Word: erdgeist
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...Dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), who was obsessed by the fury, the brevity and the desolation of the pursuit of sexual pleasure. As Wedekind's translator put it, "he dealt in 'the hellish drive out of which no joy remains alive.' " In both of his plays, Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box), Wedekind centered this hell in a promiscuous woman, Lulu...
Contradictory Feminine. Berg based his tortured opera on two plays (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) by erotic, tormented Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). In German Playwright Wedekind's mind-and in Berg's-Lulu is an amalgam of all the contradictory feminine instincts: she is innocent and worldly, timid and rapacious, sentimental and heartless. Before the garishly painted curtain rises on a circus ring, a ringmaster invites the audience to witness the spectacle of the human circus, then calls: "Bring in our snake." In comes an assistant carrying Lulu, dressed in long black stockings...
...little shocked by some of Charles's work. On rainy days when he had to stay indoors, he did acid little illustrations, in thin wiggly lines and soppy watercolor washes, for Zola's Nana, Foe's The Masque of the Red Death and Wedekind's Erdgeist. They were often sexy but never lusty, and Exhibition Director Ritchie, who points out that Charles apparently never meant them to be published, thinks they reflected "a deep unbalance and disquiet in his own nature." Perhaps his watercolors of anemic acrobats in painful poses...
...erotic, tormented mind of the late Playwright Frank Wedekind, a woman named Lulu was a symbol of insatiability. His two plays about her (Erdgeist and Büchse der Pandora) showed people helplessly racked by passion, preached: "Only children have reason; men are animals." Composer Alban Berg articulated the same opinion with his opera Wozzeck. When he based an opera on Wedekind's Lulu, Berg produced the most impressive monument of lust in all musical literature. When orchestral excerpts from it were played at the Berlin Staatsoper, extra police squads stood by to govern the crowds. Lulu was given...
...Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mzensk would seem a rural innocent (TIME, Feb. 11). The adulterous Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck is a colorless nobody compared with Alban Berg's Lulu, a symbol of insatiability conceived in the tortured mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist, Die Büchse der Pandora). Sooner or later Lulu is bound to make her operatic appearance because of Composer Berg's reputation, the power of his music. Orchestral excerpts from Lulu have been played at the Berlin Staatsoper where extra police squads governed the crowds. Last spring fragments were...