Alban Berg’s Operas According to Roland Barthes’s Five Narrative Codes

Abstract In his book S/Z , French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes applied his five narrative codes – five analytical tools for scrutinising any literary text – to analysing the intersection of various interpretive divisions and cultural discourses in Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine. Barthes’s five codes are meant to be used as an investigative methodology, and this article implements this system as a means of analysing symmetrical symbolic structures in the narratives of the two operas of Austrian composer Alban Berg: Wozzeck and Lulu. The aim of this endeavour is to present a new outlook on Berg’s method of dramaturgical construction through interdisciplinary connections that juxtapose musicology with literary analysis. This approach presents Berg as a narrative designer of allegories that closely mirror Barthes’s literary critical technique, as exemplified by their shared use of the five codes.