Who composed the opera Lulu, which is based on Frank Wedekind’s plays?

Alban Berg composed the opera Lulu, based on Frank Wedekind’s plays.

Berg’s Lulu is a 20th-century opera in three acts, drawing on Wedekind’s Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The work follows Lulu’s rise, relationships, social reversals, and violent downfall, making it a major operatic treatment of the same character later portrayed by Louise Brooks in the 1929 film.

The opera was unfinished when Berg died in 1935. Its first two acts were performed in 1937, while the completed version with a third act reconstructed from Berg’s surviving materials premiered in 1979.

Lulu is associated with the Second Viennese School and uses demanding modernist musical language. It should not be confused with Pabst’s silent film: both derive from Wedekind, but one is an opera and the other is a movie.