In Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, which instrument introduces the opening Prologue?

The saxophone introduces the opening Prologue of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu.

Lulu begins with a Prologue in which a theater director presents performers associated with the central character. The saxophone’s prominent opening helps establish the opera’s distinctive sound world, which blends late-Romantic orchestration with sharply modern harmonies, recurring motifs, and unusual instrumental colors.

Berg based the opera on Frank Wedekind’s Lulu dramas, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The title character is therefore the same Lulu who inspired the 1929 film Pandora’s Box, although Berg’s musical treatment is a separate work. Lulu premiered in an incomplete two-act form in 1937, after Berg’s death; a completed three-act version appeared later.

The saxophone is not generally a standard protagonist instrument in nineteenth-century opera, so its use is especially noticeable here. Berg employs it as part of the opera’s jazz-influenced, theatrical, and often unsettling orchestral palette.