Word: wedekind
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Berg worked out the libretto of Lulu from two plays by the German actor-writer Frank Wedekind. It is a thing of violence and sensuality, set out in the glares and black shadows of fin de siecle romanticism. Singing in clipped, high-tension German, lustful Lulu causes one violent death after another among her helpless lovers. Then the pace slackens and she moves sonorously toward her own destruction hy Jack the Ripper...
...have been a 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...
...Zurich last week Lulu the opera was given its world premiere before one of the largest, most brilliant audiences ever assembled there. Widow Wedekind and Widow Berg listened proudly to what may prove to be an opera as lasting as it is sensational...
...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 at the Berlin Staatsoper where extra police squads governed the crowds. Last spring...