Zweig MS 17

Autograph full score. Written in ink, with bar lines in pencil, on systems of up to 24 staves. Marked ‘Attacca [crochet] = 80-90’ (f. 3r). The Prologue, consisting of the opera’s first 85 bars, occupies ff. 3r-10v; f. 11r has the next four bars, after the rise of the curtain, in score in pencil, followed by the comment ‘u.s.w. noch 3720 Takte’. The title-page (f. 2r) includes the dedication ‘Arnold Schoenberg zum 60. Geburtstag’; it is followed (f. 2v) by a list of dramatis personae giving the roles played in all three acts, and details of the orchestral forces. Berg has written Schoenberg’s U.S. address above his own Wörthersee address stamp at the foot of f. 12v.

Berg died before completing the orchestration of the opera, and during his wife’s lifetime only Acts I and II, with the music for Act III that he had already orchestrated and used in the concert suite of Symphonische Stücke from the opera (first performed in Nov. 1934), were published and performed. In its complete three act form the structure of the opera requires the doubling of certain roles - the link between Lulu’s victims in the first two acts and her attackers in Act III is made in this way as well as musically. Consequently the list of dramatis personae in the present manuscript (f. 2v) is of particular interest. The early published scores give only the stage roles of the first two acts; a full list first appeared in print only with the publication of the complete libretto (copyrighted 1977) and with Friedrich Cerha’s revision of Erwin Stein’s piano score, finally published in 1978. The only lists compiled by Berg himself are those in Zweig MS 17 and among the sketch material in the Östereichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. The list in Zweig MS 17 closely follows the latter, discussed by Perle and by Jarman in ‘Lulu: The Sketches’, with the character Alwa described as a writer (rather than composer), the Acrobat’s name given as Rodrigo, and the roles of the Theatre Director, the Commissioner of Police and the Banker all allocated to the same singer, a deep buffo bass. Berg was a near contemporary and friend of Stefan Zweig, making this manuscript a particularly appropriate addition to the collection. However, Berg’s letter to Zweig of 1935, thanking him for sending a copy of his historical study Maria Stuart, is not connected with Zweig MS 17, as Rosemary Hilmar (Schriftstücke, p. 81) suggests in an annotation to her catalogue entry for the letter. The letters reprinted in Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence document the despatch to and receipt by Schoenberg of Zweig MS 17; it is one of the additions made to the collection after Zweig’s death, and never belonged to Zweig himself.