Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg's "Lulu"

Exploring the crossroads between autobiographical narrative and musical composition, this book examines Berg's transformation of Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora — the plays used in the formation of the libretto for Lulu — according to notions of gender identity, social customs, and the aesthetics of modernity in the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s. While Berg modernized several aspects of the plays and incorporated serial techniques of composition from …