ARTS ETC: THE LORE OF DESIRE ; Everybody Loves Lulu - the Woman and the Opera. but What Is the Strange Secret That Draws Us Back to Berg's Masterpiece? Philip Hensher Unravels One of Music's Great Mysteries

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In a way, the story of Lulu, the tragic heroine of Frank Wedekind's two-part play, is rather a dangerous one for an opera. The fact that Alban Berg's Lulu - the opera he began in 1929 and left unfinished at his death in 1935 - works at all is a testament to the composer's mastery. It could so easily be completely ludicrous. It all stands or falls on a single convention: that Lulu herself is a woman of almost unbounded sexual desirability. Almost every character in the opera, staged in a new production by ENO this week, is prepared to destroy his or her own life in exchange for going to bed with her.

When this conceit is put in a novel, in Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson …