ALBAN BERG'S LULU

Abstract

national world of music, need not be discussed here. His principal compositions are known in America, particularly the two most popular, the opera Wozzeck, the original score of which was promptly acquired by the Library of Congress at Washington, and the Lyric Suite for string quartet.' Parts of his last great work, Lulu, furthermore, in the form of a group of Symphonic Pieces which Berg himself arranged from the opera, have been performed in Boston and New York. fact that this music has become so widely known, and the special artistic significance that may be attributed in a general sense to the opera itself, would seem warrant enough for embarking on the observations that follow, dealing first with the text and then with the musical form of Berg's setting. Berg took the text of Lulu verbatim, though with numerous abbreviations, from a double drama of Frank Wedekind written during the years 1893-1905, the two parts of which are called respectively The Earth-Spirit and Pandora's Box, and which appeared in English in I923 in S. A. Eliot's translation entitled Tragedies of Sex. heroine of both plays is the leading female figure of Lulu, of whom Julius Kapp as early as 1909 gave an acute characterization which Berg himself considered very apt: