Lulu in silence. (Coda).(G.W. Pabst's silent motion picture, Lulu)(Brief Article)

The most famous Lulu of them all never sang a note.

"Imagine!" fumed Marlene Dietrich -- "Pabst choosing Louise Brooks for Lulu when he could have had me!"

It was 1928, and Dietrich was in film director G. W. Pabst's Berlin office, on the verge of being signed to star in Pandora's Box, at the moment Brooks's cable arrived, casually and belatedly accepting Pabst's offer of the role, made many months earlier.

Dietrich was not alone in her outrage. Except for Goethe's Gretchen, Wedekind's Lulu was the most important woman in German literature. Pabst's transatlantic casting call for the perfect Lulu was rivaled only by Hollywood's search for Scarlett O'Hara a decade later; his casting of Brooks, and her tumultuous arrival in Berlin, made the cover of every film magazine in Western Europe. And just as the choice of the British Vivien Leigh to play Margaret Mitchell's heroine once offended sensibilities south of the Mason-Dixon line, the choice of an unknown American flapper for Lulu struck Deutschland as a major cultural affront. Nevertheless, Pabst would make her an erotic icon in a silent masterpiece.

Alban Berg's Lulu was first heard, in partial form, in 1937 -- eight years after Pandora's Box was first shown. Contrary to American belief, Pabst and Berg were not Germans but proud Austrians, born the same year (1885). Both had long been fascinated to the point of obsession with Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays: Der Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Die Buchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box). Both had begun work -- on film and opera, respectively -- in 1928, facing the same initial hurdle: how to combine the two plays into one coherent story? Pabst's task was to render Lulu's psychological complexity and bizarre inter-relations in silence, without the aid of Wedekind's hysterical Expressionist dialogue. In Brooks, he found a brilliant artistic collaborator. Brooks seems to have understood instinctively that Lulu is nothing more than a fantasy of each male who desires her.

1928 Berlin: what a city, and what an exciting time in its life! The thing to do with the Nazis was ignore them, which was still possible. The goal now was pleasure, for tomorrow -- who knew? Audiences flocked to Max Reinhardt's fabulous Shakespeare productions. Three opera companies thrived: the Staatsoper, the Kroll (under Otto Klemperer) and the Stadtische (under Bruno Walter). Berg was working on Lulu. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera had opened in August. Albert Einstein lived in Berlin. So did young Wernher yon ...