"Taken by the Devil"

Abstract The book takes censorship as an entry point into Berg’s Lulu. Beginning in 1894 with the suppression of the Ur-Lulu, Wedekind’s original play, responses to acts of censorship played a role in ultimately determining the opera’s shape and tone. When Wedekind rewrote material from the Ur-Lulu as two supposedly self-sufficient plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, he responded in different ways to the threat of further censorship. The resulting discrepancies between the later plays, second order consequences of censorship, created obstacles to the joining of them that Berg and other dramaturges, beginning with Wedekind himself, would undertake. Berg worked to overcome the second order consequences by composing intricate leitmotivic connections between the opera’s halves, each based on one of the plays. Recognizing fundamental differences between the plays, this book seeks to recover some of the nuances in the plays and Berg’s treatment of them that have been obscured by assumptions of their unity. It also considers the contradiction between dramatic material that many spectators find sordid and the beauty of much of the music, in particular three musical passages that make a Liebestod effect, and traces this to differences between Wedekind and Berg. The artistic stance known as fin-de-siècle decadence was responsible for deliberately offensive features of the Ur-Lulu. Berg associated the Lulu character with the beauty of major-minor tonality, a musical system over-ripe and in that sense decadent at the turn of the century, in that way enabling a problematic symbolic reading of the also problematic misogynistic material.