1. Tim Benjamin

Centre-point of the palindrome in act 2 Berg was obsessed with symmetry in his works and Lulu is no exception, the whole being perceived as a palindrome or mirror. Lulu's popularity in the first act is mirrored by the squalor she lives in during act 3, and this is emphasised by Lulu's husbands in act 1 being played by the same singers as her clients in act 3.

The motifs associated with each, being repeated. This mirror-like structure is further emphasised by the film interlude at act 2 at the very centre of the work. The events shown in the film are a miniature version of the mirror structure of the opera as a whole (Lulu enters prison and then leaves again) and the music accompanying the film is an exact – it reads the same forwards as backwards. The centre-point of this palindrome is indicated by an played on the, first rising, then falling (shown here on the top ). Berg assigns specific vocal styles to each character with descriptive orchestral representation, recapitulative episodes to emphasise psychological significance and. Recapitulation includes having single singers performing multiple roles.

The use of pitch includes the use of twelve- Tone rows (also one of the basic cells in 's ) is the basic cell of Lulu and generates I.

Blood-soaked and beautiful, Alban Berg’s Lulu may rank among the greatest and most disturbing operas of the 20th century. This fall’s new production of Lulu at the New York Metropolitan Opera—its first reprisal of the work in its entirety since the 1980 premiere—gives us an extraordinary chance to hear and see this challenging work of midcentury modernism in all its terrifying glory, with the gifted soprano Marlis Petersen in the title role, and set designs by the South African artist William Kentridge, whose haunted drawings and films distinguish him as one of the most original artists of our time. In a throwaway age of digitalized superheroes and corporate pop, it’s hard to imagine circumstances that better reveal the explosive powers still manifest in modern art. Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School philosopher who studied composition with Berg in the 1920s, gave the opera a backhanded compliment when he described it as “one of those works that reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it.” Lulu the opera is like the heroine herself—enigmatic, alluring, and troubled by the past. It was one of Berg’s final works; he interrupted its composition to write the lush and neo-Romantic Violin Concerto, a piece that has endured across the decades as the most approachable work in his oeuvre. The opera was left unfinished when Berg died in 1935; the short score was done, but the orchestration was complete for only the first 268 bars of the harrowing third act. Even for the Zurich premiere in 1937, it remained in this imperfect state, and due to a legal dispute with his widow, for many years audiences heard just the first and second acts, leaving them to puzzle over fragmentary bits from the work’s conclusion that were performed piecemeal on the stage.

James Levine conducted the opera in its incomplete form at the Met back in 1977. The fully finished version, with the third act orchestrated by the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, premiered in Paris only in 1979, and the Met reprised the full version a year later. The opera’s style presents formidable challenges for the ears.

Lulu stands among the very first 12-tone or “dodecaphonic” operas of the 20th century, composed according to the principles introduced in the early ’20s by Arnold Schoenberg, Berg’s teacher and the titular head of the so-called Second Vienna School. (Preceding Lulu by several years were two 12-tone operas that Schoenberg himself had composed: the comedic Von heute auf morgen in 1929, and the biblically themed Moses und Aron in 1932.) Even today, the early monuments of 12-tone composition can split concert-hall audiences into warring camps, pitting a smaller faction of hard-core modernists against the reluctant many who, try as they will, just can’t warm to the sounds of the Viennese avant-garde. Just this side of the divide are the Expressionist works from Schoenberg’s earlier period of “free” atonality, such the Second String Quartet (1908), in which each movement creeps closer to the edge of complete atonality until a final breakthrough in the last movement, as announced by a soprano singing the line from a Stefan George poem: “I feel the air of another planet.” Berg’s compositions can likewise be divided into early and late; it remains a commonplace view that Wozzeck, the first of his two operas, is the more accessible and thematically unified work. But Kentridge has a whimsical side as well. A somewhat portly man in a white shirt with an old-fashioned pince-nez on his face, he carries himself with bemused irony. He often makes cameos in his own films, in which he manipulates the tools and clutter of the studio or sketches in old books. Sometimes he runs the films backward so that torn sheets of paper leap from the floor to his hands.

In Six Drawing Lessons, his 2012 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, he played with genres, shifting between sober lectures on the nature of artistic creation and mock-scientific discourses on strategies for gold extraction from the South African hills. One of his most affecting works, the 2003 Tide Table, opens with the image of a suited man reading the newspaper in a deck chair on the beach, but then widens into an allegory about post-apartheid South Africa, alluding to the AIDS epidemic and the hard facts of human mortality, accompanied by the gentle music of the Congolese singer Franco. For Lulu, Kentridge found inspiration in German Expressionism. The entire stage is overcrowded with the jagged and ink-black faces of Weimar-era modernist art, evoking most of all the primitivist woodcuts of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Brilliantly performed by Marlis Petersen, Lulu appears as an uncanny hybrid between woman and paper doll, with oversize paper gloves and a white cylinder obscuring her head. Her hair cropped in a Louise Brooks bob, Petersen plays Lulu as a modern woman, sexually confident and scornful of convention. As Alwa falls in love with Lulu in the second act, he makes explicit the equation between her sexuality and Berg’s musical genius.

“Beneath these clothes,” he fawns, “your body is like music.” The musicologist Douglas Jarman has argued that Lulu hinges on a seeming contradiction, between music of unsurpassed emotional intensity and a story line of the most brutal cynicism. The wound is healed thanks only to the overwhelming strength of the music itself, which offers a kind of moral argument transcending all violence and awakening pity, most of all for the Countess and for Lulu herself. Especially in the scenes between Lulu and Dr. Schoen, Berg’s music gestures toward sentiments of romantic love utterly foreign to Wedekind’s play. The strings play sustained passages that cite Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and also evoke the D-major “fate theme” from Schoenberg’s symphonic poem, Pelleas und Melisande. In these moments, the orchestra doesn’t just accompany the violence onstage but actually challenges it, lending the drama a deeper humanity and elevating it to a plane of universal tragedy.

Tim Benjamin

Lulu once labored under the reputation of “decadence,” a term used by the Nazis and others to conjure up fearful scenes of the immoral and grotesque. But that reputation is undeserved: If the libretto sets free a thousand demons from Pandora’s box, its sonic landscape offers more than what Adorno called “allegories of permanent catastrophe.” It also gives voice to a strange kind of hope— a longing, in Adorno’s words, for what has escaped repression. But here lies the challenge: In the difficult union between music and action, the humane element survives only if the music is given sufficient freedom. Despite its manifest brilliance, the Met’s new production does not always sustain the needed balance. Kentridge himself can hardly be blamed for imprinting the opera with a visual artistry so powerful that it threatens to overwhelm the stage. Massive black-and-white projections loom overhead, and the movable panels appear to be stained with ink.

Anonymous faces grimace and leer, and at one point Berg himself is shown gazing down upon the action with melancholy eyes. There is beauty here, as well as aggression: Lulu’s murder occurs offstage, but her face, monstrous in size, is displayed on the screen that hides the awful deed. In the last instant of death, bold slashes of ink suddenly obscure her face, an effect nearly as gruesome as the act itself. It may seem unkind to complain that an artist is too good; but with his inimitable gifts, Kentridge occasionally seems to step onto the stage as Lulu’s rival, while the music, though brilliantly conducted by Lothar Koenigs, cannot help but recede into the background.

Such considerations, I confess, tempted me more than once to close my eyes so that I might better hear Berg’s music and leave behind both the horror and the beauty of Kentridge’s superb vision. In those moments, miraculously, Lulu seemed to have survived her awful fate. Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article stated that musicologist George Perle discovered an annotated score of Alban Berg’s Lulu that revealed the work’s secret dedication to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. In fact, the annotated score Perle discovered was for Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” not Lulu, though traces of a dedication are also extant in the opera.

The text has been updated.