawn to theater and wanted to write an opera, which he did in Wozzeck (1925). Wozzeck’s unexpected success led Berg to start work on Lulu, drawn from two plays by Frank Wedekind.

The composer’s early death from blood poisoning left the final act unscored, though a piano score and orchestral sketches had been completed. Berg’s widow, who disliked the unsavory subject of Lulu, did not allow anyone to complete the third act during her lifetime, and Act III was performed instead (starting with the opera’s premiere, in Zurich, in 1937) to music from the Lulu Suite for orchestra, which Berg did complete. After Helene Berg’s death, in 1976, Act III was scored by Friedrich Cerha, making possible the opera’s first full-length performance, under Pierre Boulez, at the Paris Opera in 1979. The Met had given the work’s company premiere two years earlier, in 1977, in the current production, which was updated in 1980 to include Act III. WHAT TO READ AND HEAR The Cambridge Companion to Berg (edited by Anthony Pople) is an excellent introduction; also eminently useful are Douglas Jarman’s Cambridge Opera Handbook, Alban Berg: Lulu, and his The Music of Alban Berg (University of California). Smith and Kraus publishes two volumes of Carl R.

Mueller’s excellent translations of Frank Wedekind’s plays. The essential recording of Berg’s Lulu is Pierre Boulez’s, recorded at the time of the opera’s first full-length performances, in Cerha’s completion, at the Paris Opera in 1979 (DG). Teresa Stratas is Boulez’s incandescent Lulu. Also of great interest is Karl Böhm’s live 1968 Lulu performance from the Vienna State Opera (Andante), with Anja Silja, then in her vocal prime, especially persuasive in the title role. The DVD of choice is Graham Vick’s 1996 Glyndebourne staging (Kultur), with Andrew Davis pacing Christine Schäfer as Lulu. The arresting French soprano Patricia Petibon stars as Lulu in DVD and Blu-ray performances taped in Vienna (Kultur Video) and Barcelona (DG); Laura Aiken is the much-admired anti-heroine in a 2002 Zurich broadcast of the two-act Lulu, paced by Franz Welser-Möst (Arthaus DVD).

The 1980 Live from the Met telecast of the company’s John Dexter staging, conducted by James Levine and starring Julia Migenes in the title role, is also available on DVD. G. W. Pabst’s classic 1928 silent film of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, with the mesmerizing Louise Brooks as its Lulu, is available as a Criterion Collection DVD. OPERA NEWS - Metropolitan Opera Live in HD Transmission: Lulu Metropolitan Opera Live in HD Transmission: Lulu Live in HD Transmission of Saturday, November 21, 2015, 12:30 P.M. (ET) Set design for William Kentridge’s staging of Lulu Meg Duffy/Metropolitan Opera Technical Department The Met: Live in HD series is made possible by a generous grant from its founding sponsor, The Neubauer Family Foundation. Global sponsorship of The Met: Live in HD is also provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The HD Broadcasts are supported by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®.

Lulu Music by ALBAN BERG Libretto by the composer, based on the plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, by Frank Wedekind (in order of vocal appearance) Animal Trainer Jonathan C. Kelly, Bryan Wagorn Assistant stage directors: Gregory Coproduction of the Metropolitan Opera, Dutch National Opera, and Directed for Live Cinema by: Matthew Diamond HD host: Deborah Voigt THE STORY PROLOGUE. The Ringmaster invites the audience to view his side show. He orders his assistant to bring the star attraction — the "serpent" Lulu, the root of all evil. ACT I. Lulu — a dancer, rescued from the gutter by Dr. Schön — is having her portrait done by the Painter. Schön presents his son, the composer Alwa, to Lulu, then father and son depart. The Painter tries to make love to her, but they are interrupted by the arrival of Lulu’s husband, a Professor of Medicine; outraged, he collapses and dies of a stroke. Lulu realizes she is now a rich widow. Shocked at her detachment, the Painter questions her about her moral beliefs and finds she has none. He prays for strength.

The Painter — now married to Lulu — prospers from commissions initiated by Schön. An announcement, in the morning’s mail, of Schön’s engagement to a society girl disturbs Lulu. The doorbell announces a caller — Schigolch, an old derelict who is part of Lulu’s past. Alone with her, he asks for money and compliments her on her good fortune, but she reveals she is bored. As she shows him out, Schön arrives and asks her to remove herself from his life now that he is engaged. Lulu replies that if she belongs to anyone it is to Schön, the only one who has given her real attention. When the Painter comes in, Lulu leaves, and Schön enlightens the Painter about Lulu’s checkered past. Shocked, the Painter locks himself in the next room. When Lulu appears, followed by Alwa, the three break down the door and discover that the Painter has killed himself. Schön calls the police.

In the confusion, Lulu coolly tells him, "You’ll marry me in the end." Alwa pours champagne for Lulu in her dressing room, recalling how he first met her, shortly before his mother’s death, and hoped his father would marry her. An African Prince appears after Lulu leaves for her next cue; he hopes to marry her. There is a commotion: Lulu has pretended to faint onstage after seeing Schön in the audience with his fiancée. Schön appears, indignantly ordering her back onstage. Alwa tells the theater director to go on with the next number, then leaves Schön with Lulu, who suggests that he has not yet married the society girl because he really loves her. Defeated, Schön begs for Lulu’s command, and she dictates a letter of renunciation to his fiancée. ACT II. Lulu, now married to Schön, is saying good-bye to an admirer, the lesbian Countess Geschwitz. Schön, irrational with jealousy, decries the shame and misery of his life. Complaining of his recent neglect, Lulu coaxes him into their bedroom.

Geschwitz reenters and hides, as other hangers-on file in — Schigolch, an Athlete, a Schoolboy — to wait for Lulu, who comes in and says she is expecting someone. When a Manservant — himself infatuated with Lulu — announces Dr. Schön, the Athlete and Schoolboy hide; her visitor turns out to be Alwa. Schön watches from a distance as Alwa passionately declares his love, though Lulu murmurs she poisoned his mother. Schön escorts his son out of the room, then returns to look for the Athlete, who he knows is hiding. He thrusts his revolver at Lulu, telling her to use it on herself. Lulu declares herself blameless for what others may have done on her account; Schön turns the pistol toward Lulu, but he is distracted by the emergence of the Schoolboy from hiding, and Lulu empties the revolver into Schön’s back. As Schön dies, he warns Alwa that he will be her next victim. Though Lulu pledges to love Alwa if he will help her escape, he bars her way until the police arrive.

Alwa, Geschwitz and the Athlete, planning Lulu’s escape, wait for Schigolch, who takes Geschwitz to rescue Lulu from prison. The Athlete plans a marriage of expediency to Lulu as his show partner. The Schoolboy appears; to convince him that Lulu is dead, the Athlete shows a clipping that says she was hospitalized in prison with cholera, then throws him out. Lulu, leaning on Schigolch, appears wearing Geschwitz’s clothes. Angry at her apparent weakness, the Athlete leaves, threatening to go to the police. When Schigolch goes to pick up train tickets, Lulu rejoices in her freedom, telling Alwa how Geschwitz infected herself, then Lulu, with cholera to effect the escape through the prison hospital. She asks Alwa for a kiss, to be sure he will protect her. Though she remarks that they are lying on the sofa on which his father bled to death, Alwa is carried away with passion. ACT III. At a party in Paris, guests discuss the booming market in Jungfrau Railway stock.

Wanted for murder by the German police, Lulu is blackmailed by the Athlete and a Marquis, who means to sell her to a brothel. Lulu protests she cannot sell herself — the only thing that is truly hers. A telegram comes for the Banker, saying the market in Jungfrau shares has crashed. Schigolch appears and learns of Lulu’s predicament; he offers to push the Athlete out the window if Lulu can arrange for the Athlete to come to his apartment. Since the Athlete has been offering Countess Geschwitz his services as a gigolo, Lulu persuades him that Geschwitz is waiting for him at Schigolch’s address. He agrees and goes into the dining room; Lulu summons Geschwitz to ask her to submit to the Athlete, who reappears to escort her out. The gamblers come in, and the Banker reveals the worthlessness of the Jungfrau shares. During the confusion, Lulu escapes by switching clothes with a Groom. The fugitive Lulu is reduced to streetwalking in London, where she shares a garret with Schigolch and Alwa.

Schigolch hustles Alwa out of the room when Lulu returns with her first client, an eccentric professor. Next to arrive is the faithful Geschwitz, who has salvaged Lulu’s portrait. Alwa hangs it on the wall. Lulu goes to find another client and returns with the African Prince. He tries to take Lulu by force and deals Alwa a fatal blow when the latter tries to restrain him. After Schigolch removes the corpse, Geschwitz contemplates suicide but realizes that her death would mean nothing to Lulu. Lulu returns with a third client, who haggles over the price and is about to leave, but Lulu, feeling a desperate need for him, settles for less. As they go into her room, Geschwitz resolves to return to Germany and start anew as a champion of women’s rights. Lulu’s death shriek is heard, and when Geschwitz frantically tries to open the door, the murderer — Jack the Ripper — stabs her as well. As he leaves, the dying Geschwitz murmurs that she will be near Lulu in death.

THE BACKGROUND Alban Berg (1885–1935), along with his friend Anton Webern and their teacher Arnold Schoenberg, made up the so-called Second Viennese School. Each pursued in his own way the consequences of atonality. Berg’s music, which harks back to Wagner, Brahms and Mahler, at the same time looks ahead along the paths of modernism that Strauss had suggested in Elektra (1909), only to retreat thereafter. Though Schoenberg tried to dissuade him from undertaking such a major project, Berg felt drawn to theater and wanted to write an opera, which he did in Wozzeck (1925). Wozzeck’s unexpected success led Berg to start work on Lulu, drawn from two plays by Frank Wedekind. The composer’s early death from blood poisoning left the final act unscored, though a piano score and orchestral sketches had been completed.

Berg’s widow, who disliked the unsavory subject of Lulu, did not allow anyone to complete the third act during her lifetime, and Act III was performed instead (starting with the opera’s premiere, in Zurich, in 1937) to music from the Lulu Suite for orchestra, which Berg did complete. After Helene Berg’s death, in 1976, Act III was scored by Friedrich Cerha, making possible the opera’s first full-length performance, under Pierre Boulez, at the Paris Opera in 1979. The Met had given the work’s company premiere two years earlier, in 1977, in the current production, which was updated in 1980 to include Act III. WHAT TO READ AND HEAR The Cambridge Companion to Berg (edited by Anthony Pople) is an excellent introduction; also eminently useful are Douglas Jarman’s Cambridge Opera Handbook, Alban Berg: Lulu, and his The Music of Alban Berg (University of California). Smith and Kraus publishes two volumes of Carl R. Mueller’s excellent translations of Frank Wedekind’s plays.

The essential recording of Berg’s Lulu is Pierre Boulez’s, recorded at the time of the opera’s first full-length performances, in Cerha’s completion, at the Paris Opera in 1979 (DG). Teresa Stratas is Boulez’s incandescent Lulu. Also of great interest is Karl Böhm’s live 1968 Lulu performance from the Vienna State Opera (Andante), with Anja Silja, then in her vocal prime, especially persuasive in the title role. The DVD of choice is Graham Vick’s 1996 Glyndebourne staging (Kultur), with Andrew Davis pacing Christine Schäfer as Lulu. The arresting French soprano Patricia Petibon stars as Lulu in DVD and Blu-ray performances taped in Vienna (Kultur Video) and Barcelona (DG); Laura Aiken is the much-admired anti-heroine in a 2002 Zurich broadcast of the two-act Lulu, paced by Franz Welser-Möst (Arthaus DVD).

The 1980 Live from the Met telecast of the company’s John Dexter staging, conducted by James Levine and starring Julia Migenes in the title role, is also available on DVD. G. W. Pabst’s classic 1928 silent film of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, with the mesmerizing Louise Brooks as its Lulu, is available as a Criterion Collection DVD. This performance will be transmitted live, in high definition and surround sound, into selected movie theaters as part of The Met: Live in HD series, and will be shared with students in more than 150 U.S. schools as part of the Met’s HD Live in Schools program. For information on tickets, visit . Lulu - Modernism Lab Essays Lulu by Qingyuan Jiang Lulu is a five-act play written by German playwright Frank Wedekind (1864— 1918 ). Early critics considered it to be “the climax of Wedekind’s artistic creativity” and “the most significant of the author’s works," and such positive opinions have prevailed in the critical literature since that time.

[1] The Lulu Play(s) According to Alan Best, Wedekind struggled over the material of Lulu from 1892 until the summer of 1895 , when he submitted to his publisher a completed manuscript titled Die Büchse der Pandora, eine Monstertragödie (Pandora’s Box, a Monster Tragedy). The publisher, Albert Langen, feared legal repercussions stemming from the murder of Lulu by Jack the Ripper at the end of the play, so Wedekind was forced to divide his original work into two plays. The first published version of Lulu appeared as Der Erdgeist (The Earth Spirit) in 1895, containing the first three acts of the “Monster Tragedy” with a new act inserted between Acts Two and Three. In 1902, the reminder of the original manuscript was published in a modified form under the name Die Büchse der Pandora, prefaced by a new first act.

[2] These two plays were henceforth collectively known as “the Lulu plays." Since most theaters, for practical purposes, wanted Lulu to be played within one night rather than two, the play underwent a variety of stage adaptations, including a compressed version edited by the playwright himself in 1913. Comparing the original Lulu to the two “Lulu plays," the translator Eric Bentley proposes that the original version not only “contains all the raw and raunchy bits,” but is also “superior in style and structure." [3] Plot Summary Act One Schwartz, a young painter, is discussing a work with his client, Dr. Schön, in his studio. The topic turns to a portrait of Lulu, whose jealous husband, Dr. Goll, had her costumed as Pierrot. Dr. Goll and Lulu pay a visit to the studio, where Goll accepts Schön’s invitation to attend a show. Left alone in the studio, the enamored painter Schwartz chases Lulu around the room until she collapses on the sofa with him. At that moment, Goll returns to the room, and witnessing the scene, he attempts to strike Schwartz but dies suddenly of a heart attack.

Schwartz is hysterical; Lulu stands aside with marked indifference. Act Two Lulu has become the wife of Schwartz, who is enjoying success due to a sudden growth in popularity. A mysterious visitor named Schigolch is introduced; he claims to be Lulu’s father-protector. Lulu, who is involved in an affair with Schön, complains to her lover of her dislike for Schwartz. Schön, however, now officially engaged, wants to sever his ties with Lulu. He reveals his relationship with Lulu to Schwartz, hoping that the latter will take tighter control of his wife. Instead, Schwartz becomes overwhelmed with self-pity and commits suicide. Under growing hysteria, Schön takes Lulu as his new wife. Act Three As Schön’s wife, Lulu becomes familiar with his son, Alwa, as well as with Rodrigo the acrobat and Countess Geschwitz, an arrogant lesbian attracted to Lulu. They amuse themselves by humiliating Schön. Schön, once well composed and calculating, is now at his wit’s end. In a moment of desperation, he hands a gun to Lulu, hoping that she will kill herself and end his misery.

In a scene of great confusion, Alwa and Rodrigo rush out from their hiding places and create a distraction as Lulu pulls the trigger and kills not herself but Schön. Alwa and Lulu escape to Paris. Act Four Lulu and Alwa are now married. Together with their pretentious friends, they profit from investments in the Jungfrau cable-car company and enjoy a lavish lifestyle. Lulu, still chased by the German police because of the murder, is blackmailed by Rodrigo, who wants money, and Casti-Piani, a white slave-trader who arranges for her to serve in a brothel in Cairo. The sinister Schigolch reappears, and by offering to lure Rodrigo and Geschwitz to his lodgings, promises to "take care of" the threatening Rodrigo. As the police arrive to arrest Lulu, she changes her clothes and makes a narrow escape. The Jungfrau share price has meanwhile collapsed, leaving her penniless. Act Five In a cold and dark London attic, Lulu earns a living as a prostitute, supporting Schigolch and Alwa. Geschwitz reappears with the Lulu-as-Pierrot painting.

Lulu’s first customer is a mute doctor, and the deal becomes a pantomime. The second visitor is a self-proclaimed African prince, who kills Alwa by accident. The third is the inexperienced Dr. Hilti, who flees in a horror as Geschwitz unsuccesfully attempts suicide. The final customer turns out to be Jack the Ripper, who murders both Lulu and Geschwitz. The play ends with a dying Geschwitz trying to express her heartfelt love for Lulu. Analysis Most criticism focuses on the character and symbolic significance of Lulu the protagonist. According to Ward B. Lewis, from the beginning critics have argued over several conflicting interpretations. One major critical viewpoint casts Lulu in line with the femme fatale tradition, accentuating her potential to destroy males. She embodies the demonic power of female sexuality, a natural force seeking revenge in a masculine world. Another school instead associates Lulu with women’s sexual emancipation. She uses sex in order to gain power, and her actions suggest the Freudian pleasure principle of immediate sexual gratification. Still others believe that Lulu represents a vision of human morality completely unconstrained by the limits of bourgeois society (Lewis, 28—32).

Gail Finney, in an altogether different vein, interprets Lulu’s name as an indicator of her infant-like, innocent characteristics. [4] Skrine proposes a similar idea, underscoring Lulu’s “essential vulnerability” by linking her fate with that of Pierrot: Lulu is “simply what she is” (89), a figure that defies all specification. Critics have also shown interest in the play's social criticism. In Lulu’s Paris circle, for example, economic fraud is interwoven with unscrupulous selfish motivation. According to Skrine, however, Wedekind had a much broader intention: Lulu’s career is an allegory for Germany’s economic boom, the Unification, as well as the rise of plutocracy: “Men worked hard to acquire wealth and to improve their social station, and were not afraid to show off their success” (85). Best goes one step further, arguing that “Lulu’s is a world of eccentrics, each afraid to come to terms with the world as it is and each determined that the world of his imagination is a true reflection of the world outside” (84).

The recurring motif of Lulu’s renaming, carried out by each of her lovers, has inspired several Marxist interpretations, which view Lulu’s multiple roles as analogous to the reification of mankind under capitalism (Lewis 36). Her husbands are interpreted as symbolic of the self-righteous, hypocritical morality of the bourgeoisie (Schön), or of the limited, banal vision of aestheticism (Schwartz, Alwa). Schigolch and Geschwitz are two complex and ambiguous figures. Schigolch’s ominous otherworldliness suggests an ontological evilness. “His evil…emanates from his position as an outsider; he sees through human machinations and nevertheless affirms what transpires, assuming no responsibility.” (qtd. in Lewis, 38) According to Lewis, Wedekind considered Geschwitz the central figure of the play, an incarnation of love, devotion and sympathy (38). However, she is also attacked as a ludicrous representation of the feminine, having no identity other than perverted sexuality (Lewis 39).

A unique blend of tragic, comic, burlesque and grotesque elements, there is no consensus about the genre of Lulu, but is widely considered to be a forerunner of German Expressionism. The London scene is one of the play's strongest and most disturbing, with its depiction of bleak urban life and Lulu’s ghastly death under Jack the Ripper. The play is saturated by death wishes and their fatalistic fulfillment: Lulu imagines herself to be a victim of a rape/murderer, and the fantasy comes true. Similarly, all of her four husbands predict their violent deaths the very moments they become bound to Lulu. The intensification of and fascination with torture and death anticipate the direction of German art in the following years. Acceptance and Adaptation According to Skrine, both Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora were well received upon their premieres and remain Wedekind’s most popular works alongside Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) (83—84). Both Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora underwent numerous stage variations with different aesthetic emphases. The two most notable adaptations of Lulu are G. W.

Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box ( 1929 ) and Alban Berg’s opera Lulu ( 1937 premiere). Starring American actress Louise Brooks, the Pabst film originally met with critical and commercial failure. However, it is now considered to be one of the most memorable productions of Weimar cinema. [5] Pabst deliberately recasts the story in a modern setting, adapting the film into a criticism of the Weimar status quo. Acknowledged as a towering achievement of twentieth-century opera, Alban Berg’s adaptation not only emphasizes Lulu’s femininity; it intelligently restructures the story through the doubling of roles (Schwartz/African prince, Goll/Hilti, Schön/Jack). This creates the effect of déjà-vu, as the latter half of the story becomes a lurid distortion of the first half. [6] ↑ Ward B. Lewis, The Ironic Dissident: Frank Wedekind in the View of His Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997), 40. ↑ Alan Best, Frank Wedekind (London: Oswald Wolff, 1975), 82.

↑ Peter Skrine, Hauptmann, Wedekind and Schnitzler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 11. ↑ Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 86. ↑ Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 296-303. ↑ Elizabeth Boa, The Sexual Circle: Wedekind’s Theatre of Subversion (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 122.

Question: Alban Berg's opera 'Lulu' ends with the appearance of which murderer?
Answer: Jack The Ripper