He lived most of his adult life in Munich, though he had a brief period working in advertising, for the Maggi soup firm, in Switzerland in 1886.
Until World War I, when he was forced to obtain a German passport, he was an American citizen and traveled throughout Europe. His father, a German, had a Swiss castle in which Wedekind grew up, after the family had left Hanover in 1872. His mother was Swiss and became pregnant with him in San Francisco.
Then, realising that Schön is still fond of her, she triumphs by dictating to him a letter breaking things off with his fiancée.Benjamin Franklin Wedekind was born on July 24, 1864, in Hanover, German Confederation, Große Aegdienstraße 13 (today: Friedrichswall 10). She refuses to dance for Schön and his fiancée. Lulu becomes a dancer in a revue conceived by Alwa. Unable to bear it, he slits his own throat. He reveals to the painter his new wife’s despicable nature and her sordid past. Dr Schön, Lulu’s lover, wants to leave her in order to marry into wealth. Is he her father, her protector or her lover? No one knows. In her elegant salon, she receives a visit from a poor old asthmatic, Schigolch. He marries Lulu who, for him, becomes Eva. The Painter is struck by the young woman’s indifference in the face of this sudden death. She gives herself to him, at which point her husband enters and then dies of apoplexy when he surprises them. When they leave, the Painter makes advances towards Lulu. He kills Lulu and then the Countess Geschwitz.Īt the Painter’s studio in Vienna, Lulu is posing in the presence of Dr Schön, her “protector”, the editor of a major newspaper, and his son, Alwa, a composer. One of her clients turns violent and kills Alwa, who had intervened. When a marquis threatens to turn her in, she convinces Alwa, who is now ruined, to flee with her to London where she prostitutes herself to provide for her lover and Schigolch. They enable her to resume her troubled life as femme fatale in Paris, where she now lives with Alwa.
Schigolch and a countess who is completely devoted to Lulu, Countess Geschwitz, decide to arrange her escape from prison. Once again free, Lulu manages to marry the weak Schön, whom she kills after seducing his son, Alwa, who turns her over to the police. Dr Schön, Lulu’s true lover, wanting to rid himself of her in order to marry into wealth, reveals her unsavoury past to the Painter, who slits his own throat. She receives into her home a mysterious beggar by the name of Schigolch it is not known whether he is her father, lover or protector. Now a rich widow, Lulu marries the Painter, who now calls her Eva. Her husband surprises them and collapses, stricken by a case of apoplexy. The Painter cannot resist her wicked charm. She spends time with Dr Schön and his son, the composer Alwa, who come to attend a posing session in the studio of the Painter who is doing her portrait. Lulu is initially married to a professor of medicine. Showing great formal mastery combining symbolism and symmetry, the arching design pivots on a long interlude entitled “Filmmusik”, a scene not shown – Lulu’s imprisonment – that divides the work into two, like the fate of the heroine, split between rise and fall.
#BERG LULU LIBRETTO PDF READER SERIAL#
It is a serial or dodecaphonic opera in which Berg takes certain liberties with the technique devised by Schoenberg, to whom the work is dedicated. A critique of a decaying world, a gallery of corrupt characters, the rise and fall of a heroine whose moral freedom hides a profound subservience to men’s desires, Lulu is one of the most significant works of the 20th century. Called an “exterminating angel” by one of her prey, she is nonetheless a slave to forces that crush her and reduce her to a demeaning existence whose ineluctable outcome is a cruel and sordid death. At once executioner and victim, perverse and innocent, she resembles Manon and might well say, like Carmen, “that she never lied”, always following her instincts. Lulu presents a complex portrait of a destructive femme fatale coveted by all men. This new, almost legendary creation at the behest of Rolf Liebermann, then director of the Opéra Garnier, was an obvious success and became the definitive version. After the death of Alban Berg’s wife, who was hostile to any attempt to complete it, the Viennese composer-conductor Friedrich Cerha, using the various materials left by Berg, managed to create the three-act version staged in 1979 at the Paris Opera with Teresa Stratas in the title role, Pierre Boulez conducting and Patrice Chéreau designing the sets. The orchestration for the third act remained incomplete because of the premature death of the composer in 1935. When it was created in Zurich in 1937, Lulu had just two acts.
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