Alban Berg composed the opera Lulu, based partly on Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box.
Lulu is an unfinished three-act opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg. Its libretto draws on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which also supplied the literary basis for the 1929 film starring Louise Brooks. The opera follows Lulu’s rise, relationships, crimes, and downfall through a highly expressionist musical language.
Berg worked on Lulu during the 1920s and left the third act incomplete when he died in 1935. Friedrich Cerha later completed the orchestration of the third act using Berg’s surviving materials. The completed three-act version was first performed in 1979 at the Paris Opera.
The title creates a useful chain of cultural connections: Hesiod’s Pandora inspired the later phrase, Wedekind wrote Pandora’s Box, Pabst filmed Lulu, and Berg transformed the Lulu plays into opera. Lulu is therefore related to Pandora culturally and symbolically, but it is not a musical setting of the Greek myth itself.