In Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, Frank Wedekind’s play Pandora’s Box supplies the source for the opera’s second act. Berg based the libretto on two Wedekind dramas, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, and transformed their Lulu story into a major twentieth-century opera.
The opera premiered incompletely in 1937, two years after Berg’s death, because he had not finished the orchestration of the third act. Friedrich Cerha later completed the score, and the full three-act version was first performed in 1979. This performance history is one reason discussions of Lulu often distinguish the two-act and three-act forms.
The title Pandora’s Box can therefore refer to a play within the opera’s source history, not simply to a mythological object. Spring Awakening is another famous Wedekind play, but it is not one of the two works Berg used for Lulu.