Author: Margaret Anne Notley

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0190069864

Censorship had an extraordinary impact on Alban Berg's opera Lulu, composed by the Austrian during the politically tumultuous years spanning 1929 to 1935. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind that were repeatedly banned from publishing and performing up until the end of World War I, thelibretto was in turn censored by Berg himself when he submitted it to authorities in Nazi Germany in 1934. When Berg died before the opera was debuted the next season, the third act was censored by his widow, Helene, and his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.In "Taken By the Devil", author Margaret Notley uncovers the unusual and uniquely generative role of censorship throughout the lifecycle of Berg's great opera. Placing the opera and its source material in a wider cultural context, Notley provides close readings of the opera's libretto and score toreveal the precise techniques employed by the composer in negotiating the censors. She goes on to explore the ways Berg chose to augment rather than flatten the discrepancies between various performances of the earlier plays and the opera itself, adding further dimensions of interpretation to thework. Elegantly readable, "Taken by the Devil" is the most meticulously researched and nuanced study of Lulu to date, and illuminates the process of politically-driven censorship of theater, music, and the arts during the tumultuous early twentieth century.