In the conclusion of Lulu the audience is left with the dying Geschwitz, a lesbian character whose devoted, self-sacrificing love for Lulu and eventual decision to pursue a law degree and fight for women's rights is cut short by her fateful encounter with Jack the Ripper. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this ending is that Berg places Lulu's death offstage; the only victim onstage, and therefore seen and heard by the audience, is Geschwitz. Berg even considered, at some point during the compositional process, leaving Lulu alive, making Geschwitz the only fatal victim of Jack the Ripper. This subtle change from Frank Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora, in which Jack's intended target is Lulu and Geschwitz is murdered simply because she gets in the way, complicates the meaning of her death in the opera. Because Geschwitz is left alone onstage and sings a soliloquy similar to those reserved for operatic heroines, it is not Lulu's but Geschwitz's death that is supposed to receive emotional and sympathetic responses from audiences and scholars alike.

The image of Alban Berg as a member of the Second Viennese School and a devoted student of Arnold Schoenberg, even in his mature years, pervades our understanding of the composer. This image is derived, as Joseph Auner has demonstrated, from a historical narrative that turned the notion of a Second Viennese School of composers into a concept—a concept in which important critics such as René Leibowitz went so far as rendering Schoenberg as the sole leading genius, leaving Berg and Webern as mere derivatives whose existence as composers would have been “inconceivable” without Schoenberg's teaching. Obviously, we have no way of knowing what kind of composer Berg would have been without Schoenberg's mentoring, although he had considered studying composition with Hans Pfitzner before he started taking lessons with Schoenberg. Leibowitz's argument may be justified nonetheless by Berg's own accounts of the teacher-student relationship, attesting that long after his apprenticeship—which started in 1904 and extended to 1911—he identified himself with Schoenberg and followed every major turning point in Schoenberg's musical language, from the emancipation of dissonance to the development of serial methods in the 1920s. To define Berg as a mere follower of Schoenberg, however, runs the risk of misrepresenting the eclectic character of his music as well as the relational aspects of his identity as a composer.

Berg's fixation on constructing narratives of identity is reflected most overtly in his rendering of the character of Alwa, who is transformed into an opera composer, the “Wozzeck Komponist” (composer of Wozzeck), from the original playwright in Wedekind's play. This sort of self-identification was not unusual within his Viennese circle of friends; perhaps the closest model is Schoenberg's identification with Moses in his opera Moses und Aron.” Yet Berg complicates his self-identification with Alwa because, as Patricia Hall has rightly argued, “many sketches for the Rondo suggest that on some level Berg associated the character of Alwa with Tristan from Wagner's opera.” This conflation of Alwa and Tristan completely changes the dramatic plot in the opera and also affects Berg's musical choices, particularly the formal plan for the exposition of the rondo in the first scene of act 2.

Berg's fascination with Wagner, Tristan in particular, complicates our understanding of his music because it underlies not only his creative identity and actions but also some principles behind his musical compositions. In his writings, Adorno often tries to draw a distinction between Berg and Wagner, but his explanations, while illuminating, only contribute to the problem. In his reevaluation of Berg, written about twenty years after Berg's death, Adorno recognizes the “autonomy” of Berg's works but points to a peculiar sort of metaphysics in which Berg's music would emerge from underneath the music drama. In other words, Adorno draws a distinction between essence and appearance:

By establishing a principle of identity between Berg and Wagner, this chapter is bound to cause suspicion, as it could rightly be argued that a person's identity is formed by a multitude of factors—including the appropriation of historical or fictional narratives—by which the individual and collective identities are in a constant process of reconfiguration. To single out one element as the most important factor in the formation of one's identity would seem to establish a rather rigid category that overlooks other relational properties in identity formation. To be sure, as is well-known, Berg identified himself overtly with an array of individuals, including Schoenberg and Webern but also Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, and Gustav Mahler, among others. The evidence for Berg's identification with these individuals is all too apparent in his music and writing: Berg's adoption of the twelve-tone technique and his obsession with the logic behind musical structures, while they may have been latent traits in his personality, were certainly intensified by his long association with Schoenberg.

When Berg explained his progress with composing Lulu in a letter to Schoenberg on August 7, 1930, he had already set his mind on one of the most important distinctions between his new opera and the plays by Frank Wedekind on which the libretto was based: namely, the return of Lulu's “victims” (her husbands) as her clients in the final scene. After describing the role of the orchestral interlude between the first and second scenes of act 2 as the “focal point for the whole tragedy,” Berg added this parenthetical comment: “(Incidentally: the 4 men [actually three] who visit Lulu in her attic room are to be portrayed in the opera by the same singers who fall victim to her in the first half of the opera. In reverse order, however).” Although he originally planned to bring them back in reverse order to establish a large-scale palin-dromic structure, he later opted to retain the same order as their presentation in the original play. In the final version, Lulu's first husband, Dr. Goll, whose death occurs in the first scene of act 1, returns as the Silent Professor; the Painter, who commits suicide in the second scene, returns as the Negro; and Dr. Schön, who is killed in the first scene of act 2, returns as Lulu's final client, Jack the Ripper.

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.”