Lulu

There is something uniquely unsettling about Berg’s opera Lulu (1929-35). On one level it is a pitiless, at times shocking depiction of human, and especially male, sexuality. And yet the music, when it isn’t confronting the horror full on, can be so seductively beautiful, with glimpses of the searing compassion that redeems Berg’s other opera, Wozzeck, that it can leave the spectator feeling somehow complicit, even in the opera’s dreadful ending. Berg derived the action from two plays by the German Expressionist Frank Wedekind, which tell of the rise and fall of an enigmatic, irresistibly attractive, yet weirdly impassive femme fatale, and of the inevitable downfall of all her lovers, one of whom, the composer Alwa, is evidently a stand-in for Berg himself. In the final scene, Lulu, now working as a prostitute in London, is murdered horrifically by Jack the Ripper, a reincarnation of the lover she murdered earlier on. As in Wozzeck, the music is tightly organised, but this time the impetus is more lyrical than dramatic, and the vocal writing, though often very difficult to sing, has moments of intense melodic beauty. Berg did not live to finish Lulu, but the piano score was more or less complete at his death in 1935. In 1979, the composer Friedrich Cerha orchestrated this, and his version is now the standard text.