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Chapter 2 focuses on Lulu Belle’s 1930s radio career on WLS’s National Barn Dance as the first female radio star to embody the parodies of southern culture and early country music. Connecting her theatrics and vocal styling to a history of vaudevillian comediennes, this chapter explores Lulu Belle’s early radio performances of unruly hillbilly characters, such as the naive country girl or the man-hungry gal. In her highly publicized marriage to Scotty Wiseman, Lulu Belle’s rustic domestic image was easily conflated with notions of nostalgia, sentimentality, and romance. However, this did not prevent her from slipping in and out of roles to play the part of the demanding, comic wench or the flirtatious mountain gal. Her protean transformations persisted throughout her radio career and into film, helping give shape to historic performative models for women in country music.

John Barry returned to the series for this 1974 installment with Christopher Lee as a million-dollar assassin. With just three weeks to write and record a title song and an entire underscore, he recruited frequent collaborator Don Black and singer Lulu for a song that even the composer (in interviews in later years) confessed that he disliked. For the film's Far East setting, Barry contributed some colorful musical contexts, along with a few Dixieland flourishes for the villain's lethal funhouse.

This chapter addresses connections between the Lulu works of Wedekind and Berg and several understandings of “fin-de-siècle decadence.” The title quotes reviews of two works that owe their existence to censorship, Erdgeist and Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu,” both of which are arguably more perfect than the uncensored original works, Wedekind’s Ur-Lulu, suppressed in 1894, and Berg’s opera, rejected by authorities in 1934. After tracing the censorship of Wedekind’s Lulu plays, the chapter focuses on his transformation of Act 3 of the Ur-Lulu, manifestly a product of turn-of-the-century decadence in its ironic, over-the-top depiction of drug use and risqué sexual relationships, into passages in acts of the two later plays. It begins a discussion of Berg’s responses to those passages in the scenes of his opera’s Act 2, each of which recalls Tristan und Isolde in a different way, and touches on the broader significance of “fin-de-siècle decadence” in Berg’s time.

This chapter looks at Frank Wedekind's Lulu (1894), which was written more than fifty years after Woyzeck. Unlike Büchner's drama, it is not based on the adaptation of a singular historical case that would allow interpretive access to the documentary material. From a literary perspective, Wedekind has often been seen as a successor to Büchner, insofar as his dramatic work displays similar traits such as an open form and a lack of narrative closure. Although not a single historical case can be identified as the model for the Monstretragödie Lulu, the modern form of the play can be understood as commentary and critique of contemporary discourses on sexuality and deviance that refer to forms of knowledge derived from cases. Wedekind's Lulu presents cases from a sexological context as an arrangement of dramatic skits, exposing their anecdotal potential and staging sexual perversions as the reality of bourgeois fantasies and desires.

Chapter Three examines Marjorie Henderson's Buell's Little Lulu.When the now iconic figure moved from The Saturday Evening Post where she had resided since the 1930s to comic books during the 1950s, her character underwent numerous transformations.One compelling but formerly overlooked change is the nature of Lulu's rebellion.In the single-panel gag comics, the young girl was overwhelmingly targeting adults with her antics.Meanwhile, in the comic books, her sworn enemy is the gang of neighborhood boys. This modification from Little Lulu engaging in intergenerational conflicts during the pre-war era to intragenerational ones during the postwar period forms a compelling and previously unexplored facet to the literary, artistic, and cultural alterations that took place to this character across different print formats.The shift from plots that pitted children against adults in the 1930s to ones that pitted girls against boys in the 1950s reflects larger shifts in American culture regarding the gendering of children and the sexual segregation of childhood.

Alix Spiegel, long a producer and reporter with This American Life and NPR News, teamed up with Lulu Miller to create Invisibilia. In another of our new essays, Alix writes frankly about Invisibilia’s debt to This American Life and to Lulu’s former employer, Radiolab. But with their deep reporting and storytelling flair, Alix and Lulu—along with third host Hanna Rosin, editor Anne Gudenkauf, and the rest of their team—give Invisibilia a feel and flavor all its own. The show’s mix of learning and entertainment has quickly drawn a legion of devoted fans.

Berg had several early ideas for a text for his second opera, and his choice finally fell on Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Berg adapted the plays into a single three-act structure and made other changes in the names of characters and their attributes, and he titled his opera Lulu, after the central figure. The subject matter of the opera was highly controversial, with a perverse eroticism and sordid violence. Given the political climate of the early 1930s, prospects for a performance of the work were dim. The chronology by which Berg created the libretto for Lulu and its music reveals many delays that suggest a struggle on the composer’s part in grappling with the subject and with his relatively new twelve-tone method of composing. Berg completed the basic compositional work for the opera in spring 1934, and he then created a concert suite from the work, much as he had done with Wozzeck, which he titled Symphonic Pieces from the Opera “Lulu.” The necessary revisions to the opera that Berg foresaw and most of the orchestration of Act 3 remained incomplete at the time of his death in December 1935, and the opera was performed in its entirety only in 1979. In Lulu Berg fully developed his own distinctive twelve-tone method of composing but continued to invoke traditional musical forms.

Chapter 10 describes Berg’s final year, 1935. His financial and physical condition continued to deteriorate, and the rise of National Socialism prevented performance of his works in Germany and Austria. Completion of Lulu was delayed by a commission from the American virtuoso Louis Krasner to compose a violin concerto. Completed in the summer of 1935, the work became a memorial to Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler. Berg’s Symphonic Pieces from Lulu was the last composition that he heard performed before his death on 24 December 1935. Berg’s final illness is analyzed. His death by sepsis was likely caused by an underlying immune deficiency brought about by his lifelong habit of excessive self-medication.

Following Berg’s death the most pressing problem was the completion of the opera Lulu. Universal Edition contracted with Arnold Schoenberg to complete the work but Schoenberg subsequently declined. The opera was premiered in a two-act version in Zurich in 1937. Helene Berg’s involvement with anthroposophy shaped her contention that Berg was still in communication with her and that Lulu’s third act should never be completed. Universal Edition commissioned the completion by Friedrich Cerha, and the premiere of the three-act version was held in Paris in 1979, after Helene Berg’s death. Helene Berg undertook a publication of her husband’s letters to herself, created the Alban Berg Foundation, and donated Berg’s manuscripts and papers to the Austrian National Library. Helene Berg died in 1976. Biographies of Berg were first written by his friends and students, including Willi Reich and Soma Morgernstern, later by those outside of his circle such as Hans F. Redlich.

This chapter treats an immediate context for censorship, here of Berg’s libretto for Lulu by authorities in Nazi Germany, and direct consequences of that action. The chapter discusses a current in Berg’s Lulu and reactions to it traceable to a particular interpretation of “fin-de-siècle decadence”: a tendency in the opera and its initial reception by a group of critics close to Berg—Willi Reich, Theodor Adorno, Willi Schuh, and Ernst Krenek—to turn Lulu into an idealized abstraction, a symbol of musical beauty in decay at the turn of the century, and to represent the music itself as absolute. This trend found necessary expression in the Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu” in 1934, which Berg arranged in response to the rejection of his libretto, but it is also discernible in a sketch that can be dated to the period of his earliest ideas about the opera.

The conclusion discusses three factors central to the book’s arguments: the status of Wedekind’s censored plays as palimpsests, Berg’s affinity for Liebestod effects in the music he composed for Lulu, and his decision to work with, indeed to augment, the discrepancies in the plays rather than flatten them as other dramaturges chose to do in the 1920s. In focusing on the impact of repeated censorship of Wedekind’s plays on Berg’s opera, the conclusion considers potential consequences if he had decided to set the five-act Lulu published in 1913 rather than the two versions he settled on instead. The 1913 Lulu would not have allowed two of the Liebestod effects and would have weakened the concluding Liebestod.

Lulu was fourteen when she released her first single, a virtuosic cover of the gospel-inspired “Shout.” This chapter connects Lulu’s use of vocal techniques with Black American origins to public perceptions of her youthfulness and to conversations about her sexuality. Lulu was barely out of childhood when she began her career and her youthful performances of respectability responded to racial anxiety. First, the chapter discusses Lulu’s rise in the Glasgow music scene; then, it examines media representation of Lulu’s virginal persona. This is followed by discussion of her voice in the context of anxiety over race, drawing examples from her performances in the films Gonks Go Beat and To Sir with Love. The chapter then explores Lulu’s efforts to reinvent herself in the late 1960s and closes with a postscript on Lulu’s recent concert performances.

When Austrian composer Alban Berg was working on his opera Lulu, he wrote three Baudelaire songs as a Konzertaria entitled Der Wein. Premiered in 1930, Der Wein is a large-scale work for voice and orchestra. Berg uses a German translation by Stefan George, but the published score is in parallel texts, accommodating the French verse line. The chapter also considers a ‘hidden’ Baudelaire setting from Berg’s 1926 Lyric Suite for string quartet. The analysis covers: (a) the context of composition; (b) the connections established between selected poems; (c) the statistical data generated from the adhesion strength tests; and (d) how the data shape an evaluation of Berg’s settings of Baudelaire. Evidence suggests that Berg’s settings of Baudelaire are loosely entangled; the highly prescriptive score affects syntax, semantics, and prosody. Yet, because Der Wein has stood the test of time, the settings are deemed loosely accretive.