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ALBAN BERG’S FILMIC MUSIC: INTENTIONS AND EXTENSIONS OF

THE FILM MUSIC INTERLUDE IN THE OPERA LULU

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the

Louisiana State University and

Agricultural and Mechanical College

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

The College of Music and Dramatic Arts

by

Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith

A.B., Smith College, 1993

A.M., Smith College, 1995

M.L.I.S., Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1999

May 2002

ii

©Copyright 2002

Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith

All rights reserved

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is my pleasure to express gratitude to my wonderful committee for working so well

together and for their suggestions and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Jan Herlinger,

my dissertation advisor, for his insightful guidance, care and precision in editing my written

prose and translations, and open mindedness. His dedication to his students, to teaching and

research, and to musicology has provided an inspiring example for me. I am greatly indebted to

Jeffrey Perry and Kevin Bongiorni, members of my reading subcommittee, for their help from

the very beginning of this study as well as for their kind words. Special thanks are also due to

Bert Boyce, my minor advisor, and to Alison McFarland and Robert Peck, for their questions

and comments; to Andreas Giger, for his corrections of first drafts of my translations and

meticulous reading of the final examination draft; and to Robert Perlis, Dean’s representative

from the Graduate School, for sharing his perceptions as well as his enthusiasm.

Other Louisiana State University faculty also contributed to the resilience of my

intellectual curiosity and thus to my ongoing interest in the topic: many thanks to Irene DiMaio,

Dexter Edge, Richard Kaplan, Wallace McKenzie, John Pizer, David Robins, Lee Shiflett,

David Smyth, Cornelia Yarbrough, and Robert Ward. Lois Kuyper-Rushing, Glen Walden, and

the staff at the Carter Center for Music Resources and the Interlibrary Loan Borrowing

Department in Middleton Library were extremely helpful during the research stages of this study.

During the summers of 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, I was able to receive assistance for

research at Smith College. I owe a great deal to my former undergraduate and graduate advisor,

John Sessions, for kindly reading critically several drafts of chapters and for his invaluable

suggestions. I also wish to thank Marlene Wong, Katherine Burnett, and the staff at the Werner

Josten Music Library, for their help in gathering materials; to Randy Shannon for his help with

accommodations; and to David Bickar, Cathy Noess, Ronald Perera, and Margaret Sarkissian

for their advice and for listening.

iv

My thanks to Jennifer Williams Brown and Matthew Brown for having me stay with

them and for introducing me to the Sibley Library of the University of Rochester and the George

Eastman House and International Museum of Photography and Film. Jennifer Williams Brown

has played a pivotal role in my education in musicology; I am grateful for her willingness and

generosity in sharing her knowledge of teaching, presenting, and writing with me. I have also

benefited considerably from Matthew Brown’s teaching as well as his advice concerning

academia. Thanks to Dave Headlam for conversing with me on Berg research and music

analysis and for reading the final draft of the dissertation. Thanks also to the staff at the Sibley

Music Library for their assistance. A number of curators, archivists, librarians, and staff helped

me find information at the George Eastman House and International Museum of Photography

and Film: thanks to Paolo Cherchi Usai (senior curator, motion pictures), Rachel Stuhlman

(librarian at the Richard and Ronay Menschel Library), and Todd Gustavson (curator,

technology collection).

This dissertation would not have come to fruition without the overseas correspondence

(via mail and the Internet) from many archivists and librarians. Thanks to Dr. Anna Pia

Maissen (Zurich Stadtarchiv), who provided me with important information about Zurich and

the Zurich Opera House during the 1937 world premiere of Lulu, for helping me to obtain

pictures of stills from the film used at the premiere, and for pointing me in the right direction for

learning about Tempo, the Zurich company that made the film. For their efforts, I also wish to

recognize Mark Schulze Steinen (Dramaturgical Department of the Zurich Opera House), The

Zurich Zentralbibliothek, Office of the Trade Register of the canton of Zurich, Berlin National

Library, Austrian National Library, Lower Saxony Federal State Library of Hannover, and the

Archive of the National Theatre in Brno. I am also grateful to Christoph Hinterberger, Elisabeth

Knessl, and Aygün Lausch at Universal Edition, who sent me Universal Edition’s copies of

reviews of the premiere, along with other copies of archival materials, and for permitting me to

reproduce musical examples in this dissertation.

v

In addition to scholars already mentioned, other scholars offered their advice and shared

their experiences with me. I was honored to receive a letter from Rudolf Arnheim, who

answered my questions about living in Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s and about people he

might have known while writing his essays on film. Regina Busch, Camille Crittenden, and

Ulrich Krämer made suggestions that saved me a lot of time in the long run.

I thank my family and friends for fortifying my confidence to do what I love and for

believing in me. I am grateful to have an eccentric mother, Ursula Goldsmith, who pursued

graduate degrees at the same time I did and instilled in me a love for learning and creativity.

Strange as it might seem, I thank my cats Jade, Fetish, Mewzette, Mackie, Sassafrass, Beamer,

Roses, Fritz, Raven, Iris, Bear, and Mer Mau, and my beta fish Sid Fischious (who resides next

to my computer), for their company while I was able to write and do research at home. Finally,

I express my gratitude to Kelly Davidson (my best friend from Smith College), Michael Brooks,

Marcia Brown, Heather Cohen, Linda Page Cummins, Aaminah Durrani, Jennifer Finkle,

Susan Fischer, Amy Francis, Elbridge Hathaway, Aaron Hillman, Chandra Holloway, Isaac

Jenkins, Reginald Jones, Kheng Keow Koay, Edward Komara, Valerie Lavender, Andrea and

Guy Letourneau, Aram Lief, Susan Malde, Horace Joey Maxile, Joshua McCloud, Allison

McCubbin, Sarah Ngola, Robin Pierce, Heather Pinson, Michelle Pucci, Champika Ranasinghe,

Noah Rosen, Jamie Ruf, JoAnn Sabatini, Rebecca Savoy, Lois Smith, Sarah Casey Smith,

Patrick Tuck, Astrida Valigorsky, Nancy Washer, Lavinia Yokum, and Thomas Zirkle for their

friendship in addition to engaging conversations--as well as innumerable acts of kindness--related

directly or indirectly to this study and to the happiness I have found in my academic career.

* * *

Permission to reprint musical examples in the dissertation is acknowledged from the

following source:

Alban Berg “Lulu”/UE 13640 A/B

© 1964 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien

Revision © 1985 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................iii

LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... viii

LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................................... ix

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES..................................................................................... x

LIST OF PICTURES........................................................................................................ xi

ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... xii

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1

Aims and Directions of this Study ........................................................... 1

Characters, Plot, and Narrative: The FMI in the Opera Lulu.................... 3

The History of the FMI ........................................................................... 7

Berg’s Intellectual Mileu and the Motion Picture ...................................... 9

PART ONE: ANALYSIS OF THE FILM MUSIC INTERLUDE AND FILMIC ASPECTS

CHAPTER

1

THE MUSICAL STRUCTURE AND BERG’S COMPOSITIONAL

TECHNIQUES ...................................................................................... 12

The Palindromic Structure.................................................................... 12

Serial Procedures and How They Fit into the Palindromic Structure ...... 13

Dramatic Meaning ............................................................................... 25

Conclusions ......................................................................................... 30

2

FILMIC ASPECTS, BERG’S FILM, AND REPRESENTATION OF

CHARACTERS: IDEAS DRAWN FROM THE ANALYSIS ............... 31

Establishing Shots and Editing Styles..................................................... 31

Fades, Dissolves, and Graphic Matches................................................. 37

Rhythmic Matches................................................................................ 42

Wipes................................................................................................... 45

The Film Shown at the 1937 World Premiere of Lulu............................. 47

Musical Frames and the FMI and Frames in Film.................................. 53

Conclusions.......................................................................................... 67

PART TWO: FILMIC ASPECTS AND CRITICISM

CHAPTER

3

EARLY FILM THEORY AND BERG’S FILM MUSIC INTERLUDE.. 69

Béla Balázs and Robert Musil: The Precision and Soul of the

“Visible Man”....................................................................................... 69

Balázs and Musil: The Film Spectator and Berg’s Film Music

Spectator .............................................................................................. 77

Rudolf Arnheim and Berg’s Dual Role as Scenarist-Director................... 82

The FMI’s Film as Crime Film: Early Film Theory on this Genre.......... 89

Schoenberg, Adorno, and Their Early Ideas about Film and

Film Music........................................................................................... 95

Conclusions........................................................................................ 103

vii

4

CRITICAL RESPONSE TO THE FILM MUSIC INTERLUDE AT THE 1937

PREMIERE OF THE OPERA LULU................................................... 105

Critical Response as Description of the FMI’s Function in the Opera

and as Mere Synopsis.......................................................................... 106

Positive Critical Response to the FMI at its Premiere ........................... 111

Negative Critical Response to the FMI at its Premiere.......................... 119

Conclusions........................................................................................ 123

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 125

APPENDICES

A

PERMISSION LETTERS: UNIVERSAL EDITION ........................... 157

B

PERMISSION LETTER: ZURICH STADTARCHIV ......................... 160

C

PERMISSION LETTERS: BODY MISSING WEB PAGES .................. 162

D

PERMISSION LETTER: INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE (IMDB)

WEB PAGE......................................................................................... 165

E

PERMISSION LETTER: AUFBAU ONLINE WEB PAGES ................. 167

F

PERMISSION LETTER: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

WEB PAGE......................................................................................... 168

G

REPRODUCED WEB PAGES: BODY MISSING ................................ 170

H

REPRODUCED WEB PAGES: AUFBAU ONLINE............................. 175

I

REPRODUCED WEB PAGE: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

PRESS.................................................................................................. 177

VITA............................................................................................................................. 178

viii

LIST OF TABLES

2.1 Editing styles present in films during the early twentieth century ........................... 34

2.2 Distinct (D), Obscured (O), Questionable (Q), and Expected (E) frames

(mm. 655-719)..................................................................................................... 60

ix

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 The pattern of Berg’s designations of measures as passages with tempo

indications .......................................................................................................... 13

2.1 The Film Music Scenario..................................................................................... 32

2.2 Durations of shots and scenes in the film and rhythmic matches corresponding to

the FMI’s number of measures (mm. 656-718)...................................................... 44

x

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1.1

The P0 forms (C=0) of a. Lulu; b. Alwa; and c. Dr. Schön..................................... 14

1.2a The FMI, mm. 685-690........................................................................................ 17

1.2b The FMI, mm. 685-687 (vocal score).................................................................... 19

1.3

The FMI, mm. 656-658 ....................................................................................... 21

1.4

The FMI, mm. 670-671 ....................................................................................... 23

1.5

The FMI, mm. 674-676 ....................................................................................... 24

1.6

The FMI, mm. 666-667 ....................................................................................... 28

1.7

The FMI, mm. 680-681 ....................................................................................... 29

2.1

The FMI, mm. 652-655 ....................................................................................... 39

2.2

The FMI, mm. 719-721 ....................................................................................... 40

xi

LIST OF PICTURES

2.1

Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center and lower) and Alwa (Baxevanos, left) with the police

at her “arrest.”..................................................................................................... 49

2.2

Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center), “in nervous expectation,” with Alwa (Baxevanos,

lower left) at her “detainment.”............................................................................ 50

2.3

Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center and lower) lying in bed in the hospital with a nurse

(center and upper) checking on her; “she is being treated more as a patient than

as a prisoner.” ..................................................................................................... 51

2.4

Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center) lying in bed in the hospital, “(really sick: cholera).” .... 52

xii

ABSTRACT

The music composed to accompany the film in Berg’s Opera Lulu--the “Film Music

Interlude” (FMI)--is the subject of this study. Although this is film music, and Berg wrote his own

Film Music Scenario, scholars have ignored writings about film theory and film music in their

historical and analytical treatments of the FMI. How do writings about film theory and film music

apply to the analysis and exploration of historical and social contexts of the FMI, and what

musical and extramusical intentions and extensions can be drawn from the FMI?

Some answers come to light while exploring sources containing Berg’s correspondence

with Schoenberg, Adorno, and Morgenstern as well as the biographies on Berg by Morgenstern

and Erich Alban Berg. Other answers emerge through the analysis of filmic aspects of the FMI

and from selecting and examining exceptional ideas found in writings about film theory and film

music (from the early 1920s to 1937) as well as reviews about the FMI at the world premiere of the

opera.

Chapter 1 provides a serial analysis of the FMI as a self-contained piece, focusing on the

palindromic musical structure, Berg’s serial procedures and use of liquidation, and the dramatic

meaning. Chapter 2 examines how Berg employs characteristically cinematic techniques

(dissolves, wipes, and graphic matches) in the FMI’s music. Chapter 3 explores early writings

about film theory and film music by, among others, Balázs, Musil, Arnheim, London, Schoenberg,

and Adorno and how their ideas apply to the FMI. Chapter 4 investigates and presents for the first

time translations of selected passages from the reviews of the 1937 premiere by, among others,

David, List, Milhaud, Peyser, Reich, and Schuh.

Berg’s intellectual milieu included writers on film theory and film music and while

composing the FMI he was interested in film and its potential for the New Music. The most

important conclusions are that the FMI is filmic music, Berg employed an editing style for his

putative montage, the FMI’s fictional film can be classified as a crime film, and the FMI at its

premiere received more positive and neutral reviews than negative ones.

INTRODUCTION

Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke.

Wordless am I,

and won’t say why.

And silence reigns because the bedrock broke.

No word redeems;

one only speaks in dreams.

A smiling sun the sleeper’s images evoke.

Time marches on;

the final difference is none.

The word expired when that world awoke.

--Karl Kraus, from his letter to Franz Janowitz1

Alban Berg (1885-1935), one of the most important students of Arnold Schoenberg

(1874-1951), composed music during the emergence of the greatest innovations in film history and

the formative years of film theory. In the course of his musical output, Berg composed two works

that are recognized as outstanding operas of the twentieth century: Wozzeck (which he completed

in 1922) and Lulu (which he left incomplete when he died). In the score of the latter opera,

between ii.1 and ii.2, Berg inserted the “Film Music Interlude” (henceforth, the FMI). The music

was intended to accompany a silent film that continues the narrative of the opera, showing events

that otherwise could not be shown onstage. He also wrote annotations in the score that indicate

how the film’s images and actions correspond to the music. Another document, known as the

“Film Music Scenario” (written in Berg’s hand) was inserted into the Particell (the short score) of

the opera. The music composed to accompany the film--the FMI--is the subject of this study.

Aims and Directions of this Study

Although the FMI is film music, and Berg wrote his own Film Music Scenario, almost all

scholars have ignored writings about film theory and film music in their analytical and historical

1 Cited as “Kraus’s last poem,” dated 13 September 1933, in Harry Zohn, ed., In These Great Times:

A Karl Kraus Reader, trans. Joseph Fabry, Max Knight, Karl F. Ross, and Harry Zohn (Montreal:

Engendra Press, 1976), 259. The English version is a loosely poetic translation of the original:

“Man fragt nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte. / Ich bleibe stumm; / und sage nicht warum. / Und

Stille gibt es, da die Erde krachte. / Kein Wort, das traf; / man spricht nur aus dem Schlaf. / Und

träumt von einer Sonne, welche lachte. / Es geht vorbei; / nachher war’s einerlei. / Das Wort

entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte.” See also Caroline Kohn, Karl Kraus (Stuttgart, Germany: J. B.

Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966), 159-61.

1

2

treatments of the FMI.2 The aim of this study is to pursue answers to two main questions: how do

writings about film theory and film music apply to the analysis and exploration of historical and

social contexts of the FMI; and what musical and extramusical intentions and extensions can be

drawn from the FMI? Concerning the latter question, the musical and extramusical intentions are

choices made by the composer himself about the piece in relation to his interpretation. The

musical and extramusical extensions refer to choices made by the composer himself about the

piece in relation to other possible interpretations of it.3

2 In “Film and Lulu” and “Film in Opera,” Norbert Weiss describes Berg’s use of film in his opera,

the narrative function of the FMI, and the Film Music Scenario. Weiss is correct in that there is

no evidence that Berg knew about the theoretical writings of film director and theoretician

Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953), but he is mistaken in his assumption that Berg did not know

about Pudovkin or his work. Norbert Weiss, “Film and Lulu,” Opera 17, no. 9 (September 1966):

708. See also Norbert Weiss, “Film in der Oper,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 106 (1966): 209 and

“Film in Opera,” Opera Canada 9, no. 4 (1968): 17. In his letter to Soma Morgenstern, dated 27

November 1927, the composer asks, “Have you seen the film The Mother [(Pudovkin’s Mat, 1926)]?

Since I did not see Potemkin, this is the most marvelous of all!!! Go [see it], no matter what!”

(“Sahst Du die “Mutter” im Film? Nachdem ich Potemkin nicht sah: das herrlichste von allem!!!

Geht unbedingt!”) Ingolf Schulte, ed., Soma Morgenstern, Alban Berg und seine Idole: Erinnerungen und

Briefe (Lüneburg: Klampen Verlag, 1995), 196.

Dika Newlin contrasts narrative aspects of Berg’s opera to G. W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s

Box (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1928). She remarks on the FMI and Berg’s use of film in the opera

only at the very beginning of her essay. Newlin shifts attention to the star of Pabst’s film, Louise

Brooks (1906-85), and she reflects on observations made of Brooks’s portrayal of Lulu by Lotte H.

Eisner in her well-known monograph The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and

the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Newlin does not apply Eisner’s observations about German

expressionist cinema to the FMI. And even though she focuses on Pabst’s film, which was

released while Berg was still at the beginning of working on his second opera, Newlin never refers

to writings about film that are contemporary to Berg. Dika Newlin, “Out of Pandora’s Box: How

a Ziegfeld Girl Starred in a Silent Film of Lulu,” Opera News 41, no. 21 (April 2, 1977): 20.

The “Body Missing” website, affiliated with York University in Toronto, combines fact

and fiction concerning the discovery of art that was lost during World War II. Curiously, Berg’s

FMI and Film Music Scenario are also discussed. The website features artistically interwoven

facts, fiction, and incorrect information about Berg’s FMI and Film Music Scenario. “Body

Missing” [web site]; available from “http://www.yorku.ca/ BodyMissing/index.html”; Internet,

accessed on 1 August 2001, p. 1 of 1. See also ibid., “http://www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing/

piano/lulu2.html”; Internet, accessed on 3 March 2001, p. 1 of 1. See Appendices C and G.

3 See Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts, Advances in

Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1979; First Midland Book Edition, 1984), 14.

Eco does not define extensions, but his chart on textual interpretation (Figure 0.3) connects

extensions to the “first uncommitted references to a (possible) world” ([bracketed] extensions),

“probability disjunctions and inferences” (forecasts and inferential walks), and “world matrices,

3

Characters, Plot, and Narrative: The FMI in the Opera Lulu

The characters involved in the FMI are Lulu, Dr. Schön, Alwa, Countess Geschwitz, the

Athlete, and the Schoolboy. As with the rest of the opera, these characters are each represented

musically by a unique serial row or trope (more will be discussed about character representation in

the FMI in Chapter 1). Lulu is the central figure of the opera; all the others are but a few among

many who are in love with her and become motivated by their love for her.4 Everyone who falls in

love with her meets with certain doom.

Lulu’s past is never completely revealed in the opera. Since she was a teenager she had

lived with Dr. Schön and his family. Dr. Schön, editor-in-chief of a well-known and influential

newspaper, believes that he needs to marry a respectable woman from a good family and tells Lulu

repeatedly that he will not marry her. In i.1, Lulu’s first husband, the Medical Specialist, drops

dead after coming to believe she has been unfaithful to him with the Painter. In i.2 Dr. Schön

arranges and finances the marriage between Lulu and the Painter in order to get her out of his life,

but after the Painter realizes that Lulu does not love him he commits suicide. Lulu is incapable of

feeling attraction to another with one exception: she thinks that she really loves Dr. Schön, and

assignment of truth values, judgments of accessibility among worlds, and recognition of

prepositional attitudes” (world structures).

4 Sources that focus on the character of Lulu in Berg’s opera are Mosco Carner, Alban Berg: The

Man and the Work (London: Duckworth and Co., 1978); Elizabeth Boa, Berg’s “Lulu” and the

Operatic Tradition (London: Blackwell, 1987); and Leo Treitler, “The Lulu Character and the

Character of Lulu,” chap. 10 in David Gable, and Robert P. Morgan, eds., Alban Berg: Historical

and Analytical Perspectives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). There are also several discussions

about the character of Lulu, but within discussions about Pabst’s film Die Büchse der Pandora.

These include Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Thomas

Elsaesser, “Lulu and the Meter Man: Louise Brooks, Pabst, and Pandora’s Box,” Screen 24, no. 4-5

(1983): 4-36; and Mary Ann Doane, Femmes fatales: Feminism Film Theory Psychoanalysis (New

York and London: Routledge, 1991). The best sources containing character analysis of the other

characters who are involved in the FMI are Carner, Alban Berg: The Man and the Work; David

Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg, Composers of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn. and

London: Yale University Press, 1996); and Patricia Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the

Autograph Scores, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996). See

also David John Headlam, “The Musical Language of the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu” (Ph.D.

dissertation, University of Michigan, 1985); and Patricia Hall, “A View of Berg’s Lulu through the

Autograph Scores” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1989).

4

her pursuit to marry him occupies i.3. By the end of i.3, Dr. Schön gives in to his attraction to her

and breaks off his engagement to a respectable lady to marry Lulu. In ii.1, Lulu is married to Dr.

Schön and again lives in his house. Dr. Schön, who knows that giving in to Lulu dooms him, feels

as though she drained life out of him as a snake does with its prey. Once he leaves, her admirers

visit her.

These admirers include another father figure from the past, the asthmatic Schigolch,

followed by the Athlete, the Schoolboy, and Countess Geschwitz. The Athlete, himself a Svengali

character, desires to have Lulu star with him in his acrobatic performance. The Schoolboy, a

character cut from the same mold as the truant students who are attracted to the showgirl

Lola-Lola in Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrath, wants to gawk at her. Countess Geschwitz,

a wealthy noblewoman and a lesbian, desires Lulu both sexually and spiritually.

Then Dr. Schön’s son Alwa, a composer, enters. Because her visiting admirers believe

that Alwa must be Dr. Schön, they hide when he comes to confess to her that he loves her. Dr.

Schön quietly enters and overhears his son’s confession. Out of both rage and fear that Lulu is

unfaithful to him and that his son, too, is to die because of her, he places a pistol into her hands

and insists she kill herself. Instead, she struggles with him (either to escape or to gain control of

the gun) and kills him with five shots from the pistol.

The FMI spans the time in the opera--a film between ii.1 and ii.2--in which Alwa is

waiting for Lulu to come home from prison.5 The FMI is also located at the center of the three

acts of the opera (without considering the Prologue). Alwa waits, devoted to his father prior to the

FMI, and he waits, devoted to Lulu, after the FMI. In the film, Lulu endures her arrest,

detainment, trial, sentence, imprisonment, illness, and hospitalization, and, finally, escapes from

5 Treitler describes the change from the opera to the film, the concert hall to the cinema: “Such

games of hopscotch between the stage and the world outside are characteristic features of

expressionistic theatre and cinema--one thinks of the plays of Pirandello, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,

moments in Marx Brothers films when Groucho turns his face straight into the camera and

addresses the audience. But that is precisely what Berg’s device does.” Treitler, “The Lulu

Character and the Character of Lulu,” 268.

5

prison. The Film Music Scenario, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2 (see Figure 2.1),

shows the correspondence of scenes or events, actions, and images. In ii.2, Lulu returns to find

that Alwa still loves her. Angered by her seemingly ill appearance, the Athlete (who wants her to

be with him in his acrobatic act) threatens to turn Lulu in to the police. In iii.1, after fleeing to

Paris, Lulu receives a proposal from the Marquis in a casino room. He wants her to join his

brothel in Cairo. When she refuses, he threatens to turn her in to the police and leaves. The

Athlete finds Lulu and makes the same threat unless she gives him money. After he leaves, Lulu

tells Schigolch about the Athlete’s threats and together they decide to get Countess Geschwitz to

lure the Athlete to Schigolch’s lodgings so that Schigolch can push him out a window to his death.

The plan works. Meanwhile, the Marquis returns to the casino with the police in search of Lulu.

But Lulu and Alwa escape, fleeing to London without any money. In iii.2, Lulu prostitutes herself

in the London streets and brings her clients to an attic. Her first client, the Professor (the same

performer who portrayed the Medical Specialist), has no money. It seems that she lets him take

advantage of her. He leaves, passing Alwa and Schigolch in hiding. Countess Geschwitz arrives

with an old portrait of Lulu; treating the portrait as a spiritual icon, she nails it to the wall. Lulu

appears with her second client, the Negro (the same performer who portrayed the Painter). They

argue about the payment and Alwa defends her, but the Negro delivers a fatal blow to Alwa’s head

and leaves. As a response, Lulu rushes out for her next client. Schigolch hides Alwa’s body and

leaves for a pub. Left alone, Countess Geschwitz stares at Lulu’s portrait and contemplates

suicide. Lulu returns with her third client, Jack the Ripper (the same performer who portrayed Dr.

Schön) and they go into the adjoining room. A moment later, Jack stabs Lulu, whose death

screams make Countess Geschwitz rush to the room. As she approaches the door, Jack stabs her,

washes his hands, and leaves her to die. Alone again on stage, Countess Geschwitz sings her

Liebestod to the portrait of Lulu--her angel--and dies.

6

The film not only represents what happens to Lulu within the context of the opera; it also

can be viewed as a silent short film about what happens to her character through her own ordeal.6

Lulu goes from her arrest and detainment to her trial. There, the weapon is shown to the jury.

Once the verdict is given, Lulu collapses. She is then transported by police vehicle to prison,

where she serves a one-and-a-half year sentence. At the beginning of her sentence, she exhibits

resignation. By the end of it, she has clearly overcome her resignation and experiences an

awakened will to live. But then she takes ill with cholera and gets transported to the hospital.

There, medical doctors and their students as well as nurses treat her more like a patient than a

prisoner as she becomes more ill. Then she changes places with Countess Geschwitz, who stays in

the isolation ward in the hospital while Lulu escapes on foot. Lulu’s replacement by Countess

Geschwitz at the hospital is a turning point for Countess Geschwitz, who from now on is willing

to risk her life and commit crimes out of love and desire for Lulu.7

6 Jarman provides a brief synopsis of the FMI’s film content: “A tumultuous, flickering orchestral

interlude accompanies a silent film depicting, in its first half, Lulu’s arrest, trial, sentence, and

imprisonment. The second half of the film depicts the means of her escape from prison: her

catching cholera from Countess Geschwitz, her transfer to the isolation hospital, and the

substitution of the Countess for Lulu. Both the music and the accompanying film have a

palindromic structure (the music running backwards from the middle, while the sequence of shots

in the second half of the film corresponds to those in the first in reverse order) as a symbol of this

crucial turning point in Lulu’s career and in the opera itself. Much of the music of the following

scene repeats that of the previous scene in slow motion.” Douglas Jarman, Alban Berg: “Lulu,”

Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991),

33.

7 In ii.2 Alwa is still waiting for Lulu at his father’s house, while Athlete awaits Schigolch to take

Countess Geschwitz to the isolation ward to replace Lulu. But the film audience had just seen this

part of the opera in the film. One can only wonder why Berg chose to have this kind of narrative

repetition. George Perle has pointed it out as one of several discrepancies in the work as it was left

by Berg at his death, which might lead to the assumption that perhaps Berg made a mistake and

would have corrected it had he not died before. George Perle, “Lulu,” vol. 2 of The Operas of Alban

Berg (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), 156. A different

perspective, though also speculative, is offered here: this narrative repetition resembles a flashback

or a jump-cut as found in film. In this situation, a previous event is repeated perhaps for symbolic

reasons or to reveal a different perspective on the event. Louis Giannetti defines the flashback as

“an editing technique that suggests the interruption of the present by a shot or series of shots

representing the past” and the jump-cut as “an abrupt transition between shots, sometimes

deliberate, which is disorienting in terms of continuity of space and time.” Louis Giannetti,

Understanding Movies, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996), 509 and 511.

7

The History of the FMI

The FMI’s history is intertwined with the histories of the entire opera, the score, the Film

Music Scenario, and the Lulu Suite (also known as Symphonic Pieces from the Opera Lulu). The

history of the opera (too dense to cover in this brief section), along with chronologies, is told in

many writings about Lulu.8 It is difficult to determine when Berg decided to place a film within the

opera because of lack of documentation.9 It seems possible to divide the composition of Lulu into

two periods: the first dates from 17 July 1927 to the end of summer 1929; and the second from the

end of summer 1929 to his death on 23/24 December 1935 (he did not complete the orchestration

8 The most reliable sources on the history of the opera as a whole include Douglas Jarman, The

Music of Alban Berg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Headlam,

The Music of Alban Berg; Perle, “Lulu”; Gable and Morgan, eds., Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical

Perspectives; Jarman, Alban Berg: “Lulu”; and Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the Autograph

Scores. See also Headlam’s and Hall’s dissertations: Headlam, “The Musical Language of the

Symphonic Pieces from Lulu”; and Hall, “A View of Berg’s Lulu through the Autograph Scores.”

Two other outstanding biographies of the composer by Berg’s nephew Erich Alban Berg, Alban

Berg: Leben und Werk in Daten und Bildern, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1976), and Erich

Alban Berg, Der unverbesserliche Romantiker: Alban Berg 1885-1935 (Vienna: Österreichischer

Bundesverlag, 1985).

9 The first production to have used a film as a kind of connecting thread to tie Wedekind’s Lulu

plays (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) together was under Otto Falckenberg and took place in

Munich on 26 November 1928 (the same year as Pabst’s film Die Büchse der Pandora and when Berg

was pulling together Wedekind’s Lulu plays for his opera.) Bryan R. Simms, “Berg’s Lulu and

Theatre of the 1920s,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994): 157-58. The Falckenberg production was

extremely successful and well known. But Simms can only go as far to explain that Berg “almost

certainly knew first hand” about this production, and it is not known if Berg attended a

performance of this production or if he read about it. Ibid., 152 and 157-58. Simms explains, “in

its general conception as well as in numerous dramaturgical details, Berg’s Lulu is clearly indebted

to Falckenberg’s.” Ibid., 152-53. But before this production, as Simms points out, Berg had

originally rejected the idea of employing both film and jazz in opera in general. Ibid., 153-54.

Though Berg also placed the film at the center of his opera, there seem to be some differences in

the use of film from the Falckenberg production. Berg never suggested the use of still projections

for his opera, but the Falckenberg production used still projections from Frans Masereel’s

anthology Bilder der Großstadt (published in 1926 in Dresden): “The pictures . . . present caricatures

of city life in the 1920s, carefully chosen by Falckenberg not only to fill in the narrative but also to

reinforce the sachlich ambience of the production.” Ibid., 155. See also Jarman, Alban Berg:

“Lulu,” 20, and Karl Neumann, “Wedekind and Berg’s Lulu,” Music Review 35 (February 1974):

47-57.

8

of Act III).10 It appears that the FMI was completed during the second period.11 The Particell was

completed in May 1934.12 According to Perle, Berg began work on the scoring of the opera only

after he completed the Particell. The five sections of the Lulu Suite were the first sections of the

opera to be orchestrated; these are the Rondo (from ii.1 and ii.2), Ostinato (the FMI or orchestral

interlude between ii.1 and ii.2), Lied der Lulu (from ii.1), Variations (from iii.1, the orchestral

interlude between iii.1 and iii.2), and Adagio (the final Grave in iii.2).13

10 Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the Autograph Scores, 31-40. See also Headlam, “The Musical

Language of the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu,” 50; Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg, 302; and

Simms, “Berg’s Lulu and Theatre of the 1920s,” 158.

11 Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg, 307. Hall’s research most strongly supports her attributions of

dates for Berg’s progress with ii. She discusses the letter to Schönberg dated 7 August 1930, in

which Berg described the idea of the FMI, its symmetrical structure, and its narrative function:

“The orchestral interlude, which in my version bridges the gap between the last act of Erdgeist and

the first of Büchse der Pandora, is also the focal point for the whole tragedy and--after the ascent of

the opening acts (or scenes)--the descent in the following scenes marks the beginning of the

retrograde. . . .” Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the Autograph Scores, 61. Hall quotes the

translation in Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris, eds., The Berg-Schoenberg

Correspondence (London: Macmillan, 1987), 406. But she also states that there are no documents

from the fall 1932 to 1933 that provide clues of his progress. Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through

the Autograph Scores, 54. It is therefore not clear when particular passages of the FMI were

composed; in November 1933 he bought the Waldhaus and completed composition for ii during

his stay there from May to just before 15 September the same year. Ibid., 55. Hall discusses letters

sent to Schoenberg and Webern about his progress with ii.1 and ii.2. In a letter to Schoenberg,

dated 26 August 1932, Berg complains that he is still working on Act II. On 26 August 1933 Berg

complains about not yet completing this act, but on 15 September he writes that he had finished it.

See also Rosemary Hilmar, Katalog der Schriftstücke von der Hand Alban Bergs, der fremdschriftlichen

und gedruckten Dokumente zur Lebensgeschichte und zu seinem Werk, Alban Berg Studien, vol. 1/2

(Vienna: Universal Edition, 1985), 33.

12 Ibid., 34-35, and Perle, “Lulu, 287. Anthony Pople suggests that the Particell was not completed

until April 1934. Anthony Pople, “In the Orbit of Lulu: the Late Works,” in Anthony Pople, ed.,

The Cambridge Companion to Berg, Cambridge Companions to Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997), 222. Perle agrees with the date found in Rosemary Hilmar’s Katalog der

Schriftstücke von der Hand Alban Bergs. It was not until after Friedrich Cerha completed the work on

reconstruction of the third act (published in 1979) that the more detailed and apparently finished

draft of the Film Music Scenario was discovered. See Jarman, Alban Berg: “Lulu,” 47-48.

13 There is no date given for the sketches that include the canons for the Ostinato in the Lulu Suite

or for the FMI. See Rosemary Hilmar, Katalog der Musikhandschriften, Schriften und Studien Alban

Bergs im Fond Alban Berg und der weiteren handschriftlichen Quellen im Besitz der Österreichischen

Nationalbibliothek, Alban Berg Studien, vol. 1 (Vienna: Universal Edition), 32 and 35. See also

Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the Autograph Scores, 59. Jarman explains that the FMI

underwent few changes in connection with inclusion in the Lulu Suite: “All that was necessary to

9

Berg’s Intellectual Milieu and the Motion Picture

There are few documents written by Berg about the FMI or the Film Music Scenario.

These documents are found mostly in letters from the composer (for example, to Schoenberg dated

7 August 1930 with a chart of the succession of scenes in Lulu and to Webern dated May 1934)

that contained descriptions of its placement in the center of the opera, the narrative function of the

film within the opera, and the contents of the film. And even though there is no document known

to reveal Berg’s thoughts about composing the FMI, the influences on his FMI, or writing his own

Film Music Scenario, there are several sources that provide many letters about films from Berg to

his teacher Schoenberg, his student Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-69), and his friend Soma

Morgenstern (1891-1976). This section will deal with excerpts from these letters and with passages

from biographies on Berg by Erich Alban Berg and Morgenstern. Most of these sources either date

from the late 1920s to early 1930s or provide recollections of Berg around the time he worked on

Lulu. Not only do they show that Berg enjoyed both silent and sound film; they also provide a

glimpse of Berg’s favorite films, his interest in filmmaking, and his willingness to compose film

music.

Erich Alban Berg recalled his uncle attending several Viennese cinemas that showed

American as well as European films, and that his uncle “could laugh wholeheartedly at the

convert the manuscript of the Ostinato Film Music interlude at the center of Act II, for example,

was to cover the opening page of the original manuscript (that is to say [mm.] 1-6 of the Ostinato of

the Symphonic Pieces, which do not appear in the opera) with a new sheet of manuscript on which

were written mm. 652-55 of Act II. Once this new lead into the Film Music from Act II, sc. I, and

a similar lead out of the interlude of the interlude into Act II, sc. II, had been arranged, the

manuscript of the Ostinato of the Symphonic Pieces could be inserted in its entirety into the full

opera.” Jarman, Alban Berg: “Lulu,” 126-27. Headlam quotes a passage from a letter written by

Berg to Hans Heinsheimer (1900- ) on 28 June 1934: “A description of the Film Music will not

be printed in the score [of the Suite]. The music of this piece, without an explanation, will operate

like a second movement or scherzo. It is clear, however, that something about the text must be put

into a program book. When I am finished with the score of the Symphonic Pieces, I will write

something, or suggest that [Willi] Reich write something which could be used for a program book

or blurb. . . .” Headlam, “The Musical Language of the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu,” 23.

10

knock-about-comedy of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy or Buster Keaton.”14 Berg also mentioned

films to Schoenberg in their correspondence and discussed the potential of films for the New

Music. Excerpts from these letters will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 3. In a letter to

Schoenberg dated 18 May 1930 Berg praised Op. 34, Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene

(Drohende Gefahr, Angst, Katastrophe) (Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene [Threatening Danger,

Fear, Catastrophe]), followed by his strongest remark in favor of the talking film and his

recommendation to go see the German film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930): “. . . I have

long been absolutely convinced of a great future for the talking film (also in connection with our

music). Speaking of which, have you seen the latest Jannings film: The Blue Angel? If not, be sure

to go see it! . . .”15

Berg at one time could have had an offer to compose music for the film based on Theodor

Storm’s The White Horserider (Der Schimmelreiter, released in 1934). Adorno mentioned the possible

film music opportunity in a letter to Berg.16 It appears that Berg turned it down.17 Erich Alban

Berg mentioned the possibility of Berg working on composing music to a film some time around

1933 or 1934: “He has the following plans for the near future: a third string quartet, a chamber

14 “. . .konnte . . . über die Knockk-About Komik von Stan Laurel und Oliver Hardy oder eines

Buster Keaton herzlich lachen.” Erich Alban Berg, Alban Berg: Leben und Werk in Daten und

Bildern, 39.

15 Brand, Hailey, and Harris, eds., The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, 402. Both Berg and

Schoenberg enjoyed performances by the famous actor Emil Jannings.

16 Henri Lonitz, ed., Theodor W. Adorno-Alban Berg Briefwechsel, 1925-1935, Theodor W. Adorno

Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 2, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1995), 276-78. In this letter, Adorno also discussed Pabst’s film Die Büchse der Pandora and then

shifted focus to Berg’s opera Lulu.

17 According to Morgenstern, Berg told him, “Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno asked for me: I should

come to Frankfurt and compose music for a film on Storm’s Schimmelreiter. I did not go, of course,

and neither do I want to compose any music for a film. . . .” (“Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno forderte

mich auf, ich soll nach Frankfurt kommen und Musik für einen Film über Storms Schimmelreiter

komponieren. Ich bin natürlich nicht hingefahren, und ich will auch keine Musik schreiben für

einen Film. . . .”) Ibid., 378. See also ibid., 364.

11

music [work] with piano, a symphony, a work for radio, and one for sound film.”18 Berg’s interest

in film is documented in a letter to Adorno dated 18 November 1933: “I am tremendously

interested in the ‘sound film’ and I hope that my next work will be one. Perhaps it is possible

[that] somewhere there is a fool who will want to make [one] with me, to be precise, as I want

it.”19

18 “Für die nächste Zukunft hat er folgende Pläne: ein drittes Streichquartett, eine Kammermusik

mit Klavier, eine Symphonie, je eine Werk für den Rundfunk und für den Tonfilm.” Erich Alban

Berg, Alban Berg: Leben und Werk in Daten und Bildern, 48.

19

“Für den ‘Tonfilm’ interessiere ich mich ungeheuer u. ich hoffe daß meine

nächste Arbeit einer sein wird. Vielleicht findet sich irgend wo ein Narr der das mit mir wird

machen wollen u. zw. so, wie ich es will. . . .” Lonitz, ed., Theodor W. Adorno-Alban Berg

Briefwechsel, 283-84. See also ibid., 279. Berg’s expressed desire to have artistic power over the

making of a film seems reminiscent of Schoenberg in his letter to Emil Hertzka (1869-1932) about

making a film project out of his drama with music Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18 (1908-13), which

will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 3.

Berg wrote about the film music opportunity, perhaps for the last time, to Adorno in a

picture postcard dated 12 December 1933: “. . . I heard from Zillig that you helped him to get the

Schimmelreiter. That is very welcome news and is certain to turn out marvelously.” (“hab ich von

Zillig gehört, daß Sie ihm zum Schimmelreiter verholfen haben. Das ist sehr erfreulich u. ist sicher

famos ausgefallen.”) Ibid., 291. See also Ibid., 290. The film Der Schimmelreiter was also known

as The Rider of the White Horse. Winfried Zillig (1905-63) composed the music to this film, which

was directed by Hans Deppe and Curt Oertel. In the same year another film, Johanna, The Black

Hunter (Schwarzer Jäger Johanna), also featured Zillig’s music. Zillig was Schönberg’s student, and

Berg and Zillig were good friends. Zillig composed music to several more films. See Konrad

Vogelsang, Filmmusik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation, vol. 2, Reihe Musikwissenschaft, vol. 4

(Pfaffenweiler, Germany: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1993), 191 and 203. Der Schimmelreiter, a

film based on Storm’s novella, was produced by R. Fritsch-Tonfilm Production GmbH. Ibid., 52.

See also Anon. Internet Movie Database (IMDb), “Winfried Zillig,” “http://us.imdb.

com/Name?Zillig, +Winfried”; Internet; accessed on 2 September 2001, p. 1 of 2. Information

courtesy of The Internet Movie Database (“http://www.imdb.com”). Used with permission.

PART ONE: ANALYSIS OF THE FILM MUSIC INTERLUDE AND FILMIC ASPECTS

CHAPTER 1

THE MUSICAL STRUCTURE AND BERG’S COMPOSITIONAL TECHNIQUES

We are always trying to separate content from form, and forget that the content is the

form itself, that which is made of the substance through the medium of the artist.

--From Dr. Heinrich Jalowetz’s speech at Alban Berg’s fiftieth

birthday celebration in Vienna1

The purpose of this chapter is to show the FMI as a unity: a self-contained, coherent

piece. The first part discusses the palindromic musical structure of the FMI and Berg’s serial

procedures. The second part discusses the dramatic meaning of the FMI in connection to its

palindromic musical structure, nesting frames, character representation, and continuity.

The Palindromic Structure

The FMI has a palindromic musical structure on many levels, governing many

dimensions and categories of detail. The music has six main sections delineated by changes of

tempo: Tumultuoso, Agitato, Sempre vivace, Sempre agitato, Vivace, and Tumultuoso. The order and

the internal correspondence of these six tempo indications provide the framework for most

discussions of the FMI’s symmetrical structure in this chapter. Figure 1.1 shows how Berg divides

the FMI’s 63 measures into main sections (and shorter passages) by indicating tempo changes.

1 Cited in translation by Willi Reich in his essay “Alban Berg’s Lulu,” The Musical Quarterly 22, no.

4 (October 1936): 386-87. According to Reich, Heinrich Jalowetz (1884-1951) was a childhood

friend of Berg’s and a fellow pupil under Arnold Schoenberg. He later became a conductor in

Germany. In 1923 Jalowetz conducted the first Berlin performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. In

1938 he emigrated to the U.S. See also Joan Allen Smith, “Biographies,” in Schoenberg and His

Circle: A Viennese Portrait (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986), 275-76; Josef Rufer, The Works of

Arnold Schoenberg: A Catalogue of His Compositions, Writings and Paintings, trans. Dika Newlin

(London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 78-79; Rosemary Hilmar, “Glossar Personverzeichnis der

Adressaten,” chap. 8 in Katalog der Schriftstücke von der Hand Alban Bergs der fremdschriftlichen und

gedruckten Dokumente zur Lebensgeschichte und zu seinem Werk, Alban Berg Studien, vol. 1/2 (Vienna:

Universal Edition, 1985), 144; and Henri Lonitz, ed., Theodor W. Adorno-Alban Berg Briefwechsel,

1925-1935, Theodor W. Adorno Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 2, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv

(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 278.

12

13

FIGURE 1.1: The pattern of Berg’s designations of measures as passages with tempo indications.

The first three main sections (Tumultuoso, Agitato, and Sempre vivace) begin prior to m. 687,

the fermata in that measure serving as central axis, and the last three main sections (Vivace, Sempre

agitato, and Vivace) begin after m. 687. Berg creates an almost perfectly symmetrical pattern of

measures employed for the six tempo-defined sections (the central axis in m. 687 is excluded). The

31½ measures on each side of the fermata, however, are distributed in a slightly different manner.

Because of the tempo inflections (e.g., ritardando and poco a poco animato), there are discrepancies

between notated and performed times of corresponding sections.

Serial Procedures and How They Fit into the Palindromic Structure

In the FMI Berg employs row materials of six characters from the opera: Lulu (also

known from the literature as the Basic Series or BS), Alwa, Dr. Schön, Countess Geschwitz, the

Athlete, and the Schoolboy.2 All of these rows are originally derived from Lulu’s row materials

2 The derivations of these row materials and others have been explored already in the literature

about Lulu: for instance, George Perle, “The Music of Lulu: A New Analysis,” Journal of the

American Musicological Society 22 (1959): 182-200; George Perle, “Berg’s Master Array of the

Interval Cycles,” Musical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 1977): 1-30; and David Headlam, “The

Derivation of Rows in Lulu,” Perspectives in New Music 24 (1985): 198-233.

Calmando/ molto riten.-sehr

langsam (m. 718 = 1 measure)

Calmando/ poco allargando

(mm. 716-717 = 2 measures)

Tumultuoso (mm. 656-662 = 7 measures) 7

7 Tumultuoso (mm. 712-715 = 4 measures)

Agitato (mm. 663-677 = 15 measures) 15

15 Sempre agitato (mm. 697-711 = 15 measures)

Sempre vivace (mm. 678-682 = 5 measures) 5 3 Vivace (mm. 694-696 = 3 measures)

Poco rit.-Schon langsamer

(m. 683 = 1 measure)

4 6

rit. (m. 684 = 1 measure)

Noch langsamer (m. 685 = 1 measure)

Molto rit. (m. 686 = 1 measure)

Poco a poco animato (mm. 688-693 = 6 measures)



Ganz langsam (m. 687½[a] = ½ measure

1 Ebenso langsam (m. 687½[b] = ½ measure)

14

and are distinct because of their intervallic properties. The most important row materials (Lulu,

Alwa, and Dr. Schön) will be discussed here.

EXAMPLES 1.1a-c: The P0 Forms (C=0) of a. Lulu; b. Alwa; and c. Dr. Schön.

There are two basic ways in which Berg employs a character’s row in Lulu: linear

(melodic) and vertical (harmonic). In general, when a character has an important role in the

action of the FMI, and in the work as a whole, Berg tends to employ a linear presentation of that

character’s row. That particular row becomes part of the melodic foreground. The melodic

presentation is more noticeable than any other kind of treatment of a character’s row. The first

complete presentation of each character’s row is almost always marked Hauptstimme.3 Berg makes

3 The Hauptstimme, a term Berg takes from Schoenberg, is the principal or main voice. It is

supposed to be the prominent voice that is heard in the music. Having more than one

instrumental or vocal part marked Hauptstimme or Nebenstimme in a musical passage is also

common. Both the Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme can be performed by one instrument or a group

of instruments and then transferred to another instrument or another group of instruments.

Dashed lines in the score indicate this kind of shift in voicing. The effect ranges from subtle

coloristic changes of timbre to the Hauptstimme or Nebenstimme to extremely conspicuous changes

of instrumental texture. Berg employs Hauptstimme symmetrically in most instrumental parts, but

there are a few instances of asymmetry: the passages marked Hauptstimme in ob. 1-3 (mm. 661-662

with no later corresponding passage and mm. 711-716 with no earlier corresponding passage), bass

clarinet (mm. 656-657 with no later corresponding passage), contrabassoon (mm. 656-657 and 658-

659 with no later corresponding passage), horns 1-2 and 3-4 (m. 716 and mm. 716-717 respectively

with no earlier corresponding passages), trumpet 1 (m. 717 with no earlier corresponding passage),

15

sure that the melodic row gets a clear presentation before he decides to use it with more

freedom. After the first distinct presentation of a character’s row Berg often proceeds by subjecting

the row to liquidation. Liquidation is the progressive shortening of row or motivic material.4

Schoenberg defined liquidation as a compositional technique akin to development and variation

that “. . . gradually eliminat[es] characteristic features, until only uncharacteristic ones remain,

which no longer demand a continuation. Often only residues remain, which have little in

common with the basic motive. . . .”5 Fragments of a character’s row, after the first complete

presentation, can be repeated again and again. In the later corresponding passage, as expected, the

fragments precede the clearest presentations of the characters’ rows, thus making it more difficult

to find the characters’ rows in the score when they are presented the second time. A character

contributing less to the action may be represented by a more vertical presentation of his or her row.

In this kind of presentation, Berg stacks the row material into harmonies. In general, a character is

trombone 3 (mm. 717-718 with no earlier corresponding passage), tuba (mm. 715-716 with no

earlier corresponding passage), and vibraphone (mm. 674-678[?] with no earlier corresponding

passage). The brackets here indicate that this is the assumed measure where the Hauptstimme or

Nebenstimme indications should end. The Nebenstimme, which will be discussed later in this

chapter, is the secondary or next most important voice. All uses of Nebenstimme are symmetrical:

oboe 3=English horn (mm. 675-677[?] and 697-700), trombones 1-3 (mm. 685-686 and 688-689),

keyboard (mm. 670-672, 672-673, 673-674, 674-677[?], 697-700, 700-701, 701-702, 702-703, and

703-704), violin 1 (mm. 673 and 701), violin 2 (mm. 672 and 702), viola (mm. 670, 671-672, 702-

703, and 704), violoncello 1 and violoncello in divisi (mm. 670-671 and 703-704), and contrabass

(mm. 673-674 and 700-701).

4 Theodor Adorno describes Berg’s use of liquidation as being essential to his compositional

technique: “He fused the art of thematic manipulation, of strict motivic economy, which he had

acquired under Schoenberg’s tutelage, with the principle of continuous transition. His music

cultivates a favorite technique, a remnant [ein Rest] is retained, ever smaller, until finally only a

vanishingly small vestige remains; not only does the theme establish its own insubstantiality, but

the formal interrelationships between successive sections are woven together with infinitesimal

care. . . . One can illustrate this Bergian manner--manner in the larger sense of Mannerism--with

the children’s game in which the word “Kapuziner” is disassembled and put back together again:

Kapuziner--Apuziner--Puziner--Uziner--Ziner--Iner--Ner--Er--R; R--Er--Ner--Iner--Ziner--Uziner--

Puziner--Apuziner--Kapuziner. That is how he composed, that is how all of his music plays in a

Capuchin tomb of whimsy, and his development was essentially a development toward the

spiritualization of that manner. . . .” Theodor Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link,

trans. and with an intro. by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), 3-4.

5 Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein

(London: Faber and Faber, 1967; reprint, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1970), 58.

16

less clearly represented when his or her row materials are stacked, since this obscures the order

of pitches that make up his or her row. Berg allows himself more compositional freedom,

furthermore, when he deals with the vertical presentations of row material: when Berg employs a

vertical presentation of a character’s row, he becomes more interested in motivic resemblance than

in a literal utterance of a character’s row.

The most effective example of Berg’s treatment of Lulu’s row is the passage that bridges

the first half of the FMI and the second in Example 1.2a. Recall that the central axis of the FMI is

the fermata in m. 687. At this very moment, it seems that Berg tips his hand, enabling anyone

interested in his treatment of Lulu’s row to observe him manipulate her row. In mm. 685-686 the

trombones play Lulu’s P

11

row. On the other side of the fermata, in mm. 688-689, the passage is

reflected as Lulu’s R

11

row, also in the trombones. Not only is there registral invariance for which

Schoenberg and his students were renowned, Berg also employs textural and dynamic invariance

to reinforce the palindromic structure. Berg uses every pitch in Lulu’s I

7

row for the chords played

by the trumpets in m. 685 and again, as RI7 in m. 689. There are no changes in register, texture, or

dynamics. In m. 689 the gesture, with material only from Lulu’s RI

7

row, is fully contained.

These four chords consist of three pitches each. Every P or I row form before m. 687 will have its

corresponding R or RI afterwards. In mm. 686-687 the horns, bass clarinet, and clarinets play

chords derived from all the material of Lulu’s I

5

row. This initial gesture continues beyond the

central axis by having the last pitches of the row held by the clarinets. The RI

5

form of Lulu’s row,

as expected, is played on the other side of the fermata. The two directly opposing gestures actually

overlap at the central axis by a sixteenth note.

17

EXAMPLE 1.2a: The FMI, mm. 685-690.

(EXAMPLE continued)

18

19

Reflections around the central axis of even smaller gestures take place in m. 687, as shown

in Example 1.2b. There are also voice exchanges found between the trombones in mm. 685-686

and the piano in m. 687 and between the French horns in m. 686 and the solo violoncello in m.

687.

EXAMPLE 1.2b: The FMI, mm. 685-687 (vocal score).

The ascending arpeggiation of the piano before the fermata is derived from Lulu’s R

11

row. The

descending arpeggiation that completes the gesture is derived from P

11

. In mm. 686-688 the string

parts provide more information about Berg’s treatment of Lulu’s row in the vicinity of the central

axis. There are two linear presentations of fragments presented forward and in retrograde. The

first begins with the violoncello 1 solo in mm. 686-687. The second appears in retrograde in the

violoncello 2 solo’s answer in mm. 687-688. The fragments of the initial gesture and its answer

could be derived from Lulu’s R

11

or RI

11

rows. The second begins with the violin 1 solo in m. 687,

answered in retrograde after the fermata by the violin 2 solo. The initial gesture could be derived

from Lulu’s R

11

or RI

5

rows. These two gestures found in the string parts reveal that Berg enjoys

playing with invariance between the two rows.6 Such invariant row segments are the sources of

6 “When we listen to twelve-tone music, we don’t need to be able to identify the forms of the

series. Instead, we need to hear the musical consequences of the series, the musical results of its

20

many of the melodies, ostinatos, and harmonies in the FMI. For instance, the stacked pitches in

the woodwinds, harp, piano, and strings beginning in m. 689 can be from either Lulu’s P

5

or R

5

row. Following along in the piano’s part one can find two ostinatos at m. 690, then one ostinato

for a couple more measures. This kind of mirror-retrograde is the kind of compositional technique

that can make itself clear only retrospectively, and one must, as it were, hear the FMI from the

fermata of m. 687--the central axis--out in both directions to grasp this.

The FMI begins with a trumpet fanfare. Example 1.3 shows mm. 656-657, a more

complicated melodic treatment of a character’s row with minimal variation and liquidation. Here,

at the very beginning of the FMI, marked “Verwandlung (Filmmusik),” is a trumpet fanfare, which

accompanies the linear presentations of Alwa’s P

2

row. The trumpet fanfare incorporates the

material from Alwa’s row, partitioned trichordally, in retrograde. To create the fanfare harmonies,

Berg stacks the notes from Alwa’s row and makes a small adjustment by reversing the order of the

first and last notes: B-flat and G. He also doubles this linear presentation of Alwa’s row in the

strings, bassoons, alto saxophone, and bass clarinet. In the analogous passage, located in mm.

717-718, it appears that the composer decided that to hear the same material as a fanfare again

would be hackneyed.7 Rather than literally retrograding Alwa’s P2 row, a slightly reordered

ongoing transformations. Any musical quality or relationship preserved when the series is

transformed is called an invariant. As we hear our way through a piece, our ear is often led via a

chain of invariants.” Joseph N. Straus, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Prentice Hall, 2000), 157.

7 Most instruments are employed symmetrically so that they occur in parallel passages relating to

the fermata or central axis at m. 687. There are, however, a few noticeable exceptions. For

instance, horns 1-4 play at the end of the FMI, in mm. 716-718, but not at the beginning; likewise,

trumpets 2 and 3 play towards the end, in mm. 711-715, but are not employed in the earlier

corresponding passage prior to the central axis; the crash cymbal plays only in mm. 656-658; and

violin 1-2 and violoncello 1-2 solos, in m. 687 and mm. 685-690 respectively, are also employed

asymmetrically. Berg employs the woodwinds (mm. 656-665, 670-704, and 709-718), brass (mm.

656-663, 674-700, and 711-718), harp/keyboard (mm. 656-718), and strings (mm. 656-718)

symmetrically. He almost employs the percussion (mm. 656-681, 687, and 694-715) symmetrically

as well.

It is difficult to find demonstrable symmetries or asymmetries in the dynamics of the FMI

as it would be for any symphonic piece. The most noticeable asymmetrical use of dynamics is the

dynamics marking f at the beginning of the FMI in contrast to the diminuendo from mf to the final

pp at the end.

21

EXAMPLE 1.3: The FMI, mm. 656-658.

22

version of P2 presents a figure derived from the fanfare in the clarinets and flutes while the trumpets

present Alwa’s R2 melodically.

Ostinatos, which dominate the melodic foreground in several places, are the result of a

combination of linear presentations (melodic treatment) and fragmentations (liquidation). There is

an ostinato that can be identified with Dr. Schön’s character. It can be found first just before Dr.

Schön’s P4 in the bassoon (see Example 1.4). The ostinato, in the piano, viola, and violoncello

(along with two notes in the contrabass), consists of four notes derived from this row in the

following order: E, A, B-flat, and E-flat.8 The ostinato is first marked as Nebenstimme, and it gains

the status as the Hauptstimme in mm. 674-675 (see Example 1.5). In the analogous passage, mm.

699-704 (not shown), the ostinato remains a Nebenstimme throughout the second presentation of

the passage.

The strongest way Berg alludes to Lulu is when he employs full presentations of her row

marked Hauptstimme in the Agitato. This is at the moment in the Agitato when the texture changes

(see Example 1.4).9 In m. 670, clarinet 1 enters with a full presentation of Lulu’s P

4

row.

8 Previous scholarship labels this ostinato as the Erdgeist fourths or the Erdgeist theme and show

how the ostinato is derived from Lulu’s (or the Basic Series) row material. I prefer labeling this

ostinato differently, as Dr. Schön’s ostinato, for numerous reasons. In the FMI, the four notes

behave not as a theme and not as a motive, but simply as an ostinato: a way of recalling Dr.

Schön in the FMI after he dies or a way of showing that Lulu still thinks of him throughout the

FMI. When Dr. Schön dies in ii.1, just before the FMI, Douglas Jarman has explained that his

death is “symbolized by the absorption of his series into the basic series of the opera.” Douglas

Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979),

225. See also ibid., 144. And though it is well known that Dr. Schön’s row material (as with the

row materials of every character in this opera) is based on Lulu’s row material, showing this

absorption gives the ostinato more meaning in the FMI. The Erdgeist fourths can still be

considered a motive to help the audience relate to earlier music, but this perspective ignores certain

psychological connotations of this ostinato. For instance, “the weapon,” which clearly alludes to

Dr. Schön’s murder accompanies this ostinato in mm. 674-675. See David John Headlam, “The

Musical Language of the Symphonic Pieces from Lulu,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of

Michigan, 1985, 173.

9 In his graph showing character representation and row material used in the FMI, in “The Film

Interlude of Lulu,” Perle includes the characters’ names as their row material appears in the music,

but he does not indicate every instance of a character’s row in the FMI. Perle does not identify

Lulu in the measures of his graph that correspond to the Agitato; in his analysis, it seems implicit

that Lulu’s row material is exploited in the passages where he does not choose to indicate the

presence of Lulu in the music. George Perle, “The Film Interlude of Lulu,” The International Alban

Berg Society Newsletter 11 (Spring 1982): 3-5. In his 1985 monograph Perle omits this graph and

23

EXAMPLE 1.4: The FMI, mm. 670-671.

does not add any further discussion about his earlier analysis of the FMI.

24

EXAMPLE 1.5: The FMI, mm. 674-676.

25

The fragments of Lulu’s P

4

row that follow, for instance in mm. 670-671, are no longer juxtaposed

against full linear presentations of the row. Dr. Schön’s row material dominates this part of the

Agitato. Hence, the first 8 measures of the Agitato are dominated by Lulu and the second 8 are

dominated by Dr. Schön and vice versa for the Sempre agitato.

The FMI resembles a series of many nesting frame-like sections. The boundaries

between the FMI and the rest of the opera are the two Tumultuoso sections (mm. 656-718).10 These

form the largest frame, which contains the second largest frame--between the beginning and ending

of the Agitato and Sempre Agitato (mm. 663-712), which contains the pitch climax--and the smallest

frame formed by the Sempre vivace and Vivace (mm. 678-696) that contains the fermata, the gestural

climax. Issues about the FMI’s musical structure and its hierarchies beg to question the dramatic

meaning of the FMI, which will be dealt with in the next section.

Dramatic Meaning

One may think of the FMI as a kind of orchestral interlude that departs and returns to

Alwa, who shifts his loyalty to Lulu within the one-year-and-a-half duration that the film and the

FMI represent. At the very beginning of the FMI, in the first Tumultuoso, in mm. 656-657 (see

Example 1.3) the first Hauptstimme of the woodwind countermelody begins on the pitch D. D is

also the final note of the latter Tumultuoso, m. 718, marking the end of the FMI. This pitch also

serves as the first pitch of the next gesture, in mm. 719-721, which is the transition between ii.1

and ii.2 of the opera. In m. 687, the piano’s arpeggiation begins on D, ascends a major seventh to

D-flat, and then descends back to D (see Example 1.2a).11 The gesture may assert D as the pitch

10 The preceding and succeeding Curtain Music, discussed in detail in Chapter 2, might also be

considered as parts of these boundaries.

11 George Perle points out the momentary presence of the Signal Motive, the A-flat to the D-flat

(then D-flat to A-flat) at the fermata. The Signal Motive is associated with the ringing of a

doorbell. The use of the doorbell in this opera is similar to the telephone ringing in Arnold

Schoenberg’s opera Von Heute auf Morgen, Op. 32 (1928/1929). The ringing appears in highly

climactic moments of the opera to add to the anticipation of what might follow. See George Perle,

“Lulu,” vol. 2 of The Operas of Alban Berg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 91-93.

Despite this observation, it serves more as Augenmusik in the vibraphone and piano in the FMI.

The musical notes are recognized visually, they are symbolic because the fermata can be perceived

26

that receives priority over other pitches at that particular moment, but the D-flat, which is the

climax of this gesture, is held at the fermata and challenges the salience of D.12

The opening and closing pitch for the Agitato and the Sempre agitato, respectively, is C. In

the Agitato, C begins the gestures of all the voices playing in this section. In m. 664 C-sharp begins

the next group of gestures. After this group of gestures, another group begins on E in m. 666, then

F-sharp in m. 667, and E in m. 670. In the second half of the Agitato, starting in m. 670, Dr

Schön’s ostinato always begins on E and ends on E-flat. The opposite takes place in the Sempre

agitato. The departure and return of D, for instance, without implying D as a pitch center in any

neo-tonal sense, are a kind of structural gesture that gives the FMI a point of reference and a

referential frame. By observing the larger picture and its relationship to the nested pictures within,

one discovers that although a pattern of pitch class salience corroborates the dramatic narrative to

a certain extent, certain musical spans are governed primarily by characters rather than by pitch

structures.13

An analysis of contour and gesture in the Agitato and Sempre agitato sections reveals some

connections between the FMI, narrative, and motivic use of forms of Lulu’s row and their linear

shape. The Agitato consists entirely of linear presentations and fragmentations of Lulu’s row

material. A contour analysis of the first part of the Agitato reveals how Berg’s use of contour is

connected to the FMI’s structural and foreground elements. Individual melodic lines clearly

as a revolving door, but at this moment no doorbell rings or should be recalled. The music moves

too quickly to be thought of as the same motive heard earlier in the opera.

12 For thorough discussions of Berg’s use of pitch centers (in particular D) both generally and more

specifically in the FMI, see Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg, 5, 97, and 292-94.

13 Prolongation is “a connection between a particular pitch and its duplicate later in time,

identified by a dotted slur or dashed beam. . . .” Mark DeVoto, “Schenker Analysis,” The New

Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 732. See Joseph N. Straus, “The Problem of

Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music,” Journal of Music Theory 31, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 1-21. This

essay presents theoretical and analytical objections to earlier attempts to extend Heinrich

Schenker’s notion of prolongation to parts of the post-tonal repertoire, including the music of Berg.

Since this essay appeared, it has been difficult to discuss prolongation of notes in post-tonal music.

However, one can still discuss the prolongation of a gesture or, as in the FMI or the opera as a

whole, that of a character and the character’s row material.

27

exhibit an ascending contour from the start of the FMI until the very end of m. 667 (see

Example 1.6). A descending contour begins in this measure. Where Lulu’s music begins, in the

Agitato, according to the annotations in the score, Lulu experiences “hope for an acquittal” and

then “diminishing hope.” Lulu’s hope ascends, reaches a climax, and then descends. Similarly, in

the analogous passage in m. 707, the climax follows the annotation “growing hope” found at the

end of m. 705. The annotation that follows this climax at the end of m. 707 in the score, “she

becomes more ill” (“in nervous expectation” in the Film Music Scenario, see Figure 2.1),

accompanies the descending contour in the harp, piano, and strings.

The most important of Berg’s rhythmic materials used in the FMI is the Hauptrhythmus.14

The Hauptrhythmus is a kind of head motive that, in Lulu, recurs from time to time throughout the

opera and is often associated with fate or destiny (of a character’s impending doom, exhibiting a

rhythm for the downward spiral to doom in Lulu’s world) and foreshadows upcoming events.15 It

is also a dramatic device Berg uses for the purpose of continuity, closely bound to the downward

spiral as part of the Weltanschauung of the opera. The Hauptrhythmus (long, long, short, long) can

be presented in a staccato version, with rests between the attack points.16 The use of

Hauptrhythmen is symmetrical in the FMI in respect to its central axis, the fermata. The

Hauptrhythmen are employed in the vibraphone and strings in m. 680 (see Example 1.7) and its

corresponding passage, m. 694. They appear after “the police vehicle” and before “the ambulance

(stretcher).” There are also unmarked Hauptrhythmen that can be found in the score, as found in

violin 1 and violin 2 in the same passages. Rather than being accentuated by the vibraphone, the

14 The Hauptrhythmus is also known as the “fate rhythm.” Berg, however, labels the Hauptrhythmen

in his score and therefore Hauptrhythmus is more commonly used in current literature on the opera.

15 See Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg, 310; Perle, “Lulu,” 209-15 and 220; and Jarman, The

Music of Alban Berg, 212-15.

16 For a brief discussion identifying the use of Hauptrhythmen in the FMI, see Perle, “The Film

Interlude of Lulu,” 5-7, and Perle, “Lulu,” 155 and 207. See also Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg,

309. Headlam discusses Berg’s rhythmic and serial procedures in much greater depth.

28

EXAMPLE 1.6: The FMI, mm. 666-667.

29

EXAMPLE 1.7: The FMI, mm. 680-681.

30

violins help to sustain the vibraphone.17 The Hauptrhythmen, in addition to Berg’s use of serial

materials and character representation, not only contribute to the dramatic meaning of the FMI;

they also preserve the continuity of the FMI.

Conclusions

By presenting an analysis of the musical structure and character representation, this

chapter offered both an aural and visual orientation for understanding Berg’s FMI. Though serial

analysis and motivic analysis--as well as the analysis of character representation presented

here--show how the FMI is connected to the opera as a whole, the analysis in this chapter supports

the idea that the FMI should also be considered as a self-contained piece. From this perspective,

motivic analysis can be misleading: it reveals connections to the opera, but often ignores the

dramatic (or cinematic) action of the FMI. More profound levels of understanding the FMI are

achieved through serial analysis and character representation while taking into account the

relationship between the FMI’s music, its visual appearance, and the images and actions that

appear onscreen. Berg’s use of musical structure and compositional technique as employed in the

FMI can be found in other parts of the opera. It can also be found in all his serial works.18 The

next chapter offers an analysis that shows what makes the FMI, in particular, filmic music.

17 Mosco Carner, Alban Berg: The Man and the Work (London: Duckworth and Co., 1975), 233.

See also Willi Reich, The Life and Work of Alban Berg, trans. Cornelius Cardew (London: Thames

and Hudson, 1965), 164-69. Headlam deals with a rhythmic technique employed in the FMI,

rhythmic invariance, in The Music of Alban Berg, 199 and 307.

18 In a conversation on 8 November 2000, Professor Headlam (Eastman School of Music)

explained his idea of how the serial techniques (row materials and rhythmic materials) and

character representation employed in the Lyric Suite (a love song to Hanna), and as extension in

the Violin Concerto, resemble those of the FMI. These serial works can be approached as music

representing films featuring fictional or realistic characters. In both works, the rows representing

the characters (in particular Alban Berg and Hanna Fuchs) also fade in, fade out, and experience

liquidation and fragmentation. In the Lyric Suite as well as the FMI, there is the extraction of four

notes from a row to create a recurring melodic gesture (in the FMI it is Dr. Schön’s ostinato or fate

motive and in the Lyric Suite it is <A, B-flat, B, F>, the latter standing for Alban Berg-Hanna

Fuchs). Headlam also pointed out that the eight remaining notes of the row in the FMI represent

“neutered” characters, whereas in the Lyric Suite they become residue or accompaniment to the

four notes of the melodic gesture.

CHAPTER 2

FILMIC ASPECTS, BERG’S FILM, AND REPRESENTATION OF CHARACTERS:

IDEAS DRAWN FROM THE ANALYSIS

Just as silence can be forced to become part of the music it surrounds, so

occasionally the extremes of a composition become separated from the body of the work

in such a way that they act as what we might call internal frames.

--Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance1

The FMI accompanies Berg’s film in the opera Lulu and has (unsurprisingly) its own

filmic aspects.2

These filmic aspects involve Berg’s annotations in the score and his Film Music

Scenario and their connection to the sounds and appearance of the music and its performance.

This chapter will identify the filmic aspects of the FMI and show how they are part of its musical

structure (on the surface and on deeper levels) and of its content. By exploring the filmic aspects of

the FMI, one can draw some conclusions about the kind of motion picture Berg had in mind and

the composer’s putative montage, and gain additional understanding of the musical and filmic

representation of characters.3

Establishing Shots and Editing Styles

Two documents, the score and the Film Music Scenario, show the order of events that

take place in the film. Figure 2.1 provides an English translation of the Film Music Scenario. In

the Film Music Scenario, the dashed line between the police vehicle and the ambulance and the

line dividing the left and right side of the document approximate Berg’s own indications. The

silent film begins in m. 656. One reads downward along the left hand side until m. 687, where the

1 Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Practice (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,

1968), 22.

2 “Filmic”: “Of or pertaining to cinematography; suggestive of the cinema.” Oxford English

Dictionary.

3 Montage can be defined as a sequence of shots of a film, which have been edited, often to

condense the real time that the film images imply. See Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 7th

ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996), 513. According to Giannetti, in Europe the

word ‘montage’ also means the art of editing.

31

32

FIGURE 2.1: The Film Music Scenario.

33

fermata is, and then proceeds to the second m. 687 indicated on the right. From here, one reads

up on the right until the film’s end in m. 718.

On the left and right sides of the Film Music Scenario, Berg underlines words that

represent scenes in which the events take place: “arrest,” “detention,” “trial,” “prison”--“one-

year-and-a-half”--“prison,” “consultation,” “isolation ward,” and “liberation.”4 Is Berg suggesting

establishing shots--long shots or extreme long shots that would enable the audience to better

understand the context and content of events or scenes--with these underlined words? Such

establishing (and reestablishing) shots would be extremely useful for maintaining the fluidity of the

film’s narrative.

Beyond these underlined words and the possibility of establishing shots raised by the FMI,

there is no evidence that supports the idea that Berg had certain camera shots in mind.

Nevertheless, from the annotations in the score and the Film Music Scenario, one can still limit

the number of possible camera shots that could be used for filming some objects. For instance,

camera shots that show Lulu’s emotional states can only be close-ups or extreme close-ups:

because of the audience’s need to see Lulu’s facial expressions (even more so than her hands) in

these shots, long or even medium shots are much less likely to be what Berg desired. Other

illustrations are the individual camera shots of the police vehicle, the ambulance, and the

witnesses. All three of these shots seem to require medium or long shots because close-up shots

would not give the audience enough information about what is taking place in the film. There is a

good deal of evidence from the annotations in the score and the Film Music Scenario; and

educated guesses can help fill gaps in drawing conclusions about Berg’s (putative) editing style.

Table 2.1 presents three styles of filmmaking and several kinds of editing styles used in

films produced during Berg’s life. The classification, definitions, and examples of these editing

4 The word “Curtain” is also underlined and might be also perceived as a scene of its own, though

the FMI actually begins in m. 656.

34

TABLE 2.1: Editing styles present in films during the early twentieth century.

styles come from Louis Giannetti’s monograph Understanding Movies.5 The successful films given

as examples for each editing style in Table 2.1 show that these editing styles were potentially

available to Berg. Because of the FMI’s linear, thematic narrative, the only two editing styles

5Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 131.

REALISM

Sequence Shots: Short events that are photographed as one long shot in a single take

containing no editing. The duration of the events together is equal to

the duration of the shot.

Example: Auguste and Louis Lumière, Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat=The Arrival

of a Train at La Ciotat, France, 1895.

Cutting to Continuity: An editing style that employs shots that are arranged to preserve the

fluidity of an action without showing all of it. This editing style

employs a logical condensation of the action with no confusing breaks.

Example: Georges Méliès, Le voyage dans la lune=The Trip to the Moon, France, 1902.

CLASSICISM

Classical Cutting: An editing style in which a sequence of shots is determined by a scene’s

dramatic emotional emphasis rather than by physical action alone. The

sequence of shots represents the breakdown of the event into its

psychological as well as logical components.

Example: D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, U.S., 1915.

FORMALISM

Thematic Montage: An editing style employing separate shots that are linked together not by

their literal continuity in reality, but by symbolic association. Shots are

connected in accordance to the filmmaker’s thesis.

Example: D. W. Griffith, Intolerance, U.S., 1916.

Abstract Cutting: A purely formalistic editing style that employs a sequence of shots that is

totally divorced from any recognizable subject matter or content.

Example: Hans Richter, Rhythmus 21, Germany, 1921.

35

appropriate are Cutting to Continuity and Classical Cutting. Sequence Shots, an editing style used

in the earliest film, cannot be applied to the FMI because the underlined situations in the Film

Music Scenario (see Figure 2.1) correspond to chronologically non-contiguous scenes, suggesting

editorial cuts. Too much time has been condensed for the action to be depicted without using

more sophisticated techniques. Abstract Cutting and Thematic Montage are also not possible

because Berg’s film cannot be divorced from its recognizable linear narrative. The Film Music

Scenario and the annotations in the score show that there are cause and effect connections

between scenes, events, images, and actions. The events in the FMI proceed in a logical sequence

within condensed time: the omitted moments of action do not hinder perception of the continuity

of the film. All of these characteristics are important elements of Cutting to Continuity. Berg’s

film also contains some instances of Classical Cutting, most notably his indications for Lulu’s

emotional expressions that take over the mise-en-scène several times in the film. These indications

are found in mm. 664 (“in nervous expectation”), 668 (“dwindling hope”), 683 (“resignation”),

690/91 (“awakening will to live”), 705 (“growing hope”), and 707 (“in nervous expectation”). All

of these reactions are results of preceding stimuli, but are not necessary for maintaining the film’s

narrative.

A technique borrowed from Classical Cutting is the graphic match. The graphic match is

created when the filmmaker connects two adjacent or almost adjacent shots by graphic similarities.

These graphic similarities can be the shapes, colors or tones, speed or direction of movements, and

other visual connections shared by the filmed images.6 In mm. 686-688, already shown in

Example 1.2a, there is an implied graphic match near the fermata in m. 687. It appears that Berg

uses Lulu’s shadow on the wall followed closely by Lulu’s image in the muck shovel to represent

6 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Reading, Mass., Menlo Park,

Calif., London, Amsterdam, Don Mills, Ont., and Sydney: Addison-Wesley Publishing

Company, 1979), 154-55.

36

not only a passage of time, but also to draw a connection between these shots. This technique will

be further explored later in this chapter.

The FMI consists of many paired events that are to be presented so as to create a mirror-

like palindromic structure in order that the listening audience can comprehend the connections of

pairs both visually and aurally.7 Though the FMI’s scenes, events, images, and actions are paired

within this palindromic structure creating parallel connections, they take place at separate times

and do not suggest cross cutting or parallel editing. According to Berg’s annotations in the score

and Film Music Scenario, the FMI does not contain any instances of simultaneous time.

Although musical passages that accompany paired events recur as expected, they are changed the

second time in that they are retrogrades of their first statements. There is no shifting of musical

passages or events from their logical places in order to help increase the sense of time or to create

simultaneous time.

The lack of parallel events makes it difficult to conclude that Berg’s putative montage

relies on Classical Cutting alone; more likely the FMI’s montage possesses the editing style of

Cutting to Continuity in combination with elements of Classical Cutting. The logical,

straightforward narrative provided by the annotations in the score and the Film Music Scenario is

prominent and is seasoned with extra psychological intensity by highlighting Lulu’s emotional

states at certain moments in the film and in the music (thus implying close-ups).

Exploring the establishing shots in the FMI reveals how important a scene-by-scene or

shot-by-shot analysis is to the understanding of the FMI’s filmic aspects and putative montage.

The annotations in the score and the Film Music Scenario suggest what the composer wanted to

7The use of paired events should not be confused with the film term “parallel events.” According

to Giannetti, in film parallel events, which are used in Classical Cutting, are two or more different

events that take place at the same time. Shots of these different events are connected through cross

cutting in order to create a sense of spontaneous time: separate places, same time, moving from

one scene to another to impose continuity. See Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 139-40

37

happen in the film on a scene-by-scene or shot-by-shot-level.8 The rest of this chapter will deal

with framing techniques and editing devices in the FMI.

Fades, Dissolves, and Graphic Matches

Both fades and dissolves are framing techniques and editing devices that make an image

appear or disappear gradually onscreen. They are used for joining two shots together without

creating the rapidly occurring visual line that is made by a simple cut. Two kinds of fades in film

are the fade-out and the fade-in. Both involve the black screen, but work in opposite ways.

Giannetti defines the fade-out as “the snuffing of an image from normal brightness to a black

screen”; the fade-in is the opposite: the image emerges gradually from black screen to normal

brightness.9 The dissolve, also called a lap dissolve, is a kind of fade that differs from other fades

in that it involves previously occurring and newly occurring filmed images and not the black

screen. Giannetti perceives the dissolve as possessing both fade-out and fade-in functions. He

defines the dissolve as “the slow fading out of one shot and the gradual fading in of its successor,

with a superimposition of images, usually at the midpoint.”10

In the FMI’s film, there are few logical places for fades and dissolves to occur. Fades and

dissolves could be used to connect every pair of shots or scenes in this film, but this would

diminish the effectiveness of these techniques by over-using them. This short film, which lasts for

less than 2 minutes and 48 seconds, would go by too quickly to be effective if every scene were

connected by fade-outs or fade-ins. Berg’s annotations and certain changes in the FMI’s musical

surface might suggest that the use of fades and dissolves in the film should be as content-driven

and connected to the music as possible. This section will explore these places in which fades and

dissolves can be used effectively in the FMI.

8 The smallest unit of film, the frame, is unable to be interpreted at all by the audience and is

therefore less structurally important than the scene or shot.

9 Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 509.

10 Ibid., 508.

38

There are two passages of Curtain Music in the FMI: the first occurs at the beginning and

the second occurs at the end. The FMI’s first Curtain Music, mm. 652-655, is shown in Example

2.1. Based on the fading ostinatos and the annotations in the score, one might expect that the

music would accompany the closing of the curtain, followed by the black screen and then the first

image of the film in normal brightness. The curtain closes, somehow the screen comes down onto

the stage, and then the curtain opens just enough to show the screen (see Figure 2.1). The passage

accompanying the curtain begins with the crescendo and is followed by a decrescendo (see Example

2.1). The part of the passage marked decrescendo contains fading ostinatos. The fading ostinatos

possess an action that seems both to accompany and to oppose the first action of the camera: the

music would fade as the first image emerges from black screen. The image could emerge suddenly

or it could gradually come into view, but the music seems strongly suggestive of the latter. But

while the ostinatos of the first Curtain Music fade out the onscreen image could surely be expected

to fade in. Both media would fade, but in opposite directions.

The second Curtain Music, mm. 719-721 in Example 2.2, possesses the same fading

ostinatos as the first in retrograde. From the fading ostinatos and the annotations in the score, it

seems that the music might accompany the end of the film, a black screen, and the opening of the

curtain. The end of the film, perhaps a black screen, accompanied by the very beginning of the

second Curtain Music, would follow either the last image of the film or would occur gradually as

the last image gradually fades out. A fade-out in the film at this moment would be analogous to

the fade-in accompanied by the first Curtain Music. This time both media would fade out

together.

39

EXAMPLE 2.1: The FMI, mm. 652-655.

© Universal Edition, Vienna. Used by permission.

40

EXAMPLE 2.2: The FMI, mm. 719-721.

© Universal Edition, Vienna. Used by permission.

41

A fade would also be appropriate at the central fermata in m. 687 (see Examples 1.2a and

1.2b). The fade could be inserted between two shots (Lulu’s “shadow on the wall” and “her image

in the muck shovel”) that appear to form a graphic match. The fade-out followed by the fade-in

would be perceived as connecting the most important pillar of the FMI’s structure to its two

subordinate but still very important pillars: the FMI’s extremes, its beginning and ending. At the

same time, the fade-out fade-in at the fermata would run in opposite directions to the fade-in at the

beginning of the film and the fade-out at the end. Then again, the fermata would signify the end of

the first half followed by the beginning of the second and is also the mirror axis of the FMI. The

fade-out then fade-in at the fermata would also seem to occur in almost the opposite direction of

the attack and decay of the instruments. A black screen interrupting the implied graphic match

would represent the one-year-and-a-half period of Lulu in prison perhaps better than an

uninterrupted slow dissolve because of these connections and oppositions. Nevertheless, an

uninterrupted slow dissolve is also possible here and could be used as a framing technique at the

fermata because the connection between the fermata and the extremes would still be understood.

The images that would be used in the dissolve would be Lulu’s “shadow on the wall” followed by

“her image in a muck shovel.” The shots of the images would be expected to overlap exactly at

the fermata, forming a graphic match. The latter-mentioned image would emerge most clearly

(with the absence of the superimposition of the previous image) in m. 688, where the annotation

indicating this image takes place. As with the fade (in this case, fade-out and then fade-in), the

dissolve is a useful framing technique for signifying either Berg’s “absolute standstill” or the

passage of time.11

The pair of passages with the annotations prison “doors close” and prison “door opens”/

“in the hospital,” in mm. 680-683 and mm. 694-695, respectively, provides two more possible

11 The attack and decay of instruments in mm. 685-89 is most clearly executed and presented on

the recordings of the FMI in Berg, Lulu, Danish R. S. O., Schirmer, Chandos compact disc

CHAN9540 and in Berg, Lulu Suite, London Symphony Orchestra, Dorati, Mercury Living

Presence compact disc 432 006-2.

42

places for dissolves. After the prison “doors close,” there could be a dissolve connecting the shot

of the prison “doors close” and the shot of Lulu’s “resignation.” Another dissolve could take place

after the prison door opens in mm. 694-695, connecting the shots of the open prison door and the

ambulance. Both dissolves would signify not only the passing of time, but also that the audience

would be going through the closed doors to see what happens to Lulu next.

Finally, two other possible places for either dissolves or fades would be accompanied by

musical passages in mm. 662-663 and mm. 711-712. These passages have the annotations

“detention” and “at liberty (as Geschwitz),” respectively. The “arrest” might take place in an

entirely separate location from the “detention.” A dissolve here would indicate that time had

passed (Lulu travels with the police to her “detention” before the “trial”) and that she is now in a

new place. The following scenes, “detention,” “trial,” and “prison,” could take place in the same

building and might be most closely connected. Cuts indicating shorter passages of time could be

used between detention and trial and between trial and imprisonment. Lulu’s “deliverance,”

disguised as Geschwitz, appears to be a situation entirely separate from the previous scenes,

“prison,” “medical consultation,” and “isolation ward.” A dissolve between the “isolation ward”

and “deliverance” scenes would suggest a passage of time and that Lulu is now in an entirely

different situation: she can return to her other star vehicle, the opera.

Rhythmic Matches

The rhythmic match, which barely received attention in new introductions to film studies,

is a framing technique and editing device that is similar to the graphic match. Instead of making

the connection between two or more shots or sequences of shots via graphic similarities, the

connection is made via durational and content (often graphic, symbolic, or both) similarities.

Shots in the rhythmic match do not have to be adjacent, but it is important that they be close

together: shots occupying the same real-time duration might not be perceivable as parts of a

rhythmic match if they are too far removed from one another in time. The rhythmic match does

not require at least one dissolve or involve superimposing images. The rhythmic match must rely

43

on content similarities in order to be immediately perceived; film audiences do not connect two

noncontiguous shots simply because they occupy identical durations in real time. The analysis of

rhythmic matches might be more implicit and perceived only after analysis than immediately

explicit through film viewing.

Figure 2.2 shows how an analysis of rhythmic matches in the FMI can be enlightening

(the bold lines represent establishing shots and where the rhythmic matches begin and end).

Deeper connections can be revealed through this kind of analysis, but one must keep in mind that

the FMI has an extremely brief duration considering its content, which is divided into 27 shots.

Each shot occupies from ½ to 5½ measures of music, and the larger differences are proportionally

significant. The larger differences between durations of shots are found between Lulu’s “arrest”

and her being bound “in chains” (a difference of 4 measures), Lulu’s “image in the muck shovel”

and then her “awakening will to live” (3½ measures), her “awakening will to live” and the

“hospital doors open”/“in the hospital” (4½ measures), her “gradual success” and her “medical

examination” (3½ measures), her “medical examination” and being “really ill” (3½ measures),

and finally Lulu “at liberty (as Geschwitz)” and the appearance of “the helpers” (4 measures).

Figure 2.2 shows that there are several rhythmic matches in the FMI. The key to

rhythmic match analysis of the FMI is that these rhythmic matches are not between shots, but

between sequences of shots. For instance, the sequence of shots consisting of Lulu’s “detention,”

“hope for acquittal,” and then “dwindling hope” is the same duration as the sequence of shots

consisting of Lulu in the “isolation ward,” “her growing hope,” and her being “treated more as a

patient than prisoner.” Notice also that the rhythmic match can be made between sequences

without having corresponding shots of the same duration on the left and right side of Figure 2.2.

The next rhythmic match shown in Figure 2.2 concerns the sequence of shots consisting

of “the trial,” “the witnesses,” Lulu’s “medical examination,” and then her being “really ill

(cholera).” The rhythmic match draws the connection between “the trial” concerning Lulu and

“the witnesses” and “the medical examination” concerning Lulu and “the doctors and their

44

FIGURE 2.2: Durations of shots and scenes in the film and rhythmic matches corresponding to

the FMI’s number of measures (mm. 656-718).

mm.

Number of Image

Measures

mm. Number of

Image

Measures

656-661½ 5½

Arrest

(Local investigation)

713½-718 5½ Reappearance of the

helpers

661½-662 1½ bound in chains

707/08-711 4 She is treated more as

patient than as prisoner

662-663

2 Detention

705/06-707 2

Growing hope

664/65-667 3 Hope for acquittal

705

1

Isolation ward

704½-705

½

(really ill: cholera)

667/68-669 2 Dwindling hope

700½-704½ 4 Medical examination

(Consultation)

670

1

Trial

700-700½

½

Gradual success

674½-676 2½ She succumbs/

The weapon

696/97-699/700 4

Conspiracy for her

liberation (the helpers)/

Hypodermic syringe

677-679½ 2½ The verdict/

(Collapse)

679½-680½ 1 Police vehicle

695½-696½ 1

Ambulance

680½-683½ 3 Prison doors close

694/95-695½

½ Hospital door opens/In hospital

683½-684/85 1 Resignation

690-694

5

Awakening will to

live (Cheerfulness)

685-687½ 2½ Her shadow

688½-689 1½ Her image in a muck

shovel

670/71-674½ 3½ The witnesses

687½-688½ One-year-and-a-half/

1



(absolute standstill)

711/12-713½ 1½

(as the Countess)

At liberty

45

assistants.” Following this rhythmic match is another one consisting of a sequence of shots

showing Lulu “succumb[ing],” “the weapon,” “the verdict,” and her “collapse,” and then “the

police vehicle” on the one hand and the sequence showing the hospital “doors open,” “the

ambulance,” “the hypodermic syringe” and the “conspiracy for her liberation (the helpers),” and

her “gradual success” on the other.

The following rhythmic match between two sequences of shots consists of the sequence

that contains shots showing the prison “doors close,” Lulu’s “resignation,” and her “shadow on

the wall” and “image in the muck shovel” and then her “awakening will to live.” The three shots

in the first sequence are the same length as the latter mentioned sequence containing two in the

second. Within the two sequences of shots, the shot of Lulu’s “resignation” and the shot of “her

image in the muck shovel” are the same length. Once again, a symbolic connection can be found:

Lulu’s “resignation” (an implicit close-up) is the last time the audience sees Lulu’s face before the

“one-year-and-a-half” indication at the fermata and a close-up showing Lulu’s “image in the muck

shovel” is the first time the audience sees Lulu’s face after she served her time. Figure 2.2 depicts

the “one-year-and-a-half” imprisonment (the “absolute standstill”) as a single shot. No matter

how Lulu’s “one-year-and-a-half” of imprisonment is represented in the shot, the paired shots

consisting of Lulu’s “shadow on the wall” and then “her image in the muck shovel” can be made

to produce another rhythmic match.

Wipes

The wipe is a framing technique used in film to show the distinct or indistinct line that

pushes off a shot of the old image by replacing it with a shot of a new one.12 By their nature, wipes

are transitions and thus not sudden cuts. As with dissolves and fades, there is a problem with

using a wipe to introduce a new shot for every event, image, or action in the FMI (i.e., wipes can

12 Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 518. This definition differs slightly from Giannetti, whose

definition only considers the distinct line. The artistic replacement of the shot of an old image (old

material) by pushing this image off the screen with a shot of a new image (new material) needs to

be emphasized.

46

be over-used). The two most logical places in the FMI for wipes are the shots showing “the police

vehicle,” in mm. 679-680, and “the ambulance,” in mm. 695-696 (see Figure 2.1). Throughout the

history of film, wipes have been used frequently to show the movement of vehicles in film as well

as to replace an old shot with a new one. Wipes also condense the real time needed to show the

entire travels of a vehicle.

These wipes involve onscreen horizontal and vertical lines, diagonal lines with a positive

(right side up) and negative (right side down) slopes, a combination of two kinds of lines (only two

because one is concerned with showing no more than two kinds of materials: new and old), and

emerging from a pinhole to the periphery or the reverse. In addition to these lines, recall that they

can be distinct (one sees the line travel across the screen) or indistinct (one sees that the new shot

replaces the old one in a way that the new shot travels across the screen without a line or with

what appears to be a fuzzy border). Throughout the FMI, new materials appear to push out old

materials in ways that can be immediately perceived by ear. But there are far fewer kinds of wipes

that can be perceived immediately by ear. Similar to the vertical line onscreen, the new material in

music can push out the old material in forward motion. In music the new material might be

slowly introduced until it takes over. Changes in instrumentation, dynamics, and rhythm can play

a part in bring new materials to the foreground just as much as changes in motives and themes.

Also similar to the horizontal line onscreen, new musical materials are capable of supplanting the

old from highest to lowest or lowest to highest voices.

The shot of “the police vehicle” replaces the shots of “the verdict” and Lulu’s “collapse,”

in mm. 677-680. Several instruments play sustained notes, interrupting the prevailing sixteenth

and eighth notes in m. 678, that signify the beginning or ending of a section (Agitato or Sempre

vivace, respectively). This is followed by a new Hauptstimme and a change in contour from the

prevailing repetition of notes with Dr. Schön’s ostinato to the beginning of a quickly ascending and

descending contour played by flutes 1, 2, and 3, oboes 1, 2, English horn, clarinets 1, 2, and 3, alto

saxophone, harp, and piano. The new pitch materials in mm. 679-680 that accompany the “police

47

vehicle” are the remnants or fragments of Dr. Schön’s row materials. Dr. Schön’s ostinato is no

longer presented in this shot, but rather succeeded by this new row material. In m. 680, the

location of the next shot (prison “doors close”), Lulu’s row materials begin to appear again to take

over completely by m. 683. The shot of Lulu’s “verdict” and “collapse” can be replaced

successfully by the shot of the traveling “police vehicle”; this can be followed by a cut to the next

shot showing the prison “doors close.” Here, the wipe might travel in the same direction as “the

police vehicle.” The shot of “the ambulance” in mm. 695-96 is preceded by the prevailing

sustained notes. The end of the ascending and descending contour in the harp and piano parts and

Dr. Schön’s ostinato accompanies the image of the ambulance pulling into the hospital. This time

the wipe takes place at the end of the shot of “the ambulance”: the new material is the succeeding

shot, “the liberation action.” This suggests that the distinct or indistinct line of the new shot might

move across the screen in contrary motion to the moving vehicle. Another possibility is to have

the shot show “the ambulance” stopping at “the hospital” and then replace the shot with a wipe

having one or two distinct lines traveling across the screen at any possible angle.

The Film Shown at the 1937 World Premiere of Lulu

Cast members of this performance have been shown in the illustrations that accompany

some publications concerning the opera and its 1937 premiere. But what has not been shown is

the performers’ involvement in the FMI’s film. Berg intended for a new film to be made with

every new performance of the opera, featuring performers from the opera. Hans Rudolf Meyer’s

firm Tempo produced the film shown at the 1937 premiere.13 The film production company was

known mostly for producing films for advertising. Heinz Rückert directed the film. Though

13 According to the Handelsregisteramt des Kantons Zürich, the film production firm Tempo

(1932-59) was located at Freudenbergstraße 132 in Zurich. My thanks to Dr. Anna Pia Maissen at

the Stadtarchiv Zürich for helping me access this information and for sending photocopies of the

pictures of stills of the missing film that are in the collection there. A fifth picture was sent to me;

this picture shows Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, lower left, arm shown only) struggling with Dr. Schön (Stig,

from center to upper right). “The weapon” is in her hand. It is more likely that this picture is

perhaps a publicity photo of the struggle that took place on stage rather than a still from the film.

48

scholars believe that this film is lost, four pictures of stills from the missing film are kept at the

Zurich Stadtarchiv. These stills are shown here as Pictures 2.1-2.4. They feature Bahrija Nuri-

Hadzic as Lulu, Asger Stig as Dr. Schön, and Peter Baxevanos as Alwa. Though no annotations

accompany these pictures, it is usually easy to identify which picture might accompany which

annotation in the Film Music Scenario or the score of the opera.

All the pictures provide supporting evidence that the film company’s director (Rückert)

and its cameraman (Meyer) followed Berg’s annotations in either the earlier, less complete version

of the Film Music Scenario or the later, more complete one or by using Berg’s annotations in the

score or both. Some camera techniques can also be determined by examining these pictures.

There is an interesting use of the mise-en-scène with Lulu in this film. Lulu appears lower than

Alwa during her “arrest” (Picture 2.1), but she is shown to be above him later during her

“detainment” (Picture 2.2). The shot used here is an over-the-shoulder shot that blurs Alwa’s

features and focuses on Lulu “in nervous expectation.” The shot of Lulu is also a close-up that

places her worried facial expression and her nerve-racked hands in the fore. The shot enables the

audience to be fully aware of Lulu’s emotional state during her “detainment.” The long shot of

Lulu lying in bed in a hospital, as a nurse tends to her, enables the audience to take in details of the

hospital such as her chart as another picture of Lulu on the wall (Picture 2.3). The close-up shot of

Lulu in bed (Picture 2.4) emphasizes that Lulu has become more ill. Her hand raised to her head

adds to the impression that she is sicker than she was in the previously mentioned shot.

49

PICTURE 2.1: Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center and lower) and Alwa (Baxevanos, left) with the police

at her “arrest.”

Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Zürich. Used by permission.

50

PICTURE 2.2: Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center), “in nervous expectation,” with Alwa (Baxevanos,

lower left) at her “detainment.”

Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Zürich. Used by permission.

51

PICTURE 2.3: Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center and lower) lying in bed in the hospital with a nurse

(center and upper) checking on her; “she is being treated more as a patient than as

a prisoner.”

Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Zürich. Used by permission.

52

PICTURE 2.4: Still from the film shown at the 1937 world premiere at the Zurich Stadttheater:

Lulu (Nuri-Hadzic, center) lying in bed in the hospital, “(really sick: cholera).”

Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Zürich. Used by permission.

53

Musical Frames and the FMI and Frames in Film

This section will examine the FMI’s musical frames, which add to its cinematic quality of

shifting colors, moods, dynamics, rhythm, gestures, and instrumentation. The following analysis

draws on Edward T. Cone’s observations about musical frames in his monograph Musical Form and

Musical Performance. Cone explains that the silence before and after a performance is perhaps the

most obvious musical frame or extreme.14 The musical frame, as with a picture, defines the

subject, separating it from its surroundings and protecting it from the encroachment of its

surroundings.15 Yet in some instances music can overflow its frames. Music has internal frames

as well as extremes.16 The presence of internal frames in music implies that certain kinds of

musical gestures themselves can also be framing.

Cone is interested not only in the musical frame itself, but also the act of musical framing

and the use of the musical frame as structure. Although his discussions about frames do not cover

music that accompanies motion pictures, his observations about the frames, form, rhythm, and

performance of western art music are especially applicable to this study. Cone’s monograph has

five premises: valid and effective performances respect the musical frames of a composition as

well as musical form in the rhythmic structure; both temporal and nontemporal arts can stimulate

multiple readings; form is not just an aspect of musical style, but it also summarizes all aspects of

style and the characteristics of different styles are most distinct in comparisons and contrasts; the

best performances satisfy both aesthetic modes of perception: synoptic comprehension and

14 Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance, 16.

15 Ibid., 14-15.

16 Ibid., 19.

54

immediate apprehension;17 and performance instruction is too strongly oriented towards

immediate apprehension. This study will touch upon all five premises in the analysis of the FMI’s

filmic aspects.

Cone deals almost exclusively with examples of tonal music from the western art music

repertory, but almost all of the criteria he uses for finding musical frames can also be used for

finding frames in atonal and serial music. In order to identify a musical frame, one must find

either one or more framing devices for musical frames. Some elements of a musical work connote

a musical frame on their own. These kinds of framing devices for musical frames may or may not

appear by themselves and include the beginning and end of an entire piece and distinct sections or

movements with a beginning and an end. These framing devices are so strongly suggestive of

musical frames that they provide enough evidence for determining them. There are many more

framing devices for musical frames that work together than work separately. For tonal music these

might include double bars, metric accents (bar lines), rests, fermatas, cadences, key changes,

themes, changes in instrumental textures or timbres, dynamics, gestures, voicing, rhythms, and

registers. Many of the same framing devices work for atonal and serial music, but framing devices

such as key changes or those that depend on key changes are replaced by new row material or

collections of notes in atonal or serial music, changes of instrumental texture, and voices indicated

as Hauptstimme or Nebenstimme.

Cone’s explanations and discussions of musical frames and internal frames reveal a

hierarchy: there are frames that represent the boundaries of a work (its extremes) and there are

internal frames. The latter kind of frame is not defined explicitly by Cone; one infers that these

frames exist within a work, not necessarily requiring a boundary of silence, but requiring attention

from both performer and listening audience as an internal organizing force. Cone’s hierarchy

17 Ibid., 89-90. Cone associates synoptic comprehension with contemplation and immediate

apprehension with experience. Whereas synoptic comprehension is the esthetic mode that deals

with the perception of the unity of a musical piece, immediate apprehension is only concerned

with details and closely juxtaposed relationships found on the surface.

55

appears to be traditional or top-down. The outer frame is the large-scale and the internal frame is

the small-scale organizing factor of musical form. This musical frame does not destroy the notion

of a hierarchy of frames, but it changes one’s understanding of the kind of hierarchy employed.

The actual hierarchy here includes both specialized and interdependent kinds of frames. This

analysis shows that the most important frames appear four times in the FMI: the first and second

Curtain Music (external, just before and after the curtain) and the fermata or the end of the first

half of m. 687 and the beginning of the second half of this measure (internal, see Examples 1.2a

and 1.2b). Each of these frames occurs in an important place in the musical structure. As with

frames that are either purely extremes or purely internal, these frames are also supported by

changes of the musical surface. These changes are especially evident in the instrumental texture,

dynamics, voicing, gesture, choice of pitch material, and rhythm.

In the opera Lulu the FMI separates itself from the body of the work (film music separates

itself from opera music) via Curtain Music. Surrounding the FMI are two parallel instances of

Curtain Music. This transitional music--transitional despite being located in the middle of a serial

composition--parallels the transitional device, the curtain, used by theatre, borrowed by cinema,

and shared by both. The Curtain Music can also be comprehended as a pair of musical frames

with durations. These musical frames occur quickly, but have duration and unlike many musical

frames, audiences can perceive their content. The first Curtain Music indication, Ostinato, and

instruction, Curtain quickly closes . . . , located in mm. 652-655,18 is included in Example 2.1; the

second Curtain Music, with the instruction Curtain opens slowly, located in mm. 719-721, is

included in Example 2.2.

The Curtain Music’s ostinatos suggest transitions from one part of the body of the work to

the FMI and then to another part of the body of the work. The score and the Film Music Scenario

reveal that Berg thought of the Curtain Music as a connection between the body of the work and

18The score annotation is “Vorhang rasch zu . . . .”

56

the FMI and as music that is separate from the body of the work and the FMI. The first and

second Curtain Music serve as interruptions in the ongoing serial techniques employed in the body

of the work and in the FMI. In other words, while the musical passages of the body of the work

and the FMI that are adjacent to the Curtain Music are characterized by the use of linear and

vertical presentations of one or more character’s row material, the Curtain Music is characterized

by ostinatos unique to itself; the employment of these ostinatos presents an audible contrast to the

presentations of row material of the body of the work and the FMI.

There are, however, many connections between the first Curtain Music and the body of

the work. The first Curtain Music continues and concludes the descending melodic gesture (and

contour) found in the winds and the strings in mm. 650-651. The ostinatos actually begin before

either the Ostinato or the first Curtain Music. The first Curtain Music actually makes its entrance

already in the last two measures of the body of the work. In other words, two frames overlap: the

first Curtain Music, as a frame, overflows the frame between the body of the work and itself. The

directions above Alwa’s part suggest that the audience sees action on stage until m. 654.

According to Berg’s instructions, Alwa goes to the door to open it in mm. 652-653 and then opens

it by the end of m 653 or beginning of m. 654.19

Because of these connections to the body of the work, the FMI seems to interrupt the first

Curtain Music in m. 656 (see Example 1.3): the singers exit the stage and there is a striking

contrast in dynamics. The p/pp indication at the end of the first Curtain Music, m. 655 (see

Example 2.1), is followed immediately by f at the beginning of the FMI, the first Tumultuoso, m.

656. The decrescendo preceding the FMI might also be perceived as a setup through fading music

for the start of a new section at the end of m. 655. The first Curtain Music fades out completely

not in its own section, but rather at the first eighth note rest of the FMI in m. 656. The first eighth

note rest will be perceived as the end of the First Curtain Music rather then as the start of the

19 The directions above Alwa’s part read “geht zur Tür, um zu öffnen . . . tut es.”

57

Tumultuoso; the unison attack by the crash cymbals and trumpets on the second beat, shadowed by

the harp, low strings, and low woodwinds one dotted quarter note later, should sound like an

interruption of the Curtain Music. In addition to the contrast in dynamics, the FMI seems to

interrupt the Curtain Music by its change in instrumentation and meter. Although bass clarinet,

contrabassoon, and violoncello play in both the last measure of the first Curtain Music, m. 655,

and the first measure of the FMI, m. 656, there are differences in instrumentation. In m. 655 the

first Curtain Music employs in addition to the above-mentioned instruments the timpani, bass

drum, piano, and contrabass (in divisi). In m. 656 the FMI employs in addition to the above

mentioned instruments the trumpets 1, 2, and 3, crash cymbals, harp, and contrabass. There is no

double bar between the body of the work and the first Curtain Music. The k meter of the first

Curtain Music is more affixed to the body of the work preceding it than to the following FMI in o.

The second Curtain Music, which is one measure shorter than the first, is to be played

almost twice as slowly as the parallel passage, the first Curtain Music.20 The first and second

Curtain Music are about equal in duration. The entrance of the Second Curtain Music is in m.

718, the last measure of the FMI. The k meter of the second Curtain Music in m. 719 conveys a

point of return to both the Curtain Music and the body of the work (see Example 2.2). Although

the second Curtain Music is supposed to be a parallel passage to the first Curtain Music, its

connection to the body of the work is much weaker. The music in m. 651 is different from m. 722

(not shown). Hence the edges of the body of the FMI are not part of the central palindrome of the

three acts of the opera. In contrast to the body of the work and the beginning of the first Curtain

Music, the ascending contour at the end of the second Curtain Music is continued more

Slowly--eighth note triplets prevailing in m. 721 (see Example 1.5) rather than sixteenth notes

prevailing in m. 655 (see Example 2.1)--in the beginning of the body of the work from m. 722 to m.

726. The second Curtain Music serves a different purpose from the first: it enables the FMI to

20 Berg’s annotation at the bottom of the opera score has an asterisk: “*) fast doppelt so langsam wie

die parallele Stelle (Takte 652-655).”

58

wind down or fade out. This ending is abruptly interrupted (contrast to entrance of the crash

cymbals in m. 656) in turn by the piano’s chords in the body of the work in m. 722.

The rest of this chapter will focus on the FMI’s most distinct frames, obscured frames,

questionable frames, and passages that do not contain expected frames.21 This scope ranges from

clearly executed frames (audible and visual frames that are always sectional or indicate the

beginning or ending of a section, and can be internal) to frames that are difficult to ascertain

because they are hidden or lack supporting surface changes to expected frames that never take

place (inaudible frames that are internal). In the FMI, every annotation seems to have an

accompanying musical frame. Table 2.2 lists the distinct, obscured, questionable, and expected

frames (respectively) along with the kinds of frames identified. Table 2.2 shows that the FMI is

not perfectly symmetrical with respect to its pattern of frames. For example, there is an obscured

internal frame in mm. 670-671 whereas a questionable internal frame is found in the parallel

passage in m. 700-701. Another example is the distinct internal frame in m. 680, whereas a

distinct internal and possibly sectional frame follows in the parallel passage in m. 694. An

obscured internal frame occurs in m. 683, though its parallel passage is located in m. 691, its

parallel obscured internal frame occurs in mm. 689-690. Finally, another aspect of asymmetry can

be found in mm. 681-82 and its parallel passage in mm. 692-693. In the former passage no frame

occurs, but in the latter an obscured internal frame takes place.

The previous discussion about the first Curtain Music already touches on the FMI’s first

frame located at the beginning of m. 656, the first Tumultuoso section. This frame is distinct

because of the simultaneous change of meter, dynamics, mood, and instrumentation. In the score

21 As expected, nearly all recordings of the Film Music Interlude as the “Ostinato” in the

Lulu-Suite are about a minute longer than recordings of the FMI. It is uncertain why recordings of

the “Ostinato” are generally slower than recordings of the FMI, though some recordings of the

FMI try to match a film. Because recordings of the “Ostinato” go by slower, frames are readily

more perceptible by ear. The most striking performance observing and presenting these frames is

Berg, Lulu Suite, London Symphony Orchestra, Dorati, Mercury Living Presence compact disc

432 006-2. The duration of this performance, 3 minutes and 43 seconds, is long compared to most

recordings of the Lulu-Suite (and longer than recordings of the FMI).

59

there is a double bar that signifies the end of the first Curtain Music and the beginning of the first

Tumultuoso. This frame is followed by the first two measures of the Tumultuoso (see Examples 2.1

and 1.3). In addition to the above mentioned changes, there is the irruptive or interruptive

opening of the trumpet fanfare in mm. 656-657. Cone describes this kind of opening as a kind of

indistinct edge: “one that breaks in so violently as to suggest that there should be no silence before

it, no frame to separate the music from the outer world.”22 And there is no silence before this

opening. There is the fading music and then the double bar; neither represents silence. The

entrance of a new Hauptstimme tells the listening audience that a frame has just passed by. Despite

the Hauptstimme indications for most of the instrumental parts in mm. 656-657, it is the trumpet

fanfare with the crash cymbals that attracts the most attention and announces the beginning of the

FMI.

There is an obscured internal frame corresponding to Lulu “bound in chains” in m. 661.

This is an internal frame because of its location in the first Tumultuoso and because of the striking

changes that take place on the music’s surface. It is an obscured frame because several notes are

sustained before and after it and because of the density of the instrumental texture. The

annotation “bound in chains” takes place at the climax of pitch and dynamics of the Tumultuoso

section. The annotation is also located in a place where violins 1 and 2 play their first pizzicati in

the FMI in sffz and the viola and violoncello play their first pizzicati in ff. The clang of the triangle

can be perceived as lending to the image of Lulu “bound in chains.” It is at this very moment that

Lulu’s row material takes over the FMI for the very first time. This row material closely resembles

Lulu’s P0 as chords or stacked notes. The new Hauptstimme indications in the flutes 1, 2, and 3,

oboes 1, 2, and 3, clarinets 1, 2, and 3, and trumpets (C) 1, 2, and 3 also suggest the internal frame.

The frame that occurs in this passage is analogous to the frame that is accompanied by the

annotation reappearance of the helpers in mm. 713-714.

22 Ibid., 19.

60

TABLE 2.2: Distinct (D), Obscured (O), Questionable (Q), and Expected (E) frames

(mm. 656-718).

mm.

Annotation

Kind of Frame Kind of Frame

Annotation

mm.

656

Arrest (Local

investigation)

D: extreme,

sectional, and

internal

D: extreme,

sectional, and

internal

none (double bar) 718

661

bound in

chains

O: internal

O: internal

Reappearance of

the helpers

713-714

662-663

Detention

D: sectional and

internal

D: sectional

and internal

At liberty (as

Geschwitz)

711-712

664-665

Hope for

acquittal

E: internal

E: internal

none

710-711

667-668

Dwindling

hope

O: internal

none

O: internal

707

669-670

Trial

D: internal

D: internal

Isolation ward

705

670-671

The witnesses Q: internal

Q: internal

(really ill: cholera) 704

674-675

She

succombs/

The weapon O: internal

Q: internal

Medical

examination

(Consultation)

700-701

677-678

The verdict/

(Collapse)

D: sectional and

internal

D: sectional

and internal

Conspiracy for her

release (the

helpers)/

Hypodermic

syringe

696-697

679

Police vehicle E: internal

E: internal

Ambulance

695

680

Prison doors

close

D: internal

D: (sectional?

and) internal

Hospital door

opens/ In hospital 694

681-682

none

none

O: internal

none

692-693

683

Resignation

O: internal

O: internal

Awakening will to

live (Cheerfulness) 689-690

685

Her shadow

E: internal

E: internal

Her image in a

muck shovel

688-689

686-687½

none (double

bar)

O: internal

O: internal

none (double bar) 687½-688

687½

One-year-and-

a-half/

(abolute standstill) 687½

D: extreme, sectional and internal

61

The next frame in the FMI, located in mm. 662-663, is a distinct sectional and internal

frame, even though the Agitato’s music overflows it. It marks the beginning of the second section

of the FMI, the first Agitato. The annotation “detention” corresponds to the beginning of this new

section. The dynamics indications fp, p, and pp and the pickup notes serve as both visual and aural

cues for the Agitato. The softer dynamics that are characteristic of the beginning of the first Agitato

precede this section. The change in instrumental texture occurs quickly after the frame. The parts

with sustained notes in m. 663 do not prevail in this new section. The prevailing instruments are

the harp, piano, and strings. This frame is analogous to the distinct frame in mm. 711-712 not

because of identical pitch materials (the latter in retrograde motion); it is because of the changes in

dynamics, voicing, and sustained notes that appear near both of these frames. Although this frame

is analogous to the distinct sectional frame in mm. 711-712, it is interesting that both frames are

perceived to mark the beginnings of two nonanalogous sections. The frame in mm. 662-663 marks

the beginning of the Agitato whereas the frame in mm. 711-712 marks the beginning of the second

Tumultuoso. With the latter passage, this perception takes place regardless of knowing that the

sustained notes in the clarinets and horns in m. 662 belonged originally to the Agitato. The

sustained notes of the passage played in retrograde by the same instruments in m. 711 appear to be

setting up the anticipation of an upcoming section.

It is therefore expected that the next annotation would also have an accompanying

musical frame, but not enough changes can be found in the FMI as evidence of a musical frame.

Many changes occur before Lulu’s “hope for acquittal.” The contour, found in the strings,

ascends at the beginning of the Agitato, over one measure before Lulu’s “hope for acquittal.” This

annotation is also preceded by the entrance of the harp, rests in the contrabass, and the initial

entrances of all strings in this section. The dynamics only gradually increase at the beginning of

this section. All of these changes exist nearby, but not in the same place as Lulu’s “hope for

acquittal.” The analogous passage, mm. 710-711, does not have an annotation. The expected

internal frame in this measure would be analogous to the expected frame in mm. 664-665.

62

Example 1.6 shows the last eighth note of m. 667, at the zenith of the contour and

dynamics in the Agitato section, where the shot of Lulu’s “dwindling hope” takes place. This is an

obscured internal frame because some of the changes on the musical surface overflow it. Some of

the strings switch from arco or pizzicato to Griffbrett just before the frame whereas others switch after

it. Likewise, new voices marked Hauptstimme overlap. Lulu’s “growing hope” in mm. 705-706 is

located nearby its analogous passage to Lulu’s “dwindling hope” in mm. 707-708. The analogous

frame to the obscured one found in m. 667 does not exist here at the beginning of Lulu’s

“dwindling hope,” an event that is paired with her “growing hope.” There is an obscured frame at

m. 708 that is analogous to the one found in m. 667, but no annotation is used to indicate the

frame.

While the music from m. 663 to m. 669 is based solely on Lulu’s row material (as

mentioned in Chapter 1), Berg introduces Dr. Schön’s row material in the Agitato in m. 670, the

location of the annotation “trial” followed by “the 5 witnesses.” Dr. Schön’s ostinato in the piano

part can also be interpreted as a motive in the FMI. The ostinato appears as a Nebenstimme.

Example 1.4 includes this motive along with the internal frame in m. 670. The instrumental

texture changes following the frame as the clarinet 1 begins to accompany the ostinato played by

the piano and then by the strings in m. 670. In addition to these changes in the instrumental

texture, two percussion instruments, the snare drum and the bass drum, play together for the first

time in the FMI. Because there are many changes on the music’s surface, the internal frame

accompanying “the trial” is distinct.

The questionable internal frame corresponding to the annotation “the 5 witnesses” occurs

only 2 seconds after the previous distinct internal frame. Example 1.4 also shows the questionable

frame corresponding to “the 5 witnesses.” Although there are several changes in the musical

surface, the impression is mainly visual rather than aural. The second appearance of Dr. Schön’s

ostinato, still marked Nebenstimme, is played by more instruments than before, but demands less

attention from the listening audience than in its first appearance. The breath mark in the piano’s

63

part along with the entrance of the bassoon’s passage, a linear presentation of Schön’s P4 row, and

the dynamics indication poco a poco crescendo are clearly seen in the score as changes to the musical

surface, but also tend to pass by aurally without much notice. Though both annotations also

correspond to single eighth notes played by the contrabass in divisi, these notes are so soft and

quick that their novelty is unlikely to be immediately appreciated. These changes are weak

supporting evidence for both frames. At best, the internal frame corresponding to the witnesses is

questionable. The analogous passage and frame in mm. 669-670 is found in mm. 704-705. The

distinct frame corresponds to the annotation “isolation ward.” In the end of m. 704 is the

annotation “(really ill: cholera).” As with the passage corresponding to the witnesses, there is no

internal frame that accompanies the annotation “(really ill: cholera).” The reason for the lack of

frames in the music corresponding to these two annotations is rooted in the context of the film’s

narrative: “the 3 participants” are part of “the trial” and Lulu’s sickness becomes more severe

while in the “isolation ward.”

In m. 674, Dr. Schön’s ostinato, promoted from Nebenstimme to Hauptstimme (as discussed

in Chapter 1) accompanies the shot showing that “she succumbs” (see Example 1.5). The

vibraphone, which plays Schön’s ostinato marked Haupstimme, plays for the first time here. The

frame is internal and obscured because the winds, which do not play the ostinato, compete with it

for dominance in the foreground. Right after “she succumbs,” “the weapon” is shown. The latter

image corresponds to the first entrance of the English horn in the FMI. Both the English horn and

piano are marked Nebenstimme, but with an already dense instrumental texture and more striking

changes in the music taking place where “she succumbs,” there is not enough evidence to support

that a new frame accompanies the latter image.

In m. 677, where the “verdict/(collapse)” takes place, Dr. Schön’s ostinato repeats again

as a Hauptstimme. Here the dynamics reach f/ff. The horns, trumpets (C), vibraphone, and strings

play Dr. Schön’s ostinato, which is clearly taking over. The intensity of the ostinato is so strong

that a distinct frame can be identified here. The Agitato ends in m. 678 with end brackets for all

64

voices marked Hauptstimme. This change in voicing suggests a sectional frame or extreme that at

the same time serves as an internal frame. Dr. Schön’s row materials are still present, but now as

fragments. The heightened intensity of the instrumental texture at the end of the Agitato is released

through longer note values and rests in many of the instrumental parts at the beginning of the new

section. Because of the new section and these changes, this internal sectional frame is distinct. An

expected internal frame should accompany the new image of “the police vehicle” in m. 679, but

there is no evidence that a musical frame exists here. The new image takes place after the

beginning of the Sempre vivace section, and even though many voices are marked Hauptstimme prior

to the annotation there is too much overlapping of these voices to set up a new musical frame here.

In m. 680 the annotation “prison doors close” corresponds to another distinct internal

frame (see Example 1.7). This annotation comes after breath marks in the winds and brass as well

as the piano and harp that play prior to this frame. The annotation also corresponds to the

entrance of fragments of Lulu’s row material in the flutes, clarinets, harp, and piano. The

sustained notes played after the frame by the alto saxophone, horns, trombones, and tuba provide

another distinct surface change in the music. There is one particular aspect of this music that

overflows this frame: the Hauptrhythmus, played by the vibraphone just one beat before the

annotation, acts as a rhythmic motive that seems to stress the sense of finality for the closing of the

prison doors. This passage and its frame are analogous to m. 694. The vibraphone in the latter

passage plays the Hauptrhythmus just before “the doors open” to the hospital.23

Though there is no musical frame in mm. 681-682, there is an obscured internal frame in

its analogous passage located in mm. 692-693. There is an absence and presence of a musical

frame in mm. 681-682 and 692-693, respectively. In m. 692, the instrumental texture is sparse.

23 The Hauptrhythmus also appears in mm. 649-651 in the body of the work and just before the first

Curtain Music. It seems to set up the anticipated closing of the curtain. The exception to the

notion that Berg employs the Hauptrhythmus in the FMI to anticipate the opening and closing of

objects occurs when it does not occur, as expected, prior to the opening of the curtain in the

second Curtain Music in mm. 719-721.

65

Then the contrabass plays pizzicato and is followed by new voices marked Hauptstimme in the

strings. In m. 693, the brass gradually intensifies the instrumental texture. The sustained notes

played by violin 1 and the continuation of the upper winds, harp, and piano obscure this internal

frame, which seems to be setting up the instrumentation of the following section, the Vivace.

Example 1.2a shows several distinct, obscured, and expected internal frames in the

vicinity of the central axis, mm. 685-689. This passage exemplifies Berg’s play with musical

frames in the FMI. In m. 685 the annotation “her shadow on the wall (like the picture!)” coincides

with the tempo indication Noch langsamer. Because of the context of the annotations, which tell the

film’s story as well, one would expect a musical frame here. This annotation is preceded by Lulu’s

emotional state of “resignation” in m. 683. One would expect a new frame to correspond to “her

shadow on the wall (like the picture!).” In m. 684 there is the ritardando. One would expect the

music to slow down, perhaps to a stop just seconds after this indication, but then the music

becomes even slower in m. 685 (see Examples 1.2a and 1.2b). The only new material that enters is

the passage marked Nebenstimme that is played by trombones. This passage consists of Lulu’s P11

material presented as chords in mp. Rests in many parts and a change in instrumentation follow

this annotation and expected frame. But the overlapping voices and lack of perceivable changes

on the surface fail to suggest the expected internal frame. Similarly, the annotation “her picture in

a muck shovel” in mm. 688-689 does not have an expected internal frame. The double bars in

mm. 686-687½ and mm. 687½-688 represent obscured internal frames. The horns’ and first solo

violoncello’s passages overflow the double bar in mm. 686-687½, whereas the horns’ and second

solo violoncello’s passages overflow the double bar in mm. 687½-688. The trumpets and

trombones play immediately before and after the double bars, which help emphasize the presence

of the obscured frames. In addition to these passages, the rests before and after the frames also

helps define them, though more so visually than aurally. These two obscured frames contain

passages played by the clarinets, bass clarinet, vibraphone, piano, and solo violins.

66

Describing the frame located at the fermata as distinct might seem suspect at first. After

all, the music clearly overflows the frame here and it makes sense to label the frame as obscured.

During the fermata, the instruments employed are either sustaining notes or following rests written

in their parts. Nothing stops during the fermata; the performers resume what they were doing just

before it. The fermata imposes extra beats to the frame at the midpoint of the FMI.24 The

conductor and ultimately the sustaining abilities of these instruments limit the length of the

fermata and theoretically there must be a distinction between the attack and sustain and sustain

and decay. Though the exact appearance of the frame evades the listening audience’s limited

perception, it is understood to exist once it has passed by. It marks the beginning of the FMI’s

second half, the first half in retrograde. Because the second part has a beginning here, it must

establish a distinct frame. This frame prevents the previous music from m. 656 to 687½ from its

encroachment of the following music from mm. 687½ to m. 718. The frame is extreme and

sectional because it marks a new section and the second half of the FMI’s large-scale musical

structure. It is also an internal frame because it is surrounded by ongoing music.

This analysis of the FMI shows that most of the frames before the fermata run parallel to

those in corresponding passages after the fermata, thus almost forming an audible symmetrical

pattern. Berg tends to use distinct frames for the beginning of every new section. The symmetrical

pattern of frames can be preserved, despite the FMI’s overriding temporal progress (forward

motion), because the beginning of a new section can also be the end of a previous section. The

music in the beginning of one section differs from the music at the beginning of its analogous

section, but the function of the frames in both places is the same. It is remarkable that, despite

being surrounded by different music, the internal nonsectional frames also preserve symmetry via

their analogous functions. The repetition of these frames is varied because their content and

surrounding music change.

24 Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance, 18. This remark recalls Cone’s discussion about

how fermatas and last chords impose extra beats or even extra measures in musical works.

67

Cone addresses varied repetition in music: “not only must each varied repetition be

consistent with the composer’s expressed formal intentions and directions for performance, but it

must also be specifically justified by some complexity in the score that it clarifies.”25 Cone’s

observation can be applied to both large-scale and small-scale varied repetitions in the FMI. Up to

now three kinds of varied repetitions in the FMI have been discussed: the latter of the two large

halves, the latter analogous musical passages, and the latter analogous musical frames. The frames

occurring in the FMI almost always correspond to a change in the mise-en-scène or image indicated

in the annotations. These annotations, along with the FMI’s musical structure, enable Berg to

play with the flat structured hierarchy of these frames. For instance, distinct internal frames can be

sectional and nonsectional. Just as with the distinct sectional frames, the obscured, questionable,

and expected internal frames hold their own within the musical structure by recurring through

varied repetition. And the varied repetition of these frames adds to the clarity of the FMI’s formal

organization. The internal frames in the FMI do not require silence in order to separate

themselves from the body of the work; they stand out and demand attention because changes on

the music’s surface support their presence both visually and aurally. They are all appropriately

called “internal” because they expose their own content closely connected to the images conveyed

by their accompanying annotation. They participate in keeping the FMI from being mere

accompaniment by bringing to the fore its filmic essence.

Conclusions

Berg’s film suggests a combination of two editing styles, Cutting to Continuity and

Classical Cutting. From both the annotations in the score and the Film Music Scenario it appears

that the composer had in mind certain camera angles and framing techniques or editing devices.

Fades and dissolves, graphic and rhythmic matches, and wipes can be used in the film that the

FMI accompanies and there are many filmic musical passages that suggest certain framing devices

25 Ibid., 49.

68

over others. For instance, the graphic match suggested by both the music and the annotations that

correspond to Lulu’s “shadow” in m. 685 and “her image in a muck shovel” in mm. 688-689, both

in the vicinity of the fermata in m. 687 (see Example 1.2a).

PART TWO: FILMIC ASPECTS AND CRITICISM

CHAPTER 3

EARLY FILM THEORY AND BERG’S FILM MUSIC INTERLUDE

No art has ever become great without theory.

--Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, as cited in Robert Musil, “Toward a New

Aesthetic: Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film”1

Berg completed the FMI in the early 1930s, only shortly after the advent and then success

of the sound film or talkie, and in the formative years of film theory. As discussed in the

Introduction, intellectual and creative interactions between prominent composers (interested in

film in general as well as film music) and film theorists emerged early in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores writings in early film theory and the application of their ideas to the FMI.

Early film theory writings by Robert Musil (1880-1942), Béla Balázs (1884-1949), Rudolf Arnheim

(1904- ), Herbert Blumer (1900-87), and Kurt London (1900- ), among others, will be considered,

as well as early writings about film and film music by composers Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951),

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), and Theodor Adorno (1903-69).2

Béla Balázs and Robert Musil: The Precision and Soul of the “Visible Man”

In his essay “Toward a New Aesthetic: Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film” (1925),

Robert Musil reviews Béla Balázs’s monograph Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), praising Balázs for

articulating the need for film theory and for his observations about the isolation of images and

actions in film.3 Musil also discusses the difference between a spiritual and perceptual dichotomy

1 Robert Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic: Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film,” in Precision

and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago and London:

The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 193. The quotation is from Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare

Mensch: Eine Filmdramaturgie, 2d ed. (Halle/Saale: Verlag Wilhelm Knapp, 1926), 10. It is well

known that Berg knew Musil; the extent of their acquaintance is not known. According to Berg’s

friend Soma Morgenstern, the composer knew about Balázs and had a chance meeting with him

some time in the late 1920s or early 1930s. See Ingolf Schulte, ed., Soma Morgenstern, Alban Berg

und seine Idole: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Lüneburg: Klampen Verlag, 1995), 76-80 and 106-07.

2 Whereas a date of death left blank in the parentheses might indicate that the person is still living,

most incomplete dates indicate that there is a lack of information available.

3 Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul, 193. The editors and translators add just

69

70

he refers to as the normal condition and the “Other” condition. The normal condition is more

familiar because it is connected to human experience: it consists of one’s relationship to the world

and perception of reality. The Other condition is less familiar: it is the contrasting condition that

imprecisely includes vision, love, goodness, and renunciation of the world. For Musil, there are

only imprecise definitions of the Other condition partly because this spiritual condition has left

only traces on the human experience. This section explores the connections between the isolated

actions and images in silent film and the Other condition and how both apply to Berg’s FMI.

In Der sichtbare Mensch Balázs describes a major difference between realistic and filmic

representation of people as objects in the silent film; in the latter the space is reduced, the images

and actions are isolated: “Our expressive space has been reduced to our face. And not only

because the other parts of our body are covered by clothes. Our face now resembles a small,

clumsy, elevated semaphore of the soul sending us signals as well as it can. . . .”4 Here, Balázs

implies that through the reduction of space, the face must convey more than ever the expressive

content of a person as onscreen image. This visible man has not only had his expressive power

reduced; his expressive power has not been utilized to its fullest potential:

Today, however, this visible man is no more and not yet entirely here; because it

is a law of nature that, when not used, every organ degenerates and becomes deformed.

In the culture of words, our body has not been fully used as means of expression. It has

thus lost its expressive power [and] has become awkward, primitive, stupid, and barbaric.5

before the essay: “Set in the context of a review of a book by his friend Béla Balázs (Der sichtbare

Mensch), this essay is Musil’s most important statement on aesthetics and the ‘Other condition.’”

4

“Unsere Ausdrucksfläche hat sich auf unser Gesicht reduziert. Und nicht nur darum, weil

die anderen Teile des Körpers mit Kleidern verhängt sind. Unser Gesicht ist jetzt wie ein kleiner,

unbeholfener, in die Höhe gestreckter Semaphor der Seele, der uns Zeichen gibt, so gut er

kann. . . .” Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, 24-25.

5

“Dieser sichtbare Mensch ist aber heute schon nicht mehr und noch nicht ganz da. Denn

es ist ein Gesetz der Natur, daß jedes Organ, das nicht gebraucht wird, degeneriert und

verkrüppelt. In der Kultur der Worte wurde unser Körper als Ausdrucksmittel nicht voll gebraucht

und darum hat er auch seine Ausdrucksfähigkeit verloren, ist unbeholfen, primitiv, dumm und

barbarisch geworden.” Ibid., 27. For a fascinating discussion of Balázs’s approach to the film as

surface, see Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, Weimar and Now:

German Cultural Criticism, no. 27 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California

Press, 2001), 153-55. The ideas presented in Balázs’s Der sichtbare Mensch and Der Geist des Films

71

It is this discussion of the reduction of expressive space and Balázs’s visible man that seems to

attract Musil. It also seems that Musil is attracted to Balázs’s notion that the visible man must live

onscreen at the same level--and no more importantly--as the onscreen images of inanimate objects,

inviting parataxis and thus creating a nonhierarchical web-like world:

A remarkable example is offered by a fundamental experience that belongs to

film, that exotic life described in Balázs’s book, a life in which things gain visual

isolation. “In the world of speaking human beings, silent things are far more lifeless and

insignificant than the human being. They are allowed only a life of the second or third

order, and even that only in rare movements of especially clear-sighted sensitivity in the

people who observe them. . . . But in the shared silence inanimate things become almost

homogeneous with people, and gain thereby in vitality and significance. This is the

riddle of that special film atmosphere, which lies beyond the capacities of literature.”

One might be tempted to see in this only the description of an emphasis of attention, but

the subsequent clarification draws out the meaning quite unambiguously: “The

precondition for this is that the image of each object actually signifies an inner

condition,” that “in film all things have a symbolic meaning. . . . One could simply say

meaning. For symbolic means as much as having significance, going beyond its own

sense to a still further sense. What is decisive in this for film is that all things, without

exception, are necessarily symbolic. . . .”6

This web-like world also fits well with Musil’s perspective on life in general: “In his essays as in

his fiction, Musil kept insisting that life is not a sequential narrative of packaged actions or ideas

but a fluid network, changing from one minute to the next, in which actions and ideas are

inseparable from sensations and emotions.”7 In silent film, the exotic life described by Balázs

represents life artistically. It is connected to reality--every film subject is, including the

fantastic--and it is at the same time an isolated, cut off world in which nothing is like anything in

are presented again many years later in his final and much better known monograph. See Béla

Balázs, Theory of Film (Character and Growth of a New Art) trans. Edith Bone, The Literature of

Cinema (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952; reprint, New York: Arno Press & the New York Times:

1972). This is also the first monograph to present his film theory and criticism in English.

6 Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul, 197. Musil is quoting directly from

pages 47-48 of Balázs’s Der sichtbare Mensch.

7 Pike and Luft, introduction to Musil, Precision and Soul, ix. The writers explain Musil’s

perspective on life succinctly in the above quotation. Musil writes about the self, feelings or the

soul, and the Other condition in his essay: “The feelings do not point to things outside the self,

but rather signify inner conditions: the world is not experienced as a field of objective relations,

but rather as a consequence of self-oriented experiences.” Ibid., 207.

72

reality.8 It is certain that in this web-like world Musil’s Other condition takes place, and for Musil,

there are two conditions that cannot be mixed, the normal condition and the Other condition:

One of the two is familiar as the normal condition of our relationship to the world, to

people, and to ourselves. . . . This Other spiritual condition is always described with as

much passion as imprecision, and one might be tempted to see in this shadowy double of

our world only a daydream, had it not left its traces in countless details of our ordinary life

and did it not constitute the marrow of our morality and idealism lying within the fibrous

threads of evil. . . . and in the image of this world there is neither measure nor precision,

neither purpose nor cause: good and evil simply fall away, without any pretense of

superiority, and in place of all these relations enters a secret rising and ebbing of our being

with that of things and other people.

It is in this condition that the image of each object becomes not a practical goal,

but a wordless experience; and the descriptions quoted earlier of the symbolic face of

things and their awakening in the stillness of the image belong without a doubt in this

context.9

It is curious that these conditions, having nothing to do with each other, coexist and are closely

juxtaposed in the cinema. Presented to the audience at the same time are the real world,

possessing the normal condition, and the film world, possessing both the normal and Other

conditions.10 It is always the normal condition that makes itself more immediate to the audience

than the Other condition.

The normal and Other conditions are also closely juxtaposed in Berg’s FMI, but on more

levels than are found in the cinema. Prior to the showing of the film in the opera house, the opera

audience has already become conditioned to accept the opera Lulu as the seedy reality of its main

8 Ibid., 194. Musil remarks, “people would rather regard art as decoration than as a negation of

real life.”

9 Ibid., 198-99.

10 Though both Musil and Balázs leave enough evidence for one to conclude that they viewed form

separately from content in the silent film, the Other and normal conditions, respectively, should

not be misinterpreted as part of the form-content dichotomy. Films that emphasize form draw

from more artistic camera techniques and are considered more experimental than those that are

content driven; the latter kind of film focuses more on telling the story. Obviously, there is a great

deal of overlap of form and content elements in the many films of Musil and Balázs’s time.

73

character.11 The normal condition prevails in the opera, though elements of the Other condition

can also be found. For instance, concerning the normal condition, the seedy reality of Lulu is full

of characters who are driven by their desires. Good and evil are distinct (although for some this

distinction is not grasped immediately). At the same time this is a theatrical work and, concerning

the Other condition, the distinction between good and evil is less precise than what the audience is

familiar with based on their realistic experiences. The FMI’s film, though the narrative content is

placed into the foreground, makes the Other condition apparent. The opera’s content is mainly

presented by the singing, spoken words, and actions of the performers; the silent film content is

presented by the character’s (or actors’) actions and images on screen. It is in the film that Lulu

and the other characters employed here are more closely related to the images of objects. Musil’s

explanation that the images of objects in silent film become wordless goals is apt indeed for the

FMI’s film.12 The objects shown during the film have just as much power in advancing the

narrative of the film as the people. For Balázs, objects and people and their expressions are also

just as much the materials of film to be dealt with by the filmmaker as technical aspects such as

light and photography:

The [medium of] film is called “Lichtspiel,” and in the end it really is only a play

of light. The materials of this art consist of light and shadow [just] as those of painting

consist of colors and those of music of sound. Facial expression and pantomime, soul,

passion, fantasy . . . in the end all is just photography. And what photography cannot

express the film will not contain.13

11 Edward Cone examines “how the world of opera differs from other dramatic worlds” and “who

are the people that inhabit it, and what sorts of lives do they lead there.” See Cone, “The World of

Opera and its Inhabitants,” [pt. 2 of] “Music and Words,” chap. 2 in Cone, Music: A View from

Delft: Selected Essays, ed. Robert P. Morgan (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago

Press, 1989), 125-27.

12 Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul, 198-200.

13

“‘Lichtspiel’ wird der Film genannt und letzten Endes ist er ja auch nur ein Spiel des

Lichts. Licht und Schatten sind das Material dieser Kunst wie die Farbe das der Malerei, wie der

Ton das der Musik. Mienenspiel und Gebärdenspiel, Seele, Leidenschaft, Phantasie . . . zuletzt ist

alles doch nur Photographie. Und was die Photographie nicht ausdrücken kann, das wird der

Film nicht enthalten.” Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, 139.

74

The director must be aware of his materials and what the film will not show. Balázs compares the

director’s dealings with these materials in filmmaking to the composer’s dealings with sound

materials in creating a musical composition:

[The film] must be devised with the vision of the director. In general, a film can turn out

really well only if the director “writes” it himself, creating it from his own material.

Likewise, a musician can never compose what a poet has devised. His muses are the

sonorous potential of his instruments, material, and technique. For the director

everything is readily available in the black-and-white shadow play (just as it is for

Michelangelo in a piece of rock), from which he only needs to help it emerge. Not even

the best film script can thus be sufficient for the director. It is exactly that which is

essential that [the script] can never contain because it still contains nothing but words.

But the material must show its will.14

To compose the FMI, Berg had to deal with many kinds of materials already at hand; his

compositional techniques, camera techniques, and the history of performances of Wedekind’s Lulu

plays (productions with or without the inserted projected film stills), to identify a few. But Berg

also had to create and choose his own materials; e.g., the serial materials he composed and

developed, the Film Music Scenario he devised, and the libretto he wrote. Berg exhibits a good

deal of control over his film by creating and combining these materials in the FMI. How he

juxtaposes the normal and the Other condition has been discussed to some extent already. In

addition to the web-like world he creates with his Film Music Scenario and film in which objects

and people become more closely related, the normal condition constantly contradicts the Other

condition. For instance, in mm. 670-678 (see Examples 1.4 and 1.5) fragments from Dr. Schön’s

row are used to form a melodic ostinato and become part of the musical foreground. The ostinato

occurs before, during, and after “the weapon” in mm. 675-676. But at the place the weapon is to

be shown, the ostinato is promoted from Nebenstimme to Hauptstimme. Dr. Schön is dead, and the

14 “Es muß mit der Vision des Regisseurs erdacht sein. Überhaupt kann ein Film nur dann

wirklich gut werden, wenn der Regisseur ihn selber ‘dichtet’ und aus seinem Material heraus

gestaltet. Auch ein Musiker kann niemals komponieren, was sich ein Dichter ausgedacht hat. Die

Klangmöglichkeiten seiner Instrumente, Stoff und Technik sind seine Musen. Auch für den

Regisseur liegt im Schwarz-weißen Schattenspiel, wie im Felsblock für Michelangelo, schon alles

enthalten, was er nur herauszuschälen hat. Darum kann auch das beste Drehbuch dem Regisseur

nicht genügen. Gerade das Wesentliche wird es nie enthalten, weil es trotz allem nur Worte hat.

Aber das Material muß seinen Willen zeigen.” Ibid., 54.

75

weapon--an object--represents him as well as the murder. Interestingly, in the analogous passage

in mm. 692-704, an analogous weapon, “the instrument” (a syringe), is used on Lulu in m. 697.

The FMI and its music make clear that Dr. Schön, the weapon, and the instrument are all

penetrating instruments for Lulu. During this passage Dr. Schön’s ostinato is in retrograde and is

demoted from Hauptstimme to Nebenstimme in mm. 700-701, when the medical “consultation”

takes place. The ostinato in both passages is also penetrating objects that consist of jagged

contours (two perfect fourths joined by a minor second) and take over the music.

That the objects and people featured in the film appear to be almost equal is only one

perspective. But there are visual hierarchies in the film. Lulu is more important than any object or

person in the FMI. The audience naturally accepts the people shown onscreen as more important

than the objects in the film because they are people and because the opera provides a history of the

characters who appear in the film.

From the analysis in Chapters 1 and 2, one knows that there are both visual and aural

hierarchies in the music accompanying the film. The normal and Other conditions also work

against each other here. The Other condition is present because the row materials that represent

characters in both the opera and the film are also objects. It is also present because there are no

precise distinctions between good and evil found in the music itself. But Lulu’s row material

prevails in the music, making her more important than anyone or anything else in the FMI. And

even though Berg can use all four row forms, he prefers prime and retrograde over inversion and

retrograde inversion in the FMI. Nevertheless, there are important passages in which he allows

inversion and retrograde inversion forms to prevail, as in the vicinity of the central axis in mm.

685-689 (see Example 1.2a).

For Musil, the Other condition in music also consists of expressive elements that are

separate from any context and are sensed and felt emotionally. About music and the Other

condition, Musil’s observation applies to the FMI:

76

There is in music an apparently complete world independent of the intellect, a pure

sensing and feeling, and without doubt the other arts also display this heightened

perceptiveness and responsiveness, which seem to run their course in a space in the soul

that is hermetically sealed and walled off from the ordinary. . . .15

In the same essay, Musil discusses the other condition in music. Music has expressive qualities

that evade precise explanation or description:

But even when an art is turned in on itself as music is, full of objectless form,

abnormally heightened feeling, and inexpressible meaning: at some point one asks

oneself what it all adds up to, sets it in relation to the whole person, orders it for oneself

in some way or other.16

But Musil does not consider the score as a means for orientation in his observations about the

Other condition in music. His perspective here is that of the listener who considers the expressive

qualities that cannot be explained or described precisely. Balázs, however, deals with the musical

score and specifically the film music score in his monograph Der Geist des Films (1930), where he

describes the score as an abstraction of the music:

Indeed, one can also read music from the score. Nevertheless, the score is not

the music itself but its abstraction. The possibility of such an abstraction, however, is

proof of the actual music’s reality. The ground plan is an abstraction, the architecture is

not.17

15 Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul, 201-02.

16 Ibid., 204. This kind of criticism about art and music can be found in literary works about art

that predate Musil. For instance, Paul Signac’s From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism,

originally published as a series of articles in La Revue Blanche from May to July 1898 and then as a

monograph in 1899, uses music to make a point about the viewing distance of art:

“‘A painting is not to be sniffed,’ said Rembrandt. When listening to a symphony, one

does not sit in the midst of the brass, but in the place where the sounds of the different instruments

blend into the harmony desired by the composer. Afterwards one can enjoy dissecting the score

note by note, and so study the manner of its orchestration. Likewise, when viewing a divided

painting, one should first stand far enough away to obtain an impression of the whole, and then

come closer in order to study the interplay of the colored elements, supposing that these technical

details are of interest.” Floyd Ratliff, Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism, with the first

English edition of From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism by Paul Signac, translated from the

third French edition by Willa Silverman (New York: The Rockefeller University Press, 1992),

265. Signac’s monograph is dedicated to his friend Georges Seurat. See Paul Signac, “La touche

divisée,” chap. 5 in D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme, with an intro. by Françoise Cachin,

Collection savoir (Paris: Hermann, 1978), 125. See also Jack Flam, “The Enigma of Georges

Seurat,” The New York Review, 7 November 1991, 25-26.

17

“Allerdings kann man Musik auch in der Partitur lesen. Aber die Partitur ist nicht die

Musik selbst, sondern ihre Abstraktion. Die Möglichkeit solcher Abstraktion aber ist der Beweis

77

Balázs’s use of the word “abstraction” shows that he is aware of its double meaning: the musical

score is the source of the composer’s intentions, but at the same time it is an abstract entity

associated with and dissociated from the music itself.

The score as ground plan for the FMI’s music can be used as a source for the listener’s

orientation on many different levels: the score itself can be analyzed; the annotations provide

information about what is to appear in the film as the music plays; the Film Music Scenario gives

additional information for how the film is to correspond to the music or vice versa; and finally, the

knowledge of the rows that represent characters in the opera and how they are constructed. The

score--as deterrent for immediacy--enables the Other condition in the music to be much more

easily perceived.

Balázs and Musil: The Film Spectator and Berg’s Film Music Spectator

In Der sichtbare Mensch Balázs contrasts the reputations of theatre and its descendent, the

silent film. For Balázs, film’s lack of sound, isolation of images and actions, and reduction of

visual space keep it from being thought of an art on the same level as theatre:

Above all, one is inclined to see in film a wayward and degenerate child of the

theatre, and one views [film] as a corrupt and garbled degeneration, as a cheap substitute

for the theatre that relates to genuine stage art as, for example, a photographic

reproduction to an original painting. In both cases--so it seems--invented stories are

presented by actors.18

Despite having actors performing invented stories as a common element, film omits more than

theatre and offers less to observe but more to infer.19 One year after “Toward a New Aesthetic”

für die Konkretheit der eigentlichen Musik. Der Grundriß ist eine Abstraktion, die Architektur ist

es nicht.” Béla Balázs, Der Geist des Films (Halle: Verlag Wilhelm Knapp, 1930), 131. This

passage is indicative of a whole complex of issues (for instance, the score can be read without

being played, but Berg’s FMI cannot).

18

“Vor allem ist man geneigt, im Film ein mißtratenes und verkommenes Kind des Theaters

zu erblicken, und ist der Ansicht, daß es sich hier um eine verdorbene und verstümmelte Abart

handle, um einen billigen Theaterersatz, der sich zur echten Bühnenkunst so verhält wie etwa die

photographische Reproduktion zum Originalgemälde. In beiden Fällen--so scheint es--werden ja

erdichtete Geschichten von Schauspielern dargestellt.” Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, 37.

19 In “Toward a New Aesthetic,” Musil touches upon film’s ability to offer less visually, and this

78

Musil wrote the essay “Cinema or Theatre” (1926), in which he favored films that do not imitate

the theatre.20 Musil discusses the mistake the earliest silent films made by imitating the theatre,

contrasting theatre and film and emphasizing that film should not be used for the advancement or

progress of theatre (or literature). Film should not make explicit what it offers the spectator, but

rather present and exploit what it omits:

For the experiences of our senses are almost as conservative as theater directors.

What is to be understood through seeing and hearing (even if not at first glance) cannot be

too far removed from what is already known. As incomparably as something unutterable

may be expressed at times in a gesture, a grouping, a picture of feeling, or an event, this

always happens only in immediate proximity to the word; as something hovering, so to

speak, around its core of meaning, which is the real element of humanity. That is why

all-too-radical attempts at reform are condemned to failure, not only because of their

“boldness,” but because, unfortunately, they are also burdened with more than a little

inner banality.

Something similar is also true of the “immediate language” of feelings, passions,

and events in the theater. A stubborn prejudice insists that the human spirit and thought

be reflected in these things on the stage, but not be allowed direct expression. Happily,

film, in the phase when it was imitating the stage, produced such a babble of expressive

gestures that it undermined the idea that passions and events speak for themselves and

only need to be hung on the line. Even in one’s personal life the outer attitude of the mind

is no more than a provisional and expressively meager translation of the inner attitude,

and the essence of the person does not reside in his experiences and feelings but in his

silent, persistent quarrelling and coming to terms with them.21

In the conclusion of his earlier essay “Toward a New Aesthetic,” Musil delves further into film’s

lesser reputation as art, in contrast to theatre and literature. Notice in the following passage that

Musil is also dealing with film spectatorship:

ability--leaving less for the eye and more for interpretation--, as with every art, thus enables film to

be considered as art:

“Above all--and one could complete in this paradoxical way every proof that film is

art--what speaks for film is its truncated essence as an event reduced to moving shadows which

nonetheless generates the illusion of life. Every art involves such a bifurcation. Silent like a fish

and pale like something subterranean, film swims in the pond of the only-visible.” Musil,

“Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul, 194.

20 Musil, “Cinema or Theater,” in Precision and Soul, 68-69. The editors and translators add this

note preceding Musil’s essay “Cinema or Theater”: “As is most evident in the essay ‘Toward a

New Aesthetic,’ he was one of the pioneers in taking film seriously as an art form that introduced

new concerns into aesthetics.”

21 Ibid., 69.

79

When we look at a film, it unfolds the whole infinity and inexpressibility possessed by

everything that exists--placed under glass, as it were, by the fact that one only sees it (there

are exemplary instances of this in Balázs). In making connections and working out

relations among impressions, on the other hand, film is apparently chained more strongly

than any other art to the cheapest rationality and platitude. It appears to make the soul

more immediately visible, and thoughts into experience; but in truth the interpretation of

each individual gesture is dependent on the wealth of interpretive resources that the

spectator brings with him; the comprehensibility of the action increases, the more

undifferentiated it is (just as it does in the theater, where this is taken to be especially

dramatic). Thus the expressive power increases with the poverty of expression, and the

typicality of film is nothing but a coarse indicator of the stereotypical quality of everyday

life. Because of that, it seems to me, film will always in certain regards be on a lower level

than (and at a fixed distance below) the literature of the same period, and film realizes its

destiny not as a deliverance from literature, but as sharing its destiny.22

In the opera Lulu Berg faces the task of transforming opera spectators into film spectators.

The audience is not only hearing the opera, but seeing it as well. After ii.1, rather than having the

audience watch certain actions onstage, these actions shift temporarily to the mise-en-scène of a

silent film. And as well as Berg’s opera transforms its opera spectators into film spectators during

the FMI, Berg’s score transforms its readers into film music spectators.23 If film is, as described by

Musil, a “coarse indicator of the stereotypical quality of everyday life,” Lulu is no longer just an

object for the gazes of other characters and opera spectators; she is now an object within the gaze

of the film spectator and the eye-gaze and ear-gaze of the film music spectator. One must also ask

about the identity of the camera as it peers into this new world. Is this world (which is about Lulu)

shown from the point of view of Alwa, Countess Geschwitz, or Lulu, or is it shown from an

omnipresent point of view, detached from Lulu?

Balázs deals with spectatorship more deeply in his second monograph Der Geist des Films

than he does in Der sichtbare Mensch, and with more detailed discussions than Musil. Der Geist des

Films can be thought of as both a continuation and expansion of ideas discussed in his earlier

monograph. In Der Geist des Films, Balázs makes his reader aware of the dynamic relationship

22 Musil, “Toward a New Aesthetic,” in Precision and Soul, 203.

23 The film music spectator has the score at hand, differing from the opera spectator.

80

between filmmaker and spectator. Filmmaking techniques are key to explaining how what

appears on film differs from reality:

What do we see in film that we cannot see in the studio when faced with the same

subject? Which are the effects that primarily emerge only in a roll of film? What is it that

the camera does not reproduce but itself creates? How does the film become its own

special language?

Through the close-up.

Through the angle.

Through the montage.

Of course, “in reality” we can never see things from the microscopic proximity shown

by a close-up.24

Again, Balázs explores the idea that film isolates images and actions onscreen. The close-up and

the camera angle appear more closely connected to each other in the following sections dealing

with film theory and these techniques. Balázs is interested in montage as a visual impression and

as a filmmaking technique known also as film editing. Balázs’s discussion about the montage and

its relationship to the spectator will receive special attention here because of how he discusses the

relationship between the filmmaking techniques and the spectator and how he draws a connection

between montage and music.

Balázs begins his discussion about montage by explaining what montage does to events in

the film and how the spectator experiences it:

The montage gives breath to the narration. Something is [either] presented broadly and

leisurely in long played-out scenic images, or it is hastily chased in short ones. The

excitement of the dramatic content is transferred to the spectator via the power of optical

movement.25

24 “Was sehen wir im Film, was wir im Atelier, vor demselben Motiv, nicht sehen können?

Welche Wirkungen sind es, die erst im Filmstreifen primär enstehen? Was ist es, was die Kamera

nicht reproduziert, sondern selber schafft? Wodurch wird der Film zu einer besonderen eigenen

Sprache?

Durch die Großaufnahme.

Durch die Einstellung.

Durch die Montage.

Aus der mikroskopischen Nähe, in der uns die Großaufnahme die Dinge zeigt, können wir sie

natürlicherweise ‘in Wirklichkeit’ niemals sehen.” Balázs, Der Geist des Films, 8.

25

“Die Montage gibt den Atem der Erzählung. Da wird etwas breit und geruhsam

vorgetragen, mit lang ausgespielten Szenenbildern. Oder es wird im Kurzschnitt, hastig gejagt.

Die Erregung des dramatischen Inhalts wird durch Optische Bewegtheit auf den Zuschauer

übertragen.” Ibid., 56.

81

Balázs also calls the optical movement of film the “optical music”: “The optical music of the

montage runs, in its own sphere, alongside the abstractness (Begrifflichkeit) of the content.”26

Balázs’s separation of the montage from the film’s content is made more interesting here by his

direct analogy to music: the optical music of the montage works as a kind of accompaniment to

the film’s content and at the same time can behave on its own. Even in Der sichtbare Mensch,

Balázs was aware of how film music might have a presence of its own alongside its

accompaniment to the film: “Music conjures up other visions, which disturb those of the film

when they come too close together.”27

Even though Balázs finds that music is capable of evoking other visions, different from

those that appear onscreen, he also finds that music is a necessary accompaniment, especially for

silent film:

Why do they always play music during the showing of a film? Why does a film

without musical accompaniment have an awkward effect? Perhaps music functions to fill

in the airless space between the characters, which is otherwise bridged by the dialogue.

Furthermore, every movement entirely devoid of sound has an uncanny effect. It would

be even more uncanny, however, if several hundred people sat together in a hall silent for

hours in absolute silence.28

26 “Die optische Musik der Montage läuft in eigener Sphäre neben der Begrifflichkeit des Inhalts

einher.” Ibid., 57.

27 “Denn die Musik weckt andere Visionen, welch die des Films nur dann stören, wenn sie zu nah

zu einander kommen.” Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, 143. Kurt London also discusses how film

music is capable of distracting the spectator from the picture: “In the course of the musical

illustration of a film familiar or characteristic bars of music may have struck the filmgoer once or

twice, but otherwise he could hardly have told you, especially in an instance of well-made film

music, what he had really heard. Only at points where the music diverged from the picture,

whether in its quality or meaning, was his concentration on the picture disturbed. Thus we reach

the conclusion that good film music remained ‘unnoticed.’” See Kurt London, Film Music: A

Summary of the Characteristic Features of its History, Aesthetics, Techniques, and Possible Developments,

trans. Eric S. Bensinger, with a foreword by Constant Lambert (London: Faber & Faber, 1936),

37.

28

“Warum wird während der Filmvorführungen immer Musik gespielt? Warum wirkt ein

Film ohne Musikbegleitung peinlich? Vielleicht ist die Musik dazu da, um den luftleeren Raum

zwischen den Gestalten, den sonst der Dialog überbrückt, zu füllen. Auch wirkt jede Bewegung,

die vollkommen lautlos ist, unheimlich. Noch unheimlicher wäre es aber, wenn einige hundert

82

But even short films, of several minutes’ duration, would seem strange without musical

accompaniment. The FMI would seem extremely strange if the music ceased for the duration of

the showing of the film and returned again when the opera “resumed.” The silent film without

musical accompaniment sounds just as strange in the fictional world of the opera as it would in

reality.29

Rudolf Arnheim and Berg’s Dual Role as Scenarist-Director

Although we do not have enough evidence through Berg’s correspondence and essays

about the making of the FMI in Lulu, the writings of the film critic Rudolf Arnheim, Berg’s

contemporary, can enlighten us about Berg’s dual role as scenarist-director.30 While Berg worked

on the FMI in the early 1930s, Arnheim was working as a film critic and assistant editor of cultural

affairs at Die Weltbühne, a journal published in Berlin.31 Arnheim, who earned his Ph.D. in

Menschen in einem Saal beisammen säßen, stundenlang schweigend, in absoluter Stille.” Balázs,

Der sichtbare Mensch, 143.

29 Compare London:

“To sum up, films, shown without a sound, on a plane, in a monotonous black and white,

were in a manner of speaking dimensionless. The visual element alone and unsupported can never

be sufficient substitute for an actual representation of life, and the film, to attain full artistic

expression, must make use of more realistic media. So the need of sound or music was still felt,

even when the primitive conditions of the early cinema had no longer to be reckoned with.” Film

Music, 34.

30 I touched on these matters in “The Composer’s Montage and Veering Realities: Alban Berg’s

Film, the Film Music Scenario, and the Score of the Film Music Interlude in the Opera Lulu,”

paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society Southern Chapter,

Loyola University, New Orleans, La., 19 February 2000.

31 Rudolf Arnheim, “Chronology,” in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien, Wisconsin

Studies in Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 231. The same information

about Arnheim and his work at Die Weltbühne from this source is presented in “UW Press: Film

Essays and Criticism” [web site]; available from “http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/

0390.htm”; Internet; accessed on 20 July 2001, p. 1 of 2. Information used by permission. See

Appendix I. Arnheim’s first essay for Die Weltbühne, “Die Seele in der Silberschicht,” appeared on

28 July 1925. See Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism, 234. He later worked for Die Weltbühne

under the editor Carl von Ossietzky. At the time Die Weltbühne was an intellectual weekly that had

many left-wing liberals as contributors. For a fascinating historical account of the later prewar

years of Die Weltbühne, see Kurt Singer, “A Weltbühne Martyr,” Aufbau: deutsch-jüdische Zeitung 16,

10 August 2000, [web site]; available from “http://aufbauonline.com/2000/issue16/pages16/

83

psychology upon the completion of his dissertation on the experimental psychology of visual

expression, published Film als Kunst in 1933. The essays in this monograph date from the 1930s

and center on the author’s idea that films are not meant to reproduce reality as one perceives it, but

rather that good motion pictures ought to be understood as art from their very conception.32 In

1957, the author translated this monograph as Film as Art. Arnheim’s film theory not only has

applications for understanding silent film, but also provides a contemporary voice about the silent

film and film art. Berg’s montage can be viewed as an effort to produce film art according to

Arnheim’s ideas about montage and film versus reality. In Arnheim’s terms, Berg is not just a

scenarist-director but also a film artist.

In chapter 2, “The Making of a Film,” Arnheim’s description from the 1933 essay of what

a film artist does fits Berg well: “He shows the world not only as it appears objectively but also

subjectively. He creates new realities, in which things can be multiplied, turns their movements

and actions backward, distorts them, retards or accelerates them.”33 Berg’s control of the film in

the opera Lulu creates new realities in which parallel events, actions, and images take place (see

the Film Music Scenario in Figure 2.1). The connections of these events, actions, and images are

as evident in the film as they are throughout the opera. And the insertion of the film into the opera

creates even more new realities than the opera would have offered without the moving picture.

For Arnheim the new realities created by the film artist are not reproductions of reality:

true film art avoids reproducing reality by exploiting innovative cinematic techniques. As

12.html”; Internet; accessed on 10 July 2001, pp. 1-3. Information used by permission. See

Appendix H.

32 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California

Press, 1957), 2-3.

33 Ibid., 133.

84

Arnheim puts it, “I undertook to show in detail how the very properties that make photography

and film fall short of perfect reproduction can act as the necessary molds of an artistic medium.”34

In “Film and Reality,” Chapter 1 of Film as Art, Arnheim considers the properties

responsible for making early film fall short of perfect reproduction or duplication of reality. These

properties are described in Arnheim’s subsections: “[R]eduction of depth,” “lighting and the

absence of color,” “delimitation of the image and distance from the object,” “absence of the

nonvisual world of senses,” and “absence of the space-time continuum.” “reduction of depth” is

one main difference between film and reality. Unlike reality, film hovers between being two and

three-dimensional. Enough information must be given for the three-dimensional image to be

perceived on film. In addition to creating three-dimensional images, the images exist within a

plane that can be divided into upper and lower screen. “[R]eduction of depth,” according to

Arnheim, also affects the constancies of size and shape, which disappear when the three

dimensional impression is lost.35

“Lighting and absence of color” in the early motion picture differs obviously from reality,

yet Arnheim points out that generally audiences readily accept black and white film without being

upset about the difference. Arnheim adds to this observation:

not only has a multicolored world been transmitted into a black-and-white world, but in

the process all color values have changed their relations to one another; similarities

present themselves which do not exist in the natural world, things [sky and faces can be

the same color, for example] have the same color which in reality stand in no direct

color connection at all with each other or in quite a different one.36

Lighting is crucial in film and helps determine shapes, backgrounds, and foregrounds.37

34 Ibid., 3.

35 Ibid., 11-14.

36 Ibid., 15. The example in brackets is used later on in the same discussion.

37 Ibid., 15-16.

85

“Delimitation of the image and distance from the object” in film reduces the visual field of

the audience compared to the visual field reality can offer. The viewer is visually confined to

whatever is in the picture. Arnheim adds that this limitation is immediately experienced by the

audience watching a film, which must instead give spatial information such as frames of reference

for standards of comparison. Determining horizontal lines, distances, ranges of sizes, and focus all

depend on the camera, the lens of the projection machine, spectator seating, and the size of the

theatre.38

The “absence of the space-time continuum” began to exist in films especially after

filmmakers were no longer concerned solely with film content. Arnheim explains that although

time and space are not continuous in some films, the films can have their own continuity. This

cohesiveness is achieved through emphasizing the main story, highlighting important actions, or

directing the audience’s attention to certain objects that are significant to the film’s narrative.39

In film there is the “absence of the nonvisual world of senses,” which is strikingly different

from reality. The silent film especially must compensate for the audience’s sense of sound, touch,

balance, and--at unusual times--smell and taste. According to Arnheim these sensations in the

silent film are only conveyed “indirectly through sight.” The film must give enough information.40

Arnheim’s observations about differences between film and reality lends well to describing

the transition between Berg’s opera Lulu and the silent film. Considering the silent film’s

“reduction of depth” first, the most obvious transition between the reality of the opera and the film

is the action and characters on stage in contrast to the isolation of characters, actions, images, and

events on screen. As an implication of any film-within-an-opera, some reality is lost. Specifically

in Berg’s film-within-an-opera, the opera singers and actors play their roles within the film. But

38 Ibid., 16-19.

39 Ibid., 20-26.

40 Ibid., 30-33.

86

did Berg consider the possibility that opera singers and theatre actors might not know how to act in

front of the camera? In his 1934 essay, “Motion,” Arnheim explains why the actors and the

director should be knowledgeable about film’s “reduction of depth,” which also affects the

audience’s perception of expression and motion in films:

It is the task of the actors and the director to emphasize the expressive qualities of

motion and thereby to define the character of the entire film as well as that of the single

scene and the single shot. In the same manner the various personalities in their

similarities and differences will be defined visually. Even on the stage, motion is thus

exploited artistically; but this is all the more true for film, where things appear closer and

sharper and where the direction and speed of each motion is set off clearly by the narrow

rectangular frame of the image.41

In fact, Kurt List’s review suggests that at the 1937 premiere of Lulu in Zurich, neither the

opera singers and actors nor the film director were knowledgeable about “reduction of depth,” film

acting, and motion: “The coarse naturalism on the stage, the too literal action of the performers in

the movie written by Berg for the middle of the drama, acted as in the primitive beginnings of the

silent film, fell completely out of the frame, and destroyed the meaning of the work.”42

Differences in color between the reality of the opera and its film are also distinct. And the

black and white film provided a striking contrast in color between the stage and screen during the

premiere of Lulu. Lulu and the supporting actors of the film are suddenly in black and white; color

contrasts onscreen differ from the stage. They must rely more heavily on their facial expressions as

silent film actors than they do in their theatrical reality. Lulu’s facial expressions in the film, for

example during her “hope for acquittal” and then “diminishing hope,” are emphasized by Berg’s

use of contour in the Agitato and Sempre agitato sections of the FMI.

Studio lighting in film is generally different from theatrical lighting and therefore the

lighting used in the film differs from the stage lighting used in the opera. Arnheim explains how

crucial lighting is to determining shapes and backgrounds and foregrounds in film: “Indeed a

41 Ibid., 182-83.

42 Kurt List, “Lulu, After the Premiere,” Modern Music 15, no. 1 (November-December 1937): 12.

See Chapter 4 for further discussion of this passage.

87

shadow often acts as the announcer: it appears before the person throwing it comes on the scene,

and by this means directs the audience’s interest and attention to whatever is approaching.”43 And

in the Agitato and Sempre agitato sections of the FMI, as well as in the vicinity of the central axis in

m. 687 (see Examples 1.2a and 1.2b), Berg suggests Lulu’s “shadow” through his score annotation

and Film Music Scenario.

Arnheim’s observations about the “delimitation of the image and distance from the

object” can also be applied to this closer look at the transition between the reality of the opera and

its film in a general sense. The opera audience has a more realistic range of vision than the film

spectators. Berg’s indications in the Film Music Scenario allow for certain objects, such as the

weapon, to be shown in the film’s foreground. The distance between the object and the audience

as well as the focus of the lens depends on the director of the film and the camera operator.44

In both opera and film there can be an “absence of the space-time continuum.” Arnheim

contrasts theatre to film by explaining that film can take greater liberties with space and time than

theatre can.45 The film in Lulu has continuity, showing the audience images, actions, and events

that would be difficult to be shown using the space of the stage. Two specific examples that could

not be easily shown on stage are the police vehicle and the ambulance traveling towards their

destinations.

Another transition between the reality of the opera and the film is the film’s “absence of

the nonvisual world of the senses.” Suddenly the audience can no longer turn their heads to see

certain actions on stage. Instead the film demands their gaze as the camera compensates for the

audience’s nonvisual senses.46 Though Berg’s music does not compensate for the loss of the

43 Arnheim, Film as Art, 79.

44 Ibid., 73-85.

45 Ibid., 87.

46 Ibid., 102-03.

88

singers’ voices and words, it offers another medium that is capable of complementing the actions

in the film while at the same time possessing its own presence: music.

In addition to the transition between the reality of the opera and the film, Berg’s putative

montage could also offer new realities. Arnheim’s observations from his 1933 essay “The Making

of a Film,” in Film as Art, will be applied to this analysis of Berg’s montage. Here, Arnheim states

that in montage “actual events are changed, new realities are created.”47 For example, Berg would

have to control the “time-space continuum” successfully in the film as well as in his music. The

number of measures Berg assigns per image and action creates only a kind of “time-space

continuum” within the music accompanying the film. Another kind of “time-space continuum”

can be found in Berg’s montage. In the following quotation, Arnheim describes how the film artist

uses montage in films that are similar to Berg’s film:

In montage the film artist has a first class formative instrument, which helps

him to emphasize and give greater significance to the actual events that he portrays.

From the time continuum of a scene he takes only the parts that interest him, and of the

spatial totality of objects and events he picks out only what is relevant. Some details he

stresses, others he omits altogether.48

Returning to the Film Music Scenario (see Figure 2.1), one finds that Berg creates the film’s “time-

space continuum” by sometimes omitting how Lulu and the other characters get from one

situation to another. Arnheim’s discussion about montage, expresses the challenges faced by the

film artist:

It was a much bolder stroke to intervene in one unitary scene, to split up an event, to

change the position of the camera in midstream, to bring it nearer, move it further away,

to alter the selection of the subject of the subject matter shown. This has up to present

been the most vigorous and stimulating move toward the emancipation of the camera.49

The year and a half in prison is not represented by a caption in the FMI, but by a fermata (see

Examples 1.2a and 1.2b). Berg uses filmic montage to bring the many images, actions, and events

47 Ibid., 101.

48 Ibid., 89.

89

together, but he also faces the danger of having the fluidity of his film fall apart, a failed montage.

Arnheim discusses how this danger arises for the film artist:

Since montage separates things that are spatially continuous and joins together things

that have no inherent space-time continuity, the danger arises that the process may not

be successful and that the whole may disintegrate into pieces, which the spectator

cannot combine according to the artist’s plan.50

As discussed in Chapter 2, from the Film Music Scenario and the annotations in the score, it is

clear that Berg controls his putative montage and at the same time leaves certain artistic decisions

up to the actual filmmaker. The putative montage exhibits the film editing techniques cutting to

continuity and classical cutting and that a close following of Berg’s instructions and parameters

should not lead to primitive results, but rather to film art that offers new realities.

The Agitato and Sempre agitato sections in particular are composed of no other row

material than Lulu’s own. The music tells the audience that the film is all about Lulu. Berg is also

giving Lulu the opportunity to be a star in a motion picture. Keeping Arnheim’s operating thesis

in mind, one concludes that Berg’s opera, representing a world within a world, consists of a film

that cannot reproduce the opera’s own reality. The audience so easily trusts the film as a

continuation of the opera’s narrative that it almost fails to ask “is this really happening to Lulu?”

The film certainly introduces the film spectators to new realities. And Berg deliberately makes

these new realities, which can veer so dramatically from the reality of the opera, not by exploiting

film with color and sound, but rather by inserting a silent film featuring the composer’s montage

and starring Lulu as herself.

The FMI’s Film as Crime Film: Early Film Theory on this Genre

The previous section shows how the FMI’s film offers new realities through the

application of Arnheim’s early film theory writings. One possible reality is that Berg’s fictional

film is a crime film that provides a documentary-like depiction of what takes place and what

happens to Lulu after she murders Dr. Schön. The crime film is one of the oldest genres in film,

49 Ibid., 89.

90

receiving attention in essays since the early 1900s.51 Though the crime is sometimes presented

explicitly in the crime film, it is rarely the most important event. The crime film often spends a

good deal more time dealing with what leads up to the evil deed and its aftermath, engaging the

audience as well as the characters in the film to investigate who is responsible, and exploring

boundaries that exist between perpetrators, instigators, and innocent bystanders and between

criminal existence and normal life. In the crime film it is typical that the perpetrators are identified

and their punishment depicted to some extent in the crime film.

Berg’s film does not show Lulu murdering Dr. Schön, although the opera does. The

crime takes place before the events shown in the FMI’s film. At the beginning of the film Lulu’s

detainment makes the audience aware that she is being accused of a crime (murder). The

following trial leads to Lulu’s sentence and imprisonment.52 Later the film shows that Lulu

escapes her punishment. The opera spectator turned film spectator is forced to recall his or her

reading(s) of Lulu’s character and her past actions in the opera: is she a cold-blooded serial

murderer with multiple means for killing her prey (those attracted to her like moths to a flame)? Is

she a serial killer who cannot control herself (a plea of insanity is present in this reading: her

dreadful past and present situations drive her to mindlessly kill those attracted to her)? Or is she

actually a victim who kills out of self-defense (placing the weapon in her hand and attempting to

50 Ibid., 91.

51 “Crime film” is the name of the genre that was used in several early essays about film. It

consists of many subgenres such as the gangster film, the detective film, the street film, and (in the

1940s) the film noir. For instance, see Arnheim, “The Making of a Film,” chap. 2 in Film as Art,

52. Here, Arnheim discusses how the camera angle is used in the film The Mysterious Lady (1928),

starring Greta Garbo (1905-90). In one particular scene--a bit similar to the scene before the

FMI--military guards knock on the door after Garbo’s character, a Russian spy, kills their general.

52 In mm. 664-665 Berg’s annotation indicates that Lulu hopes for an acquittal. Is this a wish to

be proven innocent or to escape punishment? There is no indication in the film or in Berg’s

annotations that Lulu has remorse or any desire to repent. Her “dwindling hope” indicated in m.

667 shows that she is only concerned about escaping punishment.

91

have her kill herself, Dr. Schön either believes that she would follow through without a fight or is

aware that she would choose to kill him in self defense)?53

As the protagonist--and perhaps the viewpoint character--of both the film and the opera,

Lulu either evokes sympathy from the audience or at least the audience knows that regardless of

her behavior the world is centered on her. The monograph Movies, Delinquency, and Crime, by

Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser (1909- ), is a sociological study in which the authors deal

mainly with delinquents or young criminals as film spectators; however, their observations can be

applicable to any kind of film spectator:

The portrayal of the criminal fighting against tremendous odds, being apprehended

through the use of the despised “stool pigeon,” and finally losing his battle to be

subjected to punishment, suffering, and hardships, often awakens the sympathy of

observers and leads them to entirely miss what is meant to be a deterrent influence.54

Just prior to the showing of the film, the dutiful son Alwa can be seen as a “stool pigeon.” One

might conclude that if Alwa did not keep Lulu from escaping the scene of the crime in ii.1, there

would probably be no film.

Those who are more sympathetic to Lulu would not find the following passage from

Blumer and Hauser to apply only to delinquent and criminal spectators. If Lulu is understood as

the victim here, then the police and all aspects of authority represented in the film can be perceived

as enemies:

The punishment of offenders in motion pictures may incite intense resentment on the

part of delinquent and criminal observers. Instead of a deterrent influence in such

53 In the British monograph by Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in the Cinema, the author writes about

the American crime film: “The game portrayed by the camera is played in such a way that the

audience is invited to take part in it. It sits watching the moves and taking part in them, as in a

game of chess, without being able to say with absolute assurance what the end will be.” See

Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in the Cinema, The Literature of Cinema (London: Harold Shaylor,

1930), 196. As discussed above, in Lulu it appears that the game is instigated by the film’s content,

but involves facts that take place before the showing of the film.

54 Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency, and Crime, Motion Pictures and

Youth (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 130.

92

situations, the person has distinctly hostile reactions to punishment and to the agents

who administer it.55

And the onscreen punishment of the protagonist, along with her suffering, is bound to appeal to

the sympathies of even the most hostile spectators set against Lulu. The film offers an additional

opportunity to lose oneself, to temporarily forget what is right or good, and to go as far as to be

supportive of Lulu and her actions against the authorities who imprison her:

The chief characteristics of emotional possession may be mentioned here: the

inciting of impulses, the arousing of a given emotion, a relaxing of ordinary control, and

so an increased readiness to yield to the impulses aroused. These states of mind and

feeling come, usually, as a result of the individual “losing himself” in the picture, or

becoming deeply preoccupied with its drama or movement.56

The spectator can lose himself or herself in the film to the point of believing that Lulu’s

punishment makes her escape desirable. The close-ups of her ascending and diminishing hope, her

resignation, and her awakening will to live (among other close-ups discussed already in Chapter 2)

might be made to be so convincing that some members of the audience do not realize that she

actually does commit a crime in the film: she escapes from prison, with the help of Countess

Geschwitz and the helpers who thus become her accessories. This crime is far less serious and

violent than the murder of Dr. Schön. Her escape might give hope to the naive film spectator that

she will make her life better or at least effect change in it so she stays out of trouble. The film

spectators, who have watched the opera this far, however, know enough about the main character

of the opera. Lulu had a spectacular life before being apprehended by police and detained by

authorities. Perhaps some film spectators are led to believe that she earned her inheritance and

deserves every penny after dealing with the horrors of poverty, the deaths of those who loved her,

and especially after her husband Dr. Schön’s cruelty. Other film spectators might believe that they

know enough about Lulu to conclude that she is nothing more than a have-not who did not earn

55 Ibid., 131.

56 Ibid., 46-47.

93

her money honestly in order to get out of her situation. Blumer discusses this latter mentioned

perspective:

It is of interest also to notice how one’s attitude may change as a result of

disillusionment about the reality of a picture, or about its presentation. It very

frequently happens that some knowledge concerning the technique of production, such

as the use of artificial backgrounds, tricks of the camera, the “shooting” of consecutive

scenes at different times, will come as a surprise to a youthful moviegoer and cause him

to depreciate a picture. Again, information about the private lives of motion picture

stars and their relations to one another may strip pictures of much of their glamour.57

Blumer implies that it is not just the film’s content that can lead to its depreciation, but also its

form and extra-textual information (information or news about the stars, director, the making of

the film, etc.). The very same technical aspects that exploit Lulu’s expressions and aim to attract

more sympathetic film spectators can thus be seen as repulsive by those film spectators who also

know her.58 With Lulu as the main character, Berg’s film also appears to have some elements that

57 Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct, Motion Pictures and Youth (New York: The Macmillan

Company, 1933), 135.

58 The sympathetic film spectator who sides with Lulu would be characterized by Blumer as

experiencing emotional possession. The film spectator who finds Lulu and her behavior repulsive

and is not fooled by the film as a voyeuristic opportunity would be characterized as experiencing

emotional detachment :

“Opposed to the condition of emotional possession stands an opposite state which may be

called emotional detachment. In emotional possession one is, so to speak, at the mercy of the

picture; in emotional detachment one immunizes himself to its grip. Consequently emotional

detachment becomes a method of control over one’s reactions. One who approaches the picture in

this latter state discounts its character and resists its emotional appeal; whereas in emotional

possession one has surrendered himself to the movement of the theme and to the appeal of the

scenes.” Ibid., 129. In a later passage, Blumer explains the causes of the film spectator’s

emotional detachment:

“Emotional detachment is attained by building up certain attitudes which serve to fortify

the individual against captivation by the picture. The attitudes which usually yield this emotional

detachment are cynicism, scorn, analysis, indifference, superiority, or sophistication. The last two

seem to be most common. They do not mean necessarily that interest is lost in the type of picture

to which they are directed, but merely that the emotional or sentimental features are subject to a

judgment which lessens their appeal.

“The attitude of discounting a picture seems to arise from any one of three sources: first,

through instruction, or the gaining of knowledge or experience which makes one feel somewhat

superior to the kind of behavior depicted in the film; second, through response to the attitudes of

one’s group when such attitudes depreciate a certain type of picture or belittle a certain naïve

reaction to a picture; or third, disillusionment which causes one to question the reality of what is

being displayed.” Ibid., 131.

94

foreshadow film noir, an outgrowth of the crime film that emerged as a major film genre in the

1940s. From the opera, the film spectators already know Lulu as a femme fatale, who leads all who

love her to ruin.59 In the film, her lovers are drawn, without any reciprocity from her, to commit a

crime by helping her escape. As with film noir, the production cost of this film would have to be

very low in comparison to other films.60 With most events shot inside, the settings far removed

from the rooms in Dr. Schön’s elegant mansion, and by employing the performers from the opera,

Berg’s putative montage evokes the B-grade film. It is this kind of film that leads to its own

depreciation by the film spectator. The opera house is sullied by the film’s presence.

Very much secondary to Lulu and all that happens to her, Berg’s film also explores the

boundaries between perpetrators and bystanders, especially with Alwa, Geschwitz, and with

everyone else who plays a double role here (the witnesses who prosecute Lulu during the trial are

the same as the helpers during the medical consultation, and the judge and jury are the same as the

doctors and students).61 Though Berg’s film is not a detective film, it has its double agents. The

Emotional possession or detachment of the film spectator of Berg’s film is directly related

to experiences in reality, what has been learned about the characters and their actions in the opera,

and what is known about the kind of film being shown. But the first time opera audience gets no

advanced notice from the opera that a film will be shown until it suddenly takes place. Only after

the first few moments can one conclude that this film fits the crime film genre and this observation

would be made more likely in hindsight.

59 For different perspectives on Lulu as femme fatale see Judy Lochhead, “Lulu’s Feminine

Performance,” chap. 12 in Anthony Pople, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Berg (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 227-28; and Leo Treitler, “The Lulu Character and the

Character of Lulu, chap. 10 in David Gable and Robert P. Morgan, eds., Alban Berg: Historical and

Analytical Perspectives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),

261-86.

60 According to Richard Abel, it was Georges Altman who might have been the first to attach

“film noir” to the film genre: “‘For the first time, crime, suicide, and suffering take on a naked

simplicity which . . . seems completely, fatally, integral to the black despair of a hopeless life.’”

See Georges Altman, “Le Jour se lève, film noir pur,” La Lumière (June 1939): 4, and Richard Abel,

ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907-1939, vol. 2: 1929-1939, (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1988), 160 and n. 124, 178.

61 For more historical and analytical information about Berg’s use of multiple roles in Lulu see

Patricia Hall, “The Interaction of Role and Form,” chap. 3 in A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the

Autograph Sources (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 61-

95

most important double agents are Alwa (who is responsible for her arrest in the opera and appears

at the beginning of the film to observe her punishment, but helps her escape at the end of the film)

and Countess Geschwitz (who must be hurt that Lulu chooses Alwa, but makes the greatest

sacrifice for Lulu by taking her place at the hospital).

There are many suspenseful features that make the FMI’s music seem appropriate as

music for a crime film. The most suspenseful features are the diverse tempi employed throughout,

the opening trumpet fanfare with crash cymbals in mm. 656-658 (see Example 1.3), the unfolding

canons and pitch climaxes in the Agitato and Sempre agitato in m. 667 (see Example 1.6) and m.

707, Dr. Schön’s ostinati in mm. 670-678 (see Examples 1.4 and 1.5) and the analogous passage in

mm. 692-704, the passages marked Hauptrhythmus in m. 680 (see Example 1.7) and m. 694 and the

standstill at the central axis or the fermata in m. 687 (see Examples 1.2a and 1.2b).

Schoenberg, Adorno, and Their Early Ideas about Film and Film Music

Berg’s teacher Arnold Schoenberg and his student Theodor Adorno, who both wrote

about film and film music in the early twentieth century, deserve special attention for their possible

influence on Berg’s ideas about film and film music. In a letter to Emil Hertzka (1869-1932),

director of Universal Edition, Schoenberg responded to Hertzka’s request to know the composer’s

terms for making a film project out of his drama with music Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18 (1908-13).62

For his sixth term, Schoenberg explained some details of the musical work that might work better

88 and chap. 9 in Gable and Morgan, eds., Alban Berg: Historical and Analytical Perspectives, 235-59.

From Hall it appears that even the film is framed by Lulu’s crimes, whether they appear onstage or

not: “in Act II, Scene 1, Alwa has a love scene with Lulu--then at her height of beauty and wealth

as the wife of Alwa’s father, Dr. Schön. In Act II, Scene 2, Alwa has a similar scene with Lulu,

now as emaciated cholera victim who has just escaped from prison. Alwa’s first love scene ends

with her words, ‘I poisoned your mother,’ the second love scene with her question, ‘Isn’t that the

sofa [on which] your father bled to death?’” See Hall, A View of Berg’s “Lulu” through the Autograph

Scores, 80; and ibid., 252-53.

62 Arnold Schoenberg, “On the Projected Film,” in Jelena Hahl-Koch, ed., Arnold Schoenberg-

Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, trans. John C. Crawford (London and Boston:

Faber and Faber, 1984), 99. According to the editor, the letter has no date, no indication of place;

and, in “Arnold Schoenberg Letters,” Erwin Stein surmises that it was written by Schoenberg in

Berlin in the autumn of 1913. See also “Arnold Schoenberg Letters,” 43 ff.

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onscreen than onstage and expressed his interest in the potential of early film to represent his work

cinematographically:

the basic unreality of the events, which is inherent in the words, is something that they

should be able to bring out even better in the filming (nasty idea that it is!). For me this

is one of the main reasons for considering it. For instance, in the film, if the goblet

suddenly vanishes as if it had never been there, just as if it had simply been forgotten, that

is quite different from the way it is on the stage, where it has to be removed by some

device. And there are a thousand things besides that be easily done in this medium,

whereas the stage’s resources are very limited.

My foremost wish is therefore for something the opposite of what the cinema

generally aspires to. I want:

The utmost unreality!

The whole thing should have the effect (not of a dream) but of chords. Of

music. It must never suggest symbols, or meaning, or thoughts, but simply the play of

colors and forms. Just as music never drags a meaning around with it, at least not in the

form in which it [music] manifests itself, even though meaning is inherent in its nature,

so too this should simply be like sounds for the eye, and so far as I am concerned

everyone is free to think or feel something similar to what he thinks or feels while

hearing music. . . .63

Schoenberg’s desire for “the utmost unreality” and his interest in details that the camera can show

that cannot be shown successfully onstage reveal an insightful knowledge of cinematography: his

aim was not to reproduce Op. 18 as it would appear onstage, but to exploit the editing techniques

to achieve artistic effects. He was correct in criticizing cinema of the time for often attempting to

reproduce reality. The composer’s attraction to the notion of mixing film’s visual potential with

aural elements of his musical works favored form to be emphasized over content, which, as with

his music, should never be left to immediate apprehension.64 In addition to having overall control

63 Ibid., 100.

64 As discussed in the previous chapter, “immediate apprehension is only concerned with details

and clearly juxtaposed relationships formed on the surface.” See Edward T. Cone, Musical Form

and Musical Performance (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1968), 89-90. Schoenberg’s idea

that the music should have its own presence in the film separate from what is seen onscreen is

similar to his idea that text or words should not be followed too closely by the music as they are in

many musical works in his 1912 essay “The Relationship to the Text,” in Style and Idea: Selected

Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1975; reprint, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1975; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University

of California Press, 1984), 141 and 144. Many writers have complained about imitative film music

that accompanies the images and events too closely. For example, Romanian poet, writer, and

scenario adaptor Benjamin Fondane (1899-1944) described how imitative music fails the silent

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over the project, Schoenberg also wanted to have control over some visual effects of the film.

Later in the same letter he explained that he would like for the black and white silent film to be

tinted according to his own instructions: “Then, when the scenes are all rehearsed to the exact

tempo of the music, the whole thing will be filmed, after which the film shall be colored by the

film: “The silent film’s desire (albeit subterranean and stammering) was fairly perceptively of a

catastrophic tendency: to abolish all speech, all logic that supports speech, and all conception of

the human which is buoyed up by logic. Those who had come to understand the coded language

of silent film took offense at its intertitles; and they found imitative musical sound irritating--this

music that was so good at adding a supplementary text to what was complete in itself and

needlessly duplicating the image.” Fondane, “From Silent to Talkie: The Rise and Fall of the

Cinema,” trans. Claudia Gorbman, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 48 and 54. See also

Benjamin Fondane, “Du muet au parlant: Grandeur et decadence du cinema,” in Bifur 5 (April

1930): page numbers unavailable; reprint in Benjamin Fondane, Ecrits pour le cinema, ed. Michel

Carassou (Paris: Plasma, 1984), 71-85.

Hanns Eisler, Schoenberg’s student, explained the role of the film composer of the late

1920s: “A film composer was considered clever and useful if he understood how to ‘illustrate’ the

action of the film. If a machine was shown on the screen, the music had to whir, if a man was

walking along the street, the music had to walk etc.

“This principle of illustrating was supplemented by ‘sentimental’ and ‘picturesque’

music. The ‘sentimental’ was used to make the sorrow of a lover more sorrowful by means of

appropriate music. The ‘picturesque’ were those abominable pieces of music which when green

pastures were shown fell into a detestable sobbing, or became angry to suggest the roaring sea.”

Eisler, “From My Practical Work: On the Use of Music in Sound Film,” in A Rebel in Music:

Selected Writings, ed. and with an intro. by Manfred Grabs, trans. Marjorie Meyer (New York:

International Publishers, 1978; Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1978), 121-22. The editor’s note on

page 125 reads, “this article was written for and published by the London magazine, World Film

News, no.5, 1936.”

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painter (or possibly only under his supervision) according to my stage directions.”65 For reasons

unknown, this project never materialized.66

In 1927 Schoenberg wrote the essay “The Future of the Opera,” and to him the future of

opera included the silent cinema: “The future of the opera depends on the future of the drama,

and both have new ways forced on them by the fact of the cinema, which can offer all the theatre

offers except speech.”67 Schoenberg found that the visual qualities in opera cannot be compared to

those of film. Over a decade after the letter to Hertzka, the composer was still interested in the

color film and how opera can be reproduced cinematographically. But in this essay, he also

considered the audience for these films:

[Opera] has less to offer [to] the eye than the film has--and color-film will soon be here,

too. Add music, and the general public will hardly need to hear an opera sung and acted

any more, unless a new path is found.

65 Ibid., 101. Schoenberg’s desire to have the film colored by the painter reveals a good deal about

what the composer knew and did not know about the colored silent film of his time. Employing a

painter to color the film began in the late 1890s; since then, the film industry made stencils and

used them to color the film in a method similar to theorem painting as well as relied on a number

of mechanical coloring methods that had varying success by the early 1900s. It appears that

Schoenberg’s desire to color the film would have been in many ways problematic: “An ordinary

black and white film is taken, and then colored, in the same way that the photographic artist tints

his portraits. If the work is skillfully performed the results are distinctly pleasing and effective.

After one has been watching brilliant black and white pictures, the introduction of a colored film

comes as a restful interlude to the eyes. The colored cinematograph film was introduced by Robert

Paul, shortly after he established his studio. As lantern slides could be colored by hand with brush

and paints, he saw no reason why a film 40 feet in length should not be treated in the same way.

Accordingly he enlisted the services of an expert artist to make the experiment. But it was a

laborious undertaking. A picture measuring only 1 inch wide by ¾ths of an inch in depth is a base

of operations quite different from a lantern slide measuring 3¼ inches square. A magnifying glass

had to be used, and a considerable length of time was needed to treat a whole film.” Frederick A.

Talbot, “Animation in Natural Colors,” chap. 26 in Moving Pictures: How They are Made and

Worked (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1912), 287-89. According to the author, when the film

measuring 400 feet or more came into vogue, it was understood that hand coloring was not

feasible. The author also recalls that one particular film production firm would not color a film

unless it was guaranteed that 200 copies would be sold.

66 Schoenberg’s letter is in “On the Projected Film,” in Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg-Wassily

Kandinsky, 99-101.

67 Schoenberg, “The Future of the Opera,” Style and Idea, 336.

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Fortunately it is so expensive to make a film that producers will not be able to

renounce widespread popular appeal. This again makes clear the need to seek some

individual form for the newest art.

The minority that can understand deeper things will never let itself be satisfied

wholly and exclusively by what everyone can understand. This minority will always

want art to match its power of comprehension. . . .

So the drama of the future and the opera of the future cannot be art for the

masses; and if the drama is to be a verbal drama, then the opera will have to be

an opera of musical ideas.68

From the above passage it seems th