Introduction

This book is a censorship study that focuses on Alban Berg’s opera Lulu and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, as well as a case study of Berg’s transformation of the plays into a libretto and an opera. Several aspects of the book differentiate it from other recent scholarship on operatic censorship and literary sources. First, while it is true that authorities in Berlin rejected his libretto in 1934, the most important act of censorship with a bearing on Berg’s ...

“Burlesque Tragedy” and “tristan Rapture”

This chapter addresses connections between the Lulu works of Wedekind and Berg and several understandings of “fin-de-siècle decadence.” The title quotes reviews of two works that owe their existence to censorship, Erdgeist and Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu,” both of which are arguably more perfect than the uncensored original works, Wedekind’s Ur-Lulu, suppressed in 1894, and Berg’s opera, rejected by authorities in 1934. After tracing the censorship of Wedekind’s Lulu plays, the chapter focuses on his transformation of Act 3 of the Ur-Lulu, manifestly a product of turn-of-the-century decadence in its ironic, over-the-top depiction of drug use and risqué sexual relationships, into passages in acts of the two later plays. It begins a discussion of Berg’s responses to those passages in the scenes of his opera’s Act 2, each of which recalls Tristan und Isolde in a different way, and touches on the broader significance of “fin-de-siècle decadence” in Berg’s time.

Quarantined Material

Two out of three Liebestod passages in Lulu appear in Act 3; at the same time, Berg based Act 3 entirely on quarantined material from the Ur-Lulu, Acts 2 and 3 of Die Büchse der Pandora. This chapter discusses in detail Wedekind’s censorship trials in 1905–1906, which had to do with the play as a publication. After the trials, Wedekind prepared a new edition in 1906 with a misleading preface that included the court documents, which in a 1911 edition, he replaced with another paratext, an ironic prologue. The chapter addresses the unpromising aspects of Wedekind’s Act 2 that would have challenged a composer with Berg’s artistic sensibilities, and it takes up the question of whether we should consider Lulu’s clients in the final scene to be equivalent to her husbands in the first half and what is at stake in doing this.

Act 2

The chapter focuses on Berg’s Act 2. Because this is the act that joins Wedekind’s plays in the opera, the second order consequences of censoring Act 3 of the Ur-Lulu could have created an acute problem. Censorship of that act had inspired Wedekind’s pronounced use of innuendo in Act 4 of Erdgeist, an example of the indirect treatment of taboo subject matter associated with censored works, but also his quarantining of offensive lines in Act 1 of Die Büchse der Pandora, an indirect consequence of censorship. Wedekind’s responses can be said ultimately to have defined the tone and shape of Berg’s Act 2, in which musical autonomy becomes an especially pronounced possibility: the “censorship effect” that William Olmsted discusses with regard to Flaubert and Baudelaire, the chapter suggests, manifests itself in Berg’s opera as an impulse toward absoluteness in his music.

Berg’s Literal-Mindedness and Second Order Consequences of Censoring Wedekind

This chapter introduces Berg’s approach to handling discrepancies created by Wedekind’s responses to the threat of further censorship in the plays he derived from the Ur-Lulu: “second order consequences of censorship.” One strategy was to inflect the material differently by turning the two plays’ acts into scenes and distributing them into three acts. Another was to require the actors who perform Lulu’s husbands to return as her customers when she is a prostitute at the end and underscore the doublings through leitmotifs. A third solution was to conceive Lulu’s relationships with other characters within a framework of instrumental forms that span scenes in each act. The chapter offers a typology of leitmotifs in Berg’s operas, introduces his “literal-mindedness,” which emerges in his approach to leitmotifs and his over-coordination of musical and physical gestures, and demonstrates his application of this trait to a project of making Lulu a more sympathetic figure.

Censorship, Berg’s Lulu, and the Opera’s Temporal Setting

The chapter introduces this book as inspired by continuing work in recent censorship studies, including books by Annabel Patterson (1984) and William Olmsted (2016). Olmsted’s work on Flaubert and Baudelaire is especially relevant here because Wedekind’s responses to censorship resemble those of both authors and because of Berg’s affinity for Baudelaire. It discusses the changed understanding of censorship in the 1990s, observes the centrality of indirectness as a feature of artists’ negotiations with censors and censorship, and defines the concepts of preemptive censorship and second order consequences of censorship. In addition, the chapter introduces the metaphor of a palimpsest that several writers have found appropriate in reference to the perceptible layers in censored works. The chapter argues that Berg retained Wedekind’s turn-of-the-century setting, even though productions in the 1920s were updating Wedekind’s plays, and it undertakes an initial explanation of the complex genesis of the Lulu plays.

Conclusion

The conclusion discusses three factors central to the book’s arguments: the status of Wedekind’s censored plays as palimpsests, Berg’s affinity for Liebestod effects in the music he composed for Lulu, and his decision to work with, indeed to augment, the discrepancies in the plays rather than flatten them as other dramaturges chose to do in the 1920s. In focusing on the impact of repeated censorship of Wedekind’s plays on Berg’s opera, the conclusion considers potential consequences if he had decided to set the five-act Lulu published in 1913 rather than the two versions he settled on instead. The 1913 Lulu would not have allowed two of the Liebestod effects and would have weakened the concluding Liebestod.

Act 1 of Berg’s Lulu

This chapter has to do with Berg’s interpretation of Erdgeist in Act 1 of his opera and connects it to the new, expanded understanding of censorship. Building on work by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Robert C. Post wrote in 1998 that censorship “establishes the practices that define us as social subjects.” Post thereby offered a frame of reference for genres that have social practices as their subject matter, two of which critics have linked to Erdgeist: when Wedekind turned the first three acts of the Ur-Lulu into the basis of Erdgeist, he made the self-censorship that allows us to function in a society thematic in his new play. Berg chose to refine Wedekind’s material, but also to emphasize passages that reveal the origins of Erdgeist in a play Wedekind had conceived as a “monster tragedy”; in doing this, Berg clearly intended to prepare the second half of the opera.

Lulu and/or Geschwitz Idealized, in the symphonic pieces from “Lulu” and Elsewhere

This chapter treats an immediate context for censorship, here of Berg’s libretto for Lulu by authorities in Nazi Germany, and direct consequences of that action. The chapter discusses a current in Berg’s Lulu and reactions to it traceable to a particular interpretation of “fin-de-siècle decadence”: a tendency in the opera and its initial reception by a group of critics close to Berg—Willi Reich, Theodor Adorno, Willi Schuh, and Ernst Krenek—to turn Lulu into an idealized abstraction, a symbol of musical beauty in decay at the turn of the century, and to represent the music itself as absolute. This trend found necessary expression in the Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu” in 1934, which Berg arranged in response to the rejection of his libretto, but it is also discernible in a sketch that can be dated to the period of his earliest ideas about the opera.