As is well-known and has been discussed in previous chapters, Karl Kraus's introductory lecture to the 1905 private performance of Frank Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora in Vienna left a lasting impression on Berg. This impression lay dormant until 1928, when he settled on Wedekind's Lulu plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, for his second opera after considering and eventually rejecting Gerhart Hauptmann's Und Pippa tanzt! Kraus's lecture was extensive and addressed several issues, including the perception of womanhood and the typological roles of some characters, all of which he related to the moral message of the play. The passage that addresses Lulu's portrait had the most profound influence on Berg's conception of the portrait's role in the formation of Lulu's identity in the opera: “It is more clearly evident than earlier on [i.e., in Erdgeist] that the tragic heroine of the drama is in fact [Lulu's] beauty: her portrait, the picture of her painted when at the height of her beauty, plays a more important role than Lulu herself.”