Word: lulu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Alban Berg, 50, Australian composer (Wozzeck, Lulu); of blood-poisoning; in Vienna...
...erotic of all opera heroines has yet to appear on any opera stage. Beside her, 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...
...opera's prolog Lulu is represented by a fearsome wriggling snake, an eternal destroyer, according to Composer Berg who makes her just as horrid in every scene which follows. She destroys one man after another, commits a murder which lands her in prison, weasels her freedom only to philander in Paris with gamblers, procurers, swindlers. End comes in a sordid London attic where Lulu is brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Berg's orchestra then sounds out a shuddering scream. The New York Philharmonic took the cue faithfully, startled half its subscribers who still had to hear Soprano...
...Composer Alban Berg as a stark ultra-modernist who had little regard for beauty. Wozzeck's story was sordid. Its music was an enigma to many, though none denied its power. For six years in his home in Vienna, Composer Berg has been working on a second opera, Lulu. Boston had the first U. S. taste of it last week when Sergei Koussevitzky conducted five symphonic excerpts...
...Lulu's story, hatched in the erotic mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind, is even more lurid than poor bewildered Wozzeck's. Lulu is a vampire who feeds on power and lust. She destroys three men in the first two acts. At the end when she is murdered and horribly mutilated, the orchestra emits one terrifying shriek. Then only did Bostonians sit up in their seats. For although Berg again "uses the twelve-tone scale, he weaves it into a crafty harmonic design, subjects it to his moods which are for the most part restrained...