Alban Berg wrote the opera Lulu, based on Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays.
Berg began composing Lulu in the 1920s, adapting Wedekind’s Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The opera uses a highly structured modernist musical language while presenting Lulu’s relationships, ambition, sexuality, and violent downfall. Its subject connects it to the same literary tradition that inspired the 1929 film Pandora’s Box.
Berg died in 1935 before completing the orchestration of the final act. The first two acts premiered in 1937 in Zurich, while the completed three-act version was first staged in 1979 after Friedrich Cerha finished the orchestration using Berg’s surviving materials.
Lulu is distinct from the ancient Greek Pandora myth, though both stories use a woman’s presence as a symbol of released consequences. The opera’s direct source is Wedekind, not Hesiod. This distinction helps separate the classical myth from its major modern adaptations.