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. |
Contents
Illustrations | 1 |
Dessau With People and Houses from Lucullus version | 4 |
Lehrstück Opera and the New Audience Contract | 16 |
Dessau Sister Our Fate Is the Same from Lucullus | 18 |
The Operatic Roots of Gestus in The Mother | 43 |
mm | 65 |
TABLES | 73 |
Fragments of Opera in American Exile | 76 |
Opera and National Identity | 109 |
mm 619 | 129 |
Estrangement and the Canon | 140 |
56 | 151 |
55 | 167 |
67 | 177 |
129 | 194 |
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Common terms and phrases
actor aesthetic African American Akademie der Künste appears aria artists audi audience contract Berlin Bertolt Brecht body Brechtian Cambridge character choral chorus collaboration composer critical cultural Decision Dessau Dümling edited ence engagement epic theater essay estrangement example exile experience Farmer fragments Frankfurt am Main genre German gestic gests gestus Goliath Hanns Eisler Heads and Pointed Heiner Müller Hindemith Hinton Kurt Weill Laaber Lehrstück libretto Lindbergh Flight Lucullus Mahagonny March Maßnahme means melody modernist Mother music drama music theater musical setting musical style Musik nonliteral notes oeuvre onstage opera projects particular Paul Dessau performance practice pieces playwright Pointed Heads political Popular Front premiere production published revised rhythm role Round Heads scene score social socialist song Soviet spectating audience member Staatsoper stage Suhrkamp sung theory Threepenny Opera tion Tom Kuhn tradition translation University Press Verlag vocal voice-object Wagner Weimar Republic wrote York