5. ‘Lulu’ and the final years.

After the successful première of the Lyrische Suite in January 1927, Berg began to search for a subject on which to base another opera, eventually deciding on Wedekind's two Lulu plays. The 1905 performance he had seen of Die Büchse des Pandora, produced by Karl Kraus and with Wedekind himself in the role of Jack the Ripper, had been private, since the play was still under consideration on an obscenity charge (and was eventually banned) by the Royal Court in Berlin. To the 20-year old Berg, as to many of his generation, Wedekind represented the ‘really new direction in modern art’ and, fired by Kraus's introductory lecture to the Vienna performance, his enthusiasm for the play stayed with him for the rest of his life. By 1928, when he began work on Lulu, Wedekind's plays were no longer banned (censorship was abolished in Germany in 1918), but they remained controversial and were still widely regarded as obscene. In choosing, despite the advice of many of his friends, to base his opera on Wedekind's plays, Berg was making a deliberately provocative choice. Just how provocative would only become clear five years later, when the Nazis came to power.

As a composer of international standing Berg now spent much of his time travelling to attend performances or serving on various juries and committees, and work on Lulu progressed slowly. It was also twice interrupted by commissions. The first, in the summer of 1929, resulted in the concert aria Der Wein for the Czech soprano Růžena Herlingerová, and was undertaken partly because Berg needed a new work to keep his name before the public while he worked on the opera (the same period saw the orchestral arrangements of the Sieben frühe Lieder and the string orchestra arrangement of three movements from the Lyrische Suite) and partly because the aria gave him the opportunity to explore in advance some ideas for Lulu in terms of the handling of voice and orchestra, the use of a jazz idiom and the creation of a sound world characterized in particular by piano and saxophone – though the vibraphone, the sound of which is so prominent in the Lulu orchestra, is absent from Der Wein. Above all, the composition of the aria gave Berg the chance to experiment with ways in which new, subsidiary rows might be derived from a single basic row. The row of Der Wein (ex.2), like that of the later Violin Concerto, is based on one of the two most characteristic key-defining patterns of tonal music: in the case of Der Wein, an ascending minor scale. While such a row naturally gives rise to horizontal figurations reminiscent of tonal music, the production of tonally orientated vertical formations remains problematic. The most important harmonic (and some melodic) features of Der Wein are derived from the basic set by processes of extraction: by systematically extracting alternate notes (to produce a new row that consists of notes 1–3–5–7–9–11–2–4–6–8–10–12 of the original), by partitioning the set into four three-note collections which are then superimposed (in effect presenting vertically a new row that consists of notes 1–4–7–10, 2–5–8–11, 3–5–9–12) and by extracting three non-adjacent tritones (notes 4–7, 8–10, 11–3) so as to leave a residue of two three-note chromatic figures. Such methods of deriving subsidiary rows and further extensions of these methods (by the systematic extraction of every fifth or seventh note, for example) were to play an important role in Lulu.

Lulu represents the culmination of the technical and structural preoccupations of Berg's works from the op.2 songs onwards. In particular, the ingenious knitting together of dramatic and musical demands, already demonstrated in Wozzeck, is here taken a number of steps further. At the most detailed level Lulu is a 12-note work – the first 12-note opera, just as Wozzeck was the first, full-length atonal opera. Like the Lyrische Suite, Lulu uses a number of different rows, all of them, as sketches show, derived precompositionally from a single 12-note set in a number of intricate ways. The basic set of the whole opera (ex.3) and a few of the motifs that run throughout the work – most noticeably the four-note figuration on trombone that begins the whole piece and a short fateful rhythmic pattern that underlies every significant event in the drama – operate independently of the characters on stage. For the rest, the rows and the characteristic harmonies and themes to which they give rise (and also, in some cases, rhythms, metres and instrumental timbres) function as leitmotifs linked to particular characters and particular ideas in the text. This leitmotif system works within an intricate, multi-layered formal design.

On one level Lulu is a number opera consisting – as is appropriate for an opera in which one subject is the writing of an opera – of a sequence of arias, ensembles, cavatinas, ballades and other forms traditionally associated with vocal music, all of them clearly identified by Berg in the score. At the same time, each of the three acts has within it a single large-scale form. The different sections of the form are scattered throughout the particular act in a mirroring of the main dramatic development. Act 1, for example, is dominated by a sonata form, associated with Dr. Schön's attempts to break free of Lulu; the exposition and first reprise appear in scene ii, and the development and recapitulation in scene iii. In Act 2 the large-scale form is a rondo (continually interrupted in scene i but heard in its entirety in scene ii) associated with Alwa's declarations of love for Lulu, while in Act 3 a set of variations, based on a cabaret song by Wedekind himself, charts Lulu's descent into prostitution. Unlike the self-sufficient musical forms of Wozzeck, which follow one another in sequence, the musical forms of Lulu are interpenetrated and interrupted. At the highest structural level is the large-scale symmetrical relationship between the two halves of the opera, the dramatic and musical fulcrum of which is the orchestral film-music interlude linking the two scenes of Act 2. Constructed as a musical palindrome and designed to accompany the showing of a silent film (itself palindromic since each shot in the first half mirrors a shot in the second), the interlude marks the turning point of Lulu's career – the point at which begins her descent into the nightmare world of the final scene. The symmetrical musical-dramatic structure of the opera is emphasized by the relationship between the two scenes of Act 2 (the only scenes to share the same set) and, most importantly, by the extent to which large blocks of music from the first half of the opera increasingly reappear, until the final scene consists almost entirely of music that has been heard earlier. In some cases the return of music is occasioned, as one might expect, by a desire to underline dramatic similarities. Thus, to cite one of many examples, the return of the music of the duettino of Act 1 scene i as part of the cavatina of Act 2 scene i ironically anticipates Schön's fate by drawing attention to the fact that he, like the Painter earlier, is beginning to take Lulu for granted.

More generally, the reappearance of large blocks of music underlines a unique feature of the opera: the reappearance of certain performers in different roles. The largest and most important of these musical reprises are determined by the doubling of the roles of Lulu's three clients in the final scene with those of her three husbands in the earlier part of the opera: the Medical Specialist, the Painter and Dr. Schön, who comes back as Jack the Ripper. Similarly, the roles of the Prince in Act 1, the Manservant in Act 2 and the Marquis in Act 3 are sung by the same performer and share the same music, though the bit parts of the Wardrobe Mistress, the Schoolboy and the Groom, while also taken by a single performer, are not associated musically. The doubling of the roles of Lulu's husbands and clients is the key to both the musical structure and the dramatic meaning of the opera. In his introductory lecture to the 1905 Vienna performance of the second play Kraus had described the final scene of the work as ‘a men's world brashly taking revenge for its own guilt’. Berg's doublings not only symbolized this revenge strikingly but also, by equating the characters who inhabit the respectable bourgeois world of the first half with the shady inhabitants of the demi-monde depicted in the final act, draw attention to the sexual hypocrisy which is the subject of the work, and which gives it a wider moral and social significance.

With the exception of the two months in the summer of 1929 spent on Der Wein, Berg worked on the composition of Lulu from mid-1928 until the spring of 1934, by which time the whole opera was complete in short score. He then began to orchestrate the work, starting with those sections he intended to form part of a concert suite, the Symphonische Stücke aus ‘Lulu’. Having completed the suite he went back to the Prologue and scored the rest of the opera in order, pausing only for a period of about four months in the summer of 1935 to compose the Violin Concerto, the commission for which, from the American violinist Louis Krasner, he had initially accepted out of financial necessity. With the coming to power of the Nazi party in Germany in January 1933, performances of his music became rare in both Germany and Austria, and he grew desperately short of money – so short that he was even, at one point, forced to consider selling the Waldhaus, the retreat at Velden in Carinthia he had bought in 1932. The emotional and artistic stimulus for the concerto – the death from poliomyelitis of the 18-year-old Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius – only came after Berg had accepted the commission and begun work on the piece. On learning of Manon's death he resolved to dedicate the work to her memory (‘To the memory of an angel’) and create a tone poem which would paint her portrait.

The row of the Violin Concerto is based on a series of overlapping major and minor triads and a final whole-tone tetrachord, an ingenious set in which the inversion on B is identical to a cyclic permutation of the prime form in retrograde. In Der Wein Berg had derived harmonies from a scale-like row by systematically extracting notes; in the Violin Concerto he arrived at non-triadic figures by the opposite method of inserting notes: the long lamenting solo line in the final section of the work, for example, is produced by systematically alternating notes from three different row forms. The overtly tonal implications of the set also enabled Berg to include a number of diatonic references, some to particular sources (a Carinthian folksong and Bach's harmonization of the chorale Es ist genug), others to genres such as the ländler and the Viennese waltz. Written at a time when his music, labelled as a manifestation of ‘cultural bolshevism’, was no longer played in Germany or even in his native Austria, and when he himself was no longer regarded as an indigenous composer, the Violin Concerto, with its overt references to the Austro-German tradition, is perhaps as much a rejection of that narrow nationalism which denied him and other composers a place in their tradition as it is a depiction of the life and death of a young girl.

Shortly after completing the concerto Berg received an insect sting which formed an abscess. Returning to Vienna from the Waldhaus in November 1935 he was able to attend the Vienna première of the Symphonische Stücke aus ‘Lulu’, but was rushed to hospital shortly after, and died there during the night of 23–4 December. The Violin Concerto had not yet been performed or published; as to Lulu, Acts 1 and 2 had been scored, together with the first 268 bars of Act 3 and the two later sections (the orchestral variation interlude and the final 70 bars) that appear in the Symphonische Stücke, leaving 940 bars unorchestrated. The world première of the opera took place in Zürich in 1937, when, as a ‘temporary’ solution pending the expected – and, indeed, announced – publication of a complete Act 3, the opera was presented as a two-act torso, with the last moments acted to the music of the final Adagio of the Symphonische Stücke. The ‘temporary’ two-act version held the stage for 40 years, as Berg's widow gradually became more and more convinced that the opera should remain unfinished and refused all access to the sketches and short score. Only after her death in 1976, and after a court action instituted by the foundation set up by her to manage the Berg estate had attempted and failed to stop the performance, was it possible to perform the complete opera with Friedrich Cerha's brilliantly realized orchestration of Act 3 and thus finally, after almost half a century, to appreciate the full stature of Berg's final achievement.

Berg, Alban