Lulu in Boston

When Wozzeck was given in Philadelphia four winters ago, conventional operagoers shuddered at its dissonances, stamped Composer Alban Berg as a stark ultra-modernist who had little regard for beauty. Wozzeck's story was sordid. Its music was an enigma to many, though none denied its power. For six years in his home in Vienna, Composer Berg has been working on a second opera, Lulu. Boston had the first U. S. taste of it last week when Sergei Koussevitzky conducted five symphonic excerpts.

Lulu's story, hatched in the erotic mind of Playwright Frank Wedekind, is even more lurid than poor bewildered Wozzeck's. Lulu is a vampire who feeds on power and lust. She destroys three men in the first two acts. At the end when she is murdered and horribly mutilated, the orchestra emits one terrifying shriek. Then only did Bostonians sit up in their seats. For although Berg again "uses the twelve-tone scale, he weaves it into a crafty harmonic design, subjects it to his moods which are for the most part restrained.

A Berlin audience cheered 15 minutes when the excerpts were played there last November. Boston's applause was perfunctory. In the Herald the music was pronounced "incredibly thick and often excessively boring." To the Transcript Berg was "a composer of the first rank, whose speech shall yet be understood by those who scoff at it now."

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