Lulu is an opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg (see Berg, Alban ). Berg provided his own libretto (text), based on two dramas by the German actor and playwright Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). The work remained unfinished after Berg died in 1935. Nevertheless, the incomplete opera received its first performance at Zurich, Switzerland, on June 2, 1937. A completed version, orchestrated by the Austrian composer and violinist Friedrich Cerha, received its first performance at the Paris Opera on Feb. 24, 1979.
A circus ringmaster announces the start of the show. He presents Lulu as one of the acts. Lulu destroys her lovers one by one until ultimately she herself is destroyed. The first victim the audience sees is her elderly husband, who dies after finding her in bed with a young painter. The painter marries her but soon meets Doctor Schon, who tells him about Lulu’s past. Horrified at hearing this, the painter commits suicide.
Lulu forces Schon to marry her, but she continues to have sexual encounters with other men, including Schon’s son Alwa. Lulu kills Schon after an argument and, at this point, the luck she has so far enjoyed is reversed. She is found guilty following a filmed trial. The Countess Geschwitz helps Lulu escape, and she flees to London. There she lives as a prostitute with Alwa, the countess, and an elderly man named Schigolch. One of her clients turns out to be the English serial killer Jack the Ripper, who kills Lulu and then the countess (see Jack the Ripper ).
Berg’s intention in Lulu is to show that when sex and the desire for power dominate our lives, the result is a dance of death. Genuine love, if a person is capable of it, provides a means of escaping this fate. Lulu shows what happens when such love is absent. This opera is a difficult one for audiences, partly because Berg used the 12-tone system that the Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg had invented. However, Lulu contains some remarkable technical effects, notably during the filmed trial. This is a three-minute sequence in which Berg’s music reaches a central point after which it is played in reverse, forming a musical palindrome— that is, a phrase that reads the same backward or forward. While working on the opera, Berg made an orchestral suite from it. This Lulu Suite is sometimes heard in the concert hall.
