Act 1 of Berg’s Lulu

Abstract 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.