Quarantined Material

Abstract

Two out of three Liebestod passages in Lulu appear in Act 3; at the same time, Berg based Act 3 entirely on quarantined material from the Ur-Lulu, Acts 2 and 3 of Die Büchse der Pandora. This chapter discusses in detail Wedekind’s censorship trials in 1905–1906, which had to do with the play as a publication. After the trials, Wedekind prepared a new edition in 1906 with a misleading preface that included the court documents, which in a 1911 edition, he replaced with another paratext, an ironic prologue. The chapter addresses the unpromising aspects of Wedekind’s Act 2 that would have challenged a composer with Berg’s artistic sensibilities, and it takes up the question of whether we should consider Lulu’s clients in the final scene to be equivalent to her husbands in the first half and what is at stake in doing this.