Brecht at the OperaFrom an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis. From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brech |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Lehrstuck Opera and the New Audience Contract of the Epic Theater | 16 |
The Operatic Roots of Gestus in The Mother and Round Heads and Pointed Heads | 43 |
Fragments of Opera in American Exile | 76 |
Lucullus Opera and National Identity | 109 |
Brechts Legacy for Opera Estrangement and the Canon | 140 |
Notes | 165 |
| 233 | |
| 263 | |
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actor aesthetic African American Akademie der Künste aria artists audience contract Berlin Bertolt Brecht body Brechtian Cambridge University Press canonical opera character chorus cited collaboration Collected Plays composer critical cultural Debatte Dümling ence engagement epic theater essay estrangement exile experience fragments Frankfurt am Main genre German gestic gests gestus Goliath Hanns Eisler Heads and Pointed Heiner Müller Hindemith Hinton Kowalke Kurt Weill Laaber Lehrstück libretto Lindbergh Flight Lucchesi Lucullus Mahagonny March Maßnahme means melody Mother music drama music theater musical setting Musik Neue nonliteral productions notes onstage operagoing particular Paul Dessau performance practice Peter pieces playwright Pointed Heads political Popular Front premiere published reference revised role Round Heads scene score singing social socialist song Soviet spectating audience member Staatsoper stage Suhrkamp sung theory Threepenny Opera tion Tom Kuhn tradition trans translation Verlag vocal voice-object Wagner Weimar Republic whiteface Willett York