Music: Again, Lulu

In the erotic, tormented mind of the late Playwright Frank Wedekind, a woman named Lulu was a symbol of insatiability. His two plays about her (Erdgeist and Büchse der Pandora) showed people helplessly racked by passion, preached: “Only children have reason; men are animals.” Composer Alban Berg articulated the same opinion with his opera Wozzeck. When he based an opera on Wedekind’s Lulu, Berg produced the most impressive monument of lust in all musical literature. When orchestral excerpts from it were played at the Berlin Staatsoper, extra police squads stood by to govern the crowds. Lulu was given in concert form in Boston and New York, but never as a full opera before Composer Berg died in 1935 while still orchestrating the last act.

In Zurich last week Lulu the opera was given its world premiere before one of the largest, most brilliant audiences ever assembled there. Widow Wedekind and Widow Berg listened proudly to what may prove to be an opera as lasting as it is sensational.

In the prolog, a whip-cracking circus-trainer introduced the principal characters as if they were animals. Lulu was a hideous, wriggling snake whose behavior carried over into her human incarnation in the three main acts. Nearly everybody in the cast had a turn at her favors. Dr. Goll died of apoplexy when he caught her cheating. An idealistic painter killed himself upon hearing about her past. A feeble old lecher named Schön married her. When he surprised her with his son, Schön gave Lulu a revolver with which to kill herself. Lulu shot him instead.

When Lulu was jailed for murder, homosexual Countess Geschwitz helped her escape. In Paris, Lulu philandered crazily with gamblers, procurers and swindlers. The end came in a sordid London attic. Impoverished Lulu combed the streets incessantly for men, made the mistake of bringing home Jack the Ripper. The orchestra reached a shuddering climax when the sadist disemboweled Lulu, concluded sombrely with Countess Geschwitz wailing over her “angel.”

Revolting as Lulu’s career is in outline, Composer Berg dressed it in music too peculiar and powerful to be discounted. Throughout he used the twelve-tone scale he learned from Arnold Schönberg, to whom the opera is dedicated. Song forms are woven in so cunningly as not to be obtrusive. A sonata form announces the appearance of Dr. Schön; a rondo suggests his son. The whole orchestra converses gruesomely over one death, lyrically pleads when the composer wanted sympathy for his heroine, strikes an ugly dissonance of shrieking brasses when she is murdered.