The Making of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu

1 Inspired by concepts of cultural practice (Rode-Breymann) and practice theory (Schatzki), the project focuses on all the steps in the making of Alban Bergs two operas and the collaboration between the different practitioners. Five groups of practitioners took part in the making of the works, including (1) students of the composer and individuals with personal connections, (2) publishing house staff and freelancers connected to the publisher, (3) staff at opera houses and concert halls, (4) the performers, and (5) persons who worked on the stage production, sets and design. The works making encompasses conception, composition, publishing, performance and potentially arrangement. The objective of the project is to document these fields of practice extensively through the collection and compilation of, and commentary on, a great variety of source materials. Until now, no such broadly conceived study on the production processes of two operas as a continuous unity has been undertaken. The two operas by Berg are especially suited to such an examination: firstly, there is ample source material available. Secondly, the publisher, Emil Hertzka at Universal Edition Vienna (UE), performed a range of functions: in the case of Wozzeck, he only took on the work after the composer had already self-published the piano reduction. For Lulu, however, UE already became involved in the negotiations for the rights to the book. Thus, Hertzka accompanied almost the entire compositional process of Lulu and finally became the administrator of the fragment. The third reason to use Bergs two operas for an examination of the entire production process is the historical situation. More than half a century after the Milan publisher Ricordi, UE was the first publisher in the German-speaking world to adopt a mentoring role in relation to contemporary operas and their composers, at a time when New Music seemed in danger of losing its audience. This new role for publishers, which had previously been the domain of impresarios, demanded sensitivity in this situation: it turned the publisher into a mediator between composers and opera managers. The documents to be published in complete or partial form encompass primarily correspondence, but also various files from the archives of opera houses and the UE publishing archive. The documentation will be published separately for Wozzeck and Lulu as part of the complete Berg edition (book format), and in database format. The documents will be arranged in chronological order (with corresponding cross-references and indices).

No additional funding sources recorded.