Lulu

Lulu’s back in town, there but not quite there. She had popped in a decade ago with the Hamburg Opera, incomplete as usual, and late this past season the Metropolitan Opera put her on view for the first time in its history. And, sure enough, Lulu didn’t make it intact.

The explanation for this is that when Austrian 12-tone composer Alban Berg died in 1935, he left the score of Lulu unfinished. There was some uncertainty as to how much was missing from this, his setting of two turn-of-the-century plays by the outspoken and daring Frank Wedekind, but for years it was generally assumed—on the strength of what was said by Berg’s publisher, Universal Editions of Vienna, and his widow, Hélène—that only two acts had been orchestrated. Sketches alone, it was thought, existed for the third.

HP

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Harvey E. Phillips

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Lulu’s back in town, there but not quite there. She had popped in a decade ago with the Hamburg Opera, incomplete as usual, and late this past season the Metropolitan Opera put her on view for the first time in its history. And, sure enough, Lulu didn’t make it intact.

The explanation for this is that when Austrian 12-tone composer Alban Berg died in 1935, he left the score of Lulu unfinished. There was some uncertainty as to how much was missing from this, his setting of two turn-of-the-century plays by the outspoken and daring Frank Wedekind, but for years it was generally assumed—on the strength of what was said by Berg’s publisher, Universal Editions of Vienna, and his widow, Hélène—that only two acts had been orchestrated. Sketches alone, it was thought, existed for the third.