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

Abstract 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.