Search citation statements
Paper Sections
Citation Types
Year Published
Publication Types
Relationship
Authors
Journals
The book takes censorship as an entry point into Berg’s Lulu. Beginning in 1894 with the suppression of the Ur-Lulu, Wedekind’s original play, responses to acts of censorship played a role in ultimately determining the opera’s shape and tone. When Wedekind rewrote material from the Ur-Lulu as two supposedly self-sufficient plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, he responded in different ways to the threat of further censorship. The resulting discrepancies between the later plays, second order consequences of censorship, created obstacles to the joining of them that Berg and other dramaturges, beginning with Wedekind himself, would undertake. Berg worked to overcome the second order consequences by composing intricate leitmotivic connections between the opera’s halves, each based on one of the plays. Recognizing fundamental differences between the plays, this book seeks to recover some of the nuances in the plays and Berg’s treatment of them that have been obscured by assumptions of their unity. It also considers the contradiction between dramatic material that many spectators find sordid and the beauty of much of the music, in particular three musical passages that make a Liebestod effect, and traces this to differences between Wedekind and Berg. The artistic stance known as fin-de-siècle decadence was responsible for deliberately offensive features of the Ur-Lulu. Berg associated the Lulu character with the beauty of major-minor tonality, a musical system over-ripe and in that sense decadent at the turn of the century, in that way enabling a problematic symbolic reading of the also problematic misogynistic material.
The book takes censorship as an entry point into Berg’s Lulu. Beginning in 1894 with the suppression of the Ur-Lulu, Wedekind’s original play, responses to acts of censorship played a role in ultimately determining the opera’s shape and tone. When Wedekind rewrote material from the Ur-Lulu as two supposedly self-sufficient plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, he responded in different ways to the threat of further censorship. The resulting discrepancies between the later plays, second order consequences of censorship, created obstacles to the joining of them that Berg and other dramaturges, beginning with Wedekind himself, would undertake. Berg worked to overcome the second order consequences by composing intricate leitmotivic connections between the opera’s halves, each based on one of the plays. Recognizing fundamental differences between the plays, this book seeks to recover some of the nuances in the plays and Berg’s treatment of them that have been obscured by assumptions of their unity. It also considers the contradiction between dramatic material that many spectators find sordid and the beauty of much of the music, in particular three musical passages that make a Liebestod effect, and traces this to differences between Wedekind and Berg. The artistic stance known as fin-de-siècle decadence was responsible for deliberately offensive features of the Ur-Lulu. Berg associated the Lulu character with the beauty of major-minor tonality, a musical system over-ripe and in that sense decadent at the turn of the century, in that way enabling a problematic symbolic reading of the also problematic misogynistic material.
No abstract
The chapter introduces this book as inspired by continuing work in recent censorship studies, including books by Annabel Patterson (1984) and William Olmsted (2016). Olmsted’s work on Flaubert and Baudelaire is especially relevant here because Wedekind’s responses to censorship resemble those of both authors and because of Berg’s affinity for Baudelaire. It discusses the changed understanding of censorship in the 1990s, observes the centrality of indirectness as a feature of artists’ negotiations with censors and censorship, and defines the concepts of preemptive censorship and second order consequences of censorship. In addition, the chapter introduces the metaphor of a palimpsest that several writers have found appropriate in reference to the perceptible layers in censored works. The chapter argues that Berg retained Wedekind’s turn-of-the-century setting, even though productions in the 1920s were updating Wedekind’s plays, and it undertakes an initial explanation of the complex genesis of the Lulu plays.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.