Brecht at the OperaBrecht 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. |
Contents
Lehrstück Opera and the New Audience Contract | 16 |
Illustrations | 30 |
The Operatic Roots of Gestus in The Mother | 43 |
Eisler the Mother motif in The Torn Jacket from | 56 |
mm 19 | 65 |
Fragments of Opera in American Exile | 76 |
Opera and National Identity | 109 |
mm 619 | 129 |
Estrangement and the Canon | 140 |
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Common terms and phrases
act of singing actor aesthetic African American Akademie der Künste antifascist appears aria artists audience contract Berlin Bertolt Brecht Brechtian Cambridge character chord chorus cited collaboration Collected Plays Communist composer context Courtesan critical cultural Debatte described dodecaphony duet Dümling ence epic theater essay estrangement example exile experience Farmer fragments genre German gestic music gests gestus Goliath Hanns Eisler Heads and Pointed Heiner Müller Hindemith Hinton Kurt Weill Lehrstück libretto Lindbergh Flight Lucullus Mahagonny means melismas melody Mother music drama music theater musical setting musical style Musik Neues notes onstage particular Paul Dessau performance practice piece playwright Pointed Heads political Popular Front premiere production published reference revised rhythm rhythmic role Round Heads scene score social socialist socialist realism song Soviet speech Staatsoper stage sung theory Threepenny Opera tion tradition trans translation United University Press Verlag verse vocal voice voice-object Wagner whiteface York