Lulu (composed from 1929 to 1935, premièred incomplete in 1937 and complete in 1979) is an opera in three acts by Alban Berg. Berg adapted the libretto from Frank Wedekind's two Lulu plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904). Berg died before completing the third and final act, and the opera was typically performed as a "torso" until Friedrich Cerha's 1979 orchestration of the act 3 sketches, which is now established as the standard version. Lulu is notable for using twelve-tone technique during a time that was particularly inhospitable to it. Theodor W. Adorno praised it as "one of those works that reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it." The opera tells the story of Lulu, an ambiguous femme fatale in the fin de siècle, through a series of chiastic structures in both the music and drama alike. Introduced allegorically and symbolically as a serpent in the prologue, she survives three dysfunctional marriages while navigating a network of alternately dangerous and devoted admirers. Her first husband, the physician, dies of stroke upon finding her in flagrante delicto with the painter. Her second husband, the painter, dies by suicide when he learns that she is being married off and has been sexually exploited since childhood by the businessman, among others. This latter man, she says, was "the only one" who "rescued" and "loved" her. She convinces him to become her third husband but kills him when he becomes paranoid and violent. She escapes prison with the help of her lesbian admirer, the Countess Geschwitz, and they flee to London with her lover (and last husband's son) Alwa. But they are ruined by a stock market crash, reducing her to prostitution. One of her clients beats Alwa to death, and the next, Jack the Ripper, murders Lulu and Geschwitz.

New music (German: Neue Musik; French: nouvelle musique) is the collective term for a wealth of different currents in composed Western art music from around 1910 to the present – the period known as contemporary classical music. Its focus is on compositions of 20th century music. It is characterised in particular by – sometimes radical – expansions of tonal, harmonic, melodic and rhythmic means and forms. It is also characterised by the search for new sounds, new forms or new combinations of old styles, which is partly a continuation of existing traditions, partly a deliberate break with tradition and appears either as progress or as renewal (neo- or post-styles). Roughly speaking, Neue Musik can be divided into the period from around 1910 to the Second World War – often referred to as "modernism" – and the reorientation after the Second World War, which is perceived as "radical" – usually apostrophised as avant-garde – up to the present. The latter period is sometimes subdivided into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, whereby the following decades have not yet been further differentiated (the summary term "postmodernism" has not become established). In order to describe contemporary music in a narrower sense, the term Zeitgenössische Musik (English contemporary music, French musique contemporaine) is used without referring to a fixed periodisation. The term "Neue Musik" was coined by the music journalist Paul Bekker in 1919. Representatives of Neue Musik are sometimes called Neutöner.