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

Abstract 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.