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Through the telling of Alban Berg's Lulu, "Taken by the Devil" illuminates the forces of politically-driven censorship of theater, music, and the arts during the tumultuous early twentieth century.
List of contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1. Introduction
- Chapter 2. "Burlesque Tragedy" and "Tristan Rapture": Fin-de-Siècle Decadence and the Lulu Works of Wedekind and Berg
- Chapter 3. Lulu and/or Geschwitz Idealized, in the Symphonic Pieces and Elsewhere
- Chapter 4. Berg's Literal-Mindedness and Second Order Consequences of Censoring Wedekind
- Chapter 5. Act 1 of Lulu, Tragic Material Reconceived as a Comedy of Manners
- Chapter 6. Act 2: Indirect and Second Order Consequences of Censorship on a Large Scale
- Chapter 7. Quarantined Material: Husbands as Customers and Other Problems in Act 3
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Margaret Notley is the author of Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism, AMS Studies in Music (Oxford University Press, 2007) and the editor of Opera after 1900: An Anthology of Critical Essays (2010). Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Philosophical Society, and her work has appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, and a number of multi-author volumes. For an article on late nineteenth-century adagios she received the American Musicological Society's Alfred Einstein Award in 2000. From 2001 to 2016, she was a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Musicology, and she has been an Associate Editor of 19th-Century Music since 2006.
Summary
Through the telling of Alban Berg's Lulu, "Taken by the Devil" illuminates the forces of politically-driven censorship of theater, music, and the arts during the tumultuous early twentieth century.
Additional text
Although there can be few operas that so openly bear the scars of censorship as Lulu, this aspect has all too often been neglected by musicologists. Margaret Notley's extensive and detailed investigation of the subject fills a gaping hole in Lulustudies and will be invaluable for Wedekind and Berg scholars alike.
