Selected performances (videos below):
Lyric Opera of Chicago, 2008.
Paris Opera, 24 February, 1979.
Zurich Opera, c.2012.
Royal Opera, 2009.
Theodor Adorno on Berg's Lulu:
The opera Lulu is one of those works that reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it. Berg's original concept of development itself underwent development. No longer is the process one of moving from one sonority to another, from one phrase to the next, as was appropriate for the held breath, the intensified moment of Expressionism, but rather one of unfolding over long stretches.... During a lesson Berg once praised a chamber work because it development section took on real momentum. This praise, whether deserved or not, can be interpreted as the expression of a compositional interest that dominated all others in the mature Berg and in Lulu came into its own. - Adorno. Alban Berg (1968:125).
In Lulu the self - from whose point of view events are seen, from whose perspective the music is heard - steps visibly onto the stage; Berg intimates as much with one of those quotations he loved to smuggle in, the way a medieval master included his self-portrait as a minor figure in a religious painting. Truly a corporeal-incorporeal suitor: united in Alwa's rondo themes is the exuberance of Schumannesque youth and Baudelairian fascination with fatal beauty. What became known as the first movement of the Lulu Suite, the enraptured praise of the loved one, glows in an ecstasy words can not equal; as if the music wanted to become one of those fairy-tale gowns Wedekind envisaged for Lulu. This music, as a radiant, multi-hued jewel for the beloved body, seeks to restore human dignity to a banished, heretical yearning. Every bar of music intends salvation for the banished, for the symbol of sexual being, for a soul that in the hereafter rubs the sleep from its eyes, to quote from the most irresistible bars of the opera. In using and setting these words Berg paid his respects to the sixty-year-old [Karl] Krause, author of Sittlichkeit und Kriminalitat. Berg's Lulu music thanks him in the name of that utopia which at heart motivates Kraus's critique of the bourgeois taboos that degrade love. Berg's music strikes a nerve where civilized man does not joke, and precisely this point becomes for him a refuge of the humane.
- Adorno. Alban Berg (1968:7).
"The twelve-tone chord at the moment of Lulu's death in Berg's opera produces an effect very much like that of a motion picture."
- Adorno and Eisler. Composing for the Films (1947:.24).
Composed in 1927, Alban Berg’s Lulu was the first opera to include
specific directions for a FILM to be projected as a part of the staging.
In this 2008 Lyric Opera of Chicago production digital video was used
to carefully emulate period film and advance the narrative."
Alban Berg died of a blood infection before he could complete Lulu. The first two acts were complete, but the third act was not, though in the opinion of many, including Adorno, the work was all but complete. Though the narrative's concerning the motivations vary, Berg's widow asked both Schoenberg and Webern to complete the work and both refused. Adorno believed that Schoenberg's refusal had more to do with jealousy, as Berg's masterpiece surpassed Schoenberg's own achievements. Webern, Adorno thought, was moving in his own direction and it differed enough from Berg's that Webern did not want to risk compromising either vision. [--- Berg died at the time of Webern's working on three of his important works: Op. 24, Concerto for Nine Instruments [Glenn Gould] (1934), Op. 27, Variations for Piano (1936) and the Op. 28, String Quartet (1937–38) ---] The work of both composers, along with Schoenberg's, were complemented by the fascist ban on degenerate music and art. Without the participation of Schoenberg in particular, Helene Berg refused to allow the work to be completed and thus only a two act version with excerpts from Act III (known as the Lulu Suite [performed by Kathleen Battle, 1981]) was performed.
Today I am now also writing to you for a particular reason, one that seems to me the most important for both of us: the orchestration of the missing parts of Lulu. I know that Schoenberg refused to do it. Webern was also against it when I last saw him in England (probably 1936) and I have been told that you are not generally in favor of the plan.
If I now strive to change your mind with all due seriousness and responsibility, you must believe that I am guided by nothing other than concern for the work an for Alban's intentions. I myself, to clarify the matter in advance, neither wish nor am I able to take on the task.
As far as Schoenberg's rejection is concerned, first of all, I am convinced that his motives - despite the one serious argument he advances - are not of the purest sort. We often spoke of his jealousy, you, Alban and I; I had occasion to observe it in its basest manifestations, and I have no reservations about claiming that the thought of cutting off Alban's deciding work from posterity through his refusal is a tempting one to him. And in conversation with Webern, I also encountered a form of coldness that was able only with some effort to mask itself as respect before the fate one must accept. He said, with his air of native cunning, that a work such as Schubert's B minor Symphony is also incomplete, yet lives. But this is sophistic analogy. There is a fundamental difference between a symphonic work and an opera. Anyone with even the slightest understanding of theatre, which is by its very nature dependent on an audience, knows that an unfinished opera, outside of memorial or festival performances, could not live.
God knows that I honour the idea of the fragment [e.g., Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was subtitled Philosophical Fragments], but in an art form whose aesthetic substance cannot be separated from a certain drastic materiality, a fragmentary reproduction would be an impossibility, even if it survived the worldly demands of the theatrical world. And I would stake my life on the fact that Alban would have approved of my intention....
And if Webern claimed in the end that the composition was not really complete, but in some sections only sketched in the principle parts, then I refuse to believe this before I have seen, nay: studied it with my own eyes. Berg told me unequivocally of the compositions completion; in a letter to me.... One should not believe anything to the contrary.
Now, I am all too aware of the incredible difficulty, arduousness and responsibility of such a task. No one person can carry it out. The orchestration of Lulu is only possible collectively....
My Paris friend Rene Leibowitz... a musician of the highest order... versed in the style... bound to the cause by the most passionate love. He has gathered around him a group of musicians fanatically devoted to Alban.
It could finally be argued that there is plenty of time yet for such a matter, and that one could see to it one day, much, much later, when Alban has 'become entirely historical' (itself a ghastly notion). I also consider this argument false. There is never enough time for the things that matter. The world we live in has taken on the tempo of catastrophe; it would be naive to simply trust its course - it can all fall to ruin. And, to speak of more concrete matters: the tradition of our music lies in the hands of very few people, among whom Leibowitz is the most important. If it is interrupted, the instrumentation of Lulu will no longer be possible, as no one will understand the sense and language of such an instrumentation any more. But if those few people still directly familiar with it succeed in completing the instrumentation, then this can itself save the tradition. The extreme importance of which calls for no further words.
-- Theodor Adorno to Helene Berg
November 23, 1949 238-241
Lonitz, Henri, ed. (Wieland Hoban, trans.). 2005. Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg.: Correspondence 1925-1935. Cambridge: Polity Press.
In his Dream Notes, Adorno’s final entry before his death was a dream about Lulu.
I was walking across a street in a very large town in the middle of the night, perhaps the Kurfürstendamm. Above the entrance to a cabaret the word LULU was written in large letters. I thought it must refer to a possibly shortened version of the opera and went in. I then noticed that there was nothing but a somewhat charmless, down-at-the-heel striptease dancer, who was trying after a fashion to represent Lulu through her dancing. Repelled, I left the place and woke up with a feeling of shock (Adorno. Dream Notes, p.77).
In 1976 Helene Berg died and almost immediately the work on a new completed version of the opera was begun by Friedrich Cerha -- Rene Leibowitz having died in 1972, a fact that sadly testifies to Adorno's obvious urgency in his letter. Cerha was known for his interpretations of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Conducted by Pierre Boulez, one the students of Rene Leibowitz referred to by Adorno, the Berg/Cerha Three Act version premiered on February 24, 1979 with Teresa Stratas as Lulu and the stage production by Patrice Chéreau.
Theatre National de l'Opera de Paris, February 24, 1979
Pierre Boulez: Musical Director
Lulu: Teresa Strata
Stage Direction: Patrice Chereau
Lulu
Chorus and Orchestra of the Zurich Opera House
Direttore: Franz Welser-Möst
Lulu: Laura Aikin
Countess Geschwitz: Cornelia Kallisch
Medical Specialist: Peter Keller
Painter: Steve Davislim
Dr. Schön: Alfred Muff
Alwa: Peter Straka
Schigolch: Guido Götzen
Schoolboy: Andrea Bönig
Dresser: Katharina Peetz
Animal Trainer/Acrobat: Rolf Haunstein
Prince/Manservant: Martin Zysset
Theatre Director: Werner Gröschel
Child: Lynn Lange
LECTURE NOTES on Adorno, Berg, and Lulu, c. 2020/21
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“...Lulu embodies all of the raging contradictions of Central European culture on the eve of the Hitler Catastrophe” (Ross 225).
What are we to think of the character of Lulu?
What are we to think of the objectification: only the Beggar and the Countess call her by her real name. Lulu, Act 2: c. 38:00 mins.
Berg’s (Adorno’s and Petersen’s) sympathetic reading: “She is a victim of what men desire of her” Petersen says. They destroy themselves notes Jarman, too. How different Peterson’s interpretation [Introduction] is from the guy that follows, who “interpreting the music” actually says that she is a femme fatale. A view which Adorno and Patersen reject.
Double and Triple roles of the performers (and in the music, too) respectable men become slavers and murders, or perhaps what they were all along? The hypocrisy of bourgeois morality. Reversals, such as in the Film Music interlude.
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The opera as a marker of the coming catastrophe:
“...Lulu embodies all of the raging contradictions of Central European culture on the eve of the Hitler Catastrophe” (Ross 225).
Tragedy or Farce? (“Sordid and absurd” according to Jarman p.91-92 and p.93).
What it seems to mean for Adorno: His letters to Helene Berg and his final dream.
As a form of popular culture?
Ross: Lulu contains a jazz band, vaudeville, and light opera. It also has sections without music and it features a film between Acts 1 and 2. All the things we have seen Adorno disliked!
The Domination of Nature and the Domination of women.
Original titles of the Wedikind plays were Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box.
The domination of nature and the domination of women go hand in hand not because women are somehow closer to Nature, but because they are socially constructed as such. The drive to dominate each is an essential aspect of Enlightenment rationality, technological/scientific advances, and control of populations and resources. Given that Critical Theory equates the domination of Nature with the Domination of women, one could also see the character and demise of Lulu as a personification of this process of domination. Lulu was “the Earth spirit” in a non-metaphysical sense:
“Absolute Isolation and the consumer world, irreconcilably breaking apart, are correlates…. Opposed to this is Lulu, around who everything turns. She represents repressed nature, its incommensurability with civilization, both the sin therein and retribution for it. But Berg would not have been a true artist if he had copied the eternally bourgeois-sanctioned antithesis: nature/anti-nature. In fact it is not Lulu who is the self out of whose perspective the music comes, but rather Alwa, who loves her…. The imago of Lulu draws its shining arc over the abyss, only to disappear into it.” Adorno, Alban Berg, p.130.
This and the fact that it is told through a new form of popular culture are certainly key ideas. (Pabst. 1929. Pandora’s Box starring Louise Brooks. Youtube).
Perhaps mention the Lou Reed/Robert Wilson/Metallica collaborations based off the plays and decidedly not from Berg’s opera. The misogynist is restored by returning to Wedikind.
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Adorno (Sociologist, Philosopher, Composer, associated with “The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory”)
Music is not expressive of something outside of structures of social relations, which are relations of authority. If music expresses anything, it is that it, along with taste, style, fashion, and popular culture, the everyday experience of the mechanisms of domination and authority that run through contemporary social relations.
Adorno: Proposes that the critical social analysis of music is place to work out these questions about social theory, domination, consumerism/culture. He gives this rationale in his only recently published essay “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being”:
The fact that music is still unexplored territory… means that one finds far fewer rigid views here than in other fields, and that there are far fewer obstacles in the form of cliches to impede the posing of questions…. Music is especially qualified [as ‘an especially good point of entry’] to do this because it shares fundamental characteristics with language and, like language, is clearly dominated by monopolistic centres, while, at the same time, [unlike language] it is not directly connected to the world of objects. At the same time, however, the influence of this object-world is palpable in all elements of musical language and its reception. Music truly is, to cite Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, ‘the world once again’, but a model that one can use to study the defining characteristics of reality without having to discuss directly the content of that reality. (The Current of Music)
Adorno: Music as we know it is not “Natural” or expressive of “Nature”
However, although it does connect Humans to natural aspects of themselves, it does so only to exploit those natural/biological aspects of ourselves or to provide our minds and bodies with relaxation/recreation/reproduction so as to return to work the next day.
Music can not be expressive of Nature because that Nature no longer exists. For Adorno, Nature has been transformed and appropriated by humans.
You may know the phrase: “Like Second Nature” and Adorno takes that seriously.
“Nature” is now really “Second Nature, indistinguishable and unimaginable apart from its domination by human social production. Any aspects of ourselves that are “Natural”, the very aspects that Bernstein appeals to, are no less dominated than the Nature we still think of as “Out There”.
If Music expresses a relation to Nature, it is in fact expressing our relation to this Second Nature that is characterized by Authority and Domination, and not Freedom and choice.
Marx’s “vast accumulation of commodities” is the other image of this Second Nature, and Adorno draws heavily on Marx’s Fetish of Commodities to argue that music is no less commodified, and there for no more expressive, than any other consumer good produced by “The Culture Industry”.
Adorno on Music and Popular Protest: https://archive.org/details/RicBrownTheordorAdornoonPopularMusicandProtest
Therefore the idea that music expresses something other than social relations, that some music is “Authentic” and others not, is absurd.
Authenticity is a means by which conformity is regulated and imposed from within and without.
One hears echos of this view in John Schaffer’s remarks on WNYC and his show New Sounds:
“Marginalization of the arts, with the big depressing news we’re facing, is the exact opposite of what this culture needs.... When what we listen to is all based on algorithms, you’re fed things that will already fit your taste”
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The domination and intensification of consumer society (the Culture Industry) until it pervades every aspect of life means for Adorno even Schoenberg’s atonality could not escape the process of commodification. It even becomes, as “a degraded form of pure dissonance,” the norm in horror film soundtracks:
“The modern motion picture... requires musical means that do not represent a stylized picture of pain, but rather its tonal record. This particular dimension of the new musical resources was made apparent by Stravinsky in his Sacre du Prentemps” (Adorno and Eisler Composing for the Films, pgs. 24-25).
Here Bernstein and Adorno converge: Stravinsky’s nod to popular music, especially Jazz, was understandable, but Stravinsky embraced this relationship to the Culture industry, he did not try to resist it as Adorno thinks Schoenberg did… at least until his later works when “Schoenberg wanted to be heard” by a wider public, such Kurt Weil, Hans Eisler, and of course, Stravinsky himself commanded.
They also converge in another important way: they both believe that music is expressive of social life, but here they diverge immediately.
If Bernstein is right about Ives – that he was asking a question about not only the direction of music, but also of a civilization on the brink of a catastrophic World War – then it holds equally true that Stravinsky’s Sacre expresses the coming crisis, with its industrialization of killing that only civilized people, and certainly not “primitives” can dream of.
Adorno on Stravinsky, especially La Sacre du printemps “Le Sacre du printemps… makes the subject of the work a human sacrifice, that of the principal dancer – a sacrifice which the music not so much interprets as ritualistically accompanies. (“On Jazz” from Essays on Music, p.289)
Sacre consists of rigid and “convulsive blows and shocks” that reproduce the machines and technocratic domination that we can see in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis:
“His percussive effects are no less than assassination attempts, echoes of archaic war drums, blows of the sort that sacrificial victims and slaves have to endure” (Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait, 1962-63).
“….the anti-humanistic sacrifice to the collective – sacrifice without tragedy, made not in the name of a renewed image of man, but only in the blind affirmation of a situation recognized by the victim. This insight can find expression either through self-mockery or through self-annihilation…. Speaking of the prehistoric youthful generation of Sacre, Cocteau stated in somewhat condescending but well-intentioned tones of enlightenment: ‘These credulous men imagine that the sacrifice of a young girl, chosen above all others, is absolutely essential to the rebirth of Spring’” (Adorno. The Philosophy of Modern Music, p.145-146).
So for Adorno Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) and its primitivism show, like the paintings of Emil Nolde, that this naive primitivism is not so naive and harmless as might pretend it to be, nor is it a threat to the bourgeois social order. Like Nolde’s paintings, Stravinsky presents Nature in terms of the primitive and the savage. For Adorno, it does not express the Freedom or the so-called “Back-to-Nature” ideology that it claims. Adorno argues that this is not “nature” but really the expression of a “Second Nature” with the pleasures and desires, brutality and domination, that Sade’s Justine and Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills” announced.
Stravinsky, therefore, has more in common with Emile Nolde than he does with Schoenberg. Not all expressionism is the same. Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party from its first days and remained a committed Nazi until the end. His work was still banned because its’ primitivism and expressionism was, the authorities said, degenerate.
There is a significant contrast to be drawn between Stravinsky's Sacre and Berg’s Lulu. Stravinsky naturalizes the violence and terror of the present by connecting it to a mythological/ritualistic past, whereas Berg’s Lulu makes it clear that the violence and objectification found in the work of art are those found in the production of everyday life. Lulu describes social life without naturalizing it. Even if we were to look at the past, the murder of Iphigenia at Aulis is not an annual ritual sacrificed to bring the cycle of seasons, but because Agamemnon, her father, recently killed a deer in Artemis’ sacred grove and she sends the winds to prevent the Greek fleet from embarking for the war at Troy. Unlike the murders in the Sacre, when Agamemnon returns to Mycenae from Troy, he is almost immediately killed by Clytemnestra in revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia. There is no eternal return of Spring and ritual sacrifice and libations (see also the story of the “King of the Wood” in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.6095/page/n19 ). In fact, the future holds is only ruin for the houses of Atreus. In the midst of their great success at Troy, Mycenaean Greece was obvious to its own impending social and economic collapse. Likewise, the Roman Empire – much like the British Empire at the end of WWI – did not fall in a day.
To discuss Sacre and Lulu would take at least another 20 pages or so, but if you find these notes helpful, I can try to add a discussion of Lulu to them at some point before the end of the semester.
I will let Adorno have the last word on what he sees as the contrast to be drawn between the two:
To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky’s Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind's Lulu than does Berg’s music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg's work is to Stravinsky’s and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out of just such conflicts…. (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, p. 269).
Sensual satisfaction, punished at various times by an ascetic authoritarianism, has historically become directly antagonistic to art; mellifluous sounds, harmonious colors, and suaveness have become kitsch and trademarks of the culture industry. The sensual appeal of art continues to be legitimate only when, as in Berg’s Lulu or in the work of Andre Masson, it is the bearer or a function of the content rather than an end in itself (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, p. 276).
To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky’s Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind’s Lulu than does Berg’s music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg’s work is to Stravinsky’s and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out of just such conflicts (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory 269).
Sensual satisfaction, punished at various times by an ascetic authoritarianism, has historically become directly antagonistic to art; mellifluous sounds, harmonious colors, and suaveness have become kitsch and trademarks of the culture industry. The sensual appeal of art continues to be legitimate only when, as in Berg's Lulu or in the work of Andre Masson, it is the bearer or a function of the content rather than an end in itself. One of the difficulties of new art is how to combine the desideratum of internal coherence, which always imports a certain degree of evident polish into the work, with opposition to the culinary element. Sometimes the work requires the culinary, while paradoxically the sensorium balks at it (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, 276).
