Introduction to Schoenberg X: The Lulu Suite by Alban Berg

I previously likened the freely atonal works by Schoenberg to the free abstractionist works of the same period by Wassily Kandinsky:

Out of this chaotic abstractionism emerges a greater order imposed by a system. This is the end result:

You can see that it makes the canvas much more easy to enjoy and appreciate. The same thing happens with Schoenberg's twelve-tone serial works. In his own words:

Composition with twelve tones has no other aims than comprehensibility.

Composition with Twelve Tones (1941) in Style and Idea P215

He himself further said that "one follows the row but otherwise composes as before". As many modernist composers have discovered (often to their utter horror!) on gaining greater familiarity with Schoenberg's work, this meant carry on as per Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The more Schoenberg himself gained mastery with this method of composition, the more and more like Brahms his music would become.

For the first entry into the world of twelve-tone composition, I have chosen, not a work by Schoenberg, but a work by his pupil, Alban Berg: the Suite from the opera, Lulu (1938). There are few more deliciously accessible introductions to the mature style of the Second Viennese School than this. If you cannot come away singing some of the tunes in your bathtub (with Joachim the rubber ducky) then you never will:

My recommended recording is from Simon Rattle once again:

Yet again we find ourselves in a very post-Mahlerian musical world, where deliberately schmaltzy and saccharine sounding Viennese populist sounding melodies act as a foil to the dark and sordid world of Lulu. The same play by Wiedekind that Berg based his opera on, Erdgeist, was made into a classic 1929 silent film, Pandora's Box, where the character of Lulu was played by Louise Brooks in her legendary bobby haircut:

Lulu is your archetypal femme fatal, a burlesque dancer whose erotic allure every man hopelessly falls for:

The music Berg lovingly composes for her is every bit as erotically enticing as her character:

This music is as seductive as opium.

Berg perfectly depicts a cynical, sleazy, and decadent world of Weimar cabarets that seems to have lept straight off a canvas by Otto Dix:

Berg even includes a saxophone in the orchestral part to depict the on-stage cabaret. 

Berg's opera emphasises the rise and fall of Lulu (it has a palindromic structure), before she ends up a fugitive for killing the only man she ever loved—riddling him with a shower of bullets, each shot of which is notated in Berg's score like a percussion instrument:

The stock-market collapses, leaving Lulu, and those who love her to death, penniless, and she ends up a prostitute in the streets of London, until she is murdered by a client called "Jack". The spine chilling Jack the Ripper murder is followed with Jack plunging his already bloodied knife next into the lesbian Countess.

Lulu, centre, with the lesbian Countess on the left - devoted to her until death

The opera ends with the dying Countess singing her eternal love for Lulu, in a climactic lesbian Liebestod ("Lulu my angel!"). This is the modern version of Isolde's Liebestod, and Berg himself referred to this scene as such.

Apart from Lulu's Death-Scream motif, with its echoes of the Hammer-Blow of Fate from the Mahler Sixth, as well as the Death Leitmotiv from The Ring, the music that accompanies the final Liebestod is angelically beautiful – exquisite in its heavenly purity – in sharp ironic counterpoint to the sordidness of the scene in the gutters of East-End London, flowing with blood. Lulu's final Death Scream yet again sounds like the ultimate musical realisation of Munch's expressionistic Scream.

Lustmord (Sex Murder) by Otto Dix

Lustmord by George Grosz

If you like the Lulu Suite, then I would suggest going on and listening to the entire opera:

Anyone who has followed me on the journey so far will by now react with speechless and bemused horror when they encounter these myopic, stubborn people who bizarrely insist that the music of the Second Viennese School is somehow unemotional! I find it hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Once you have fallen under the seductive spell of Lulu's charms, I think you will find that even the most seemingly "difficult" music by the Second Viennese School slowly starts to melt away in her wake. In particular, you will just lap up Berg's Violin Concerto, another twelve-tone work, which is already a standard mainstream concert item anyway. Listen out for the quotation from Bach's Es ist genug (pleading for merciful release from the endless sufferings of this world): this turned out to be Berg's own requiem. Listen, too, for the similarity in the paradisal ending of this work to that of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. There is really on one recording I truly treasure of the Berg Violin Concerto and that is the one by Louis Krasner accompanied by Anton Webern no less:

It is probably one of the greatest recordings of any music I have ever heard.