Brecht at the Opera
Brecht at the Opera

Author: Joy H. Calico

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0520314263

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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, 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.

Brecht at the Opera
Brecht at the Opera

Author: Joy H. Calico

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780520942813

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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, 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.

Brecht on Theatre
Brecht on Theatre

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0809005425

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Essays of Brecht translated and edited to explain his theories and discussion of his dramatic works.

The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-02-10

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 135020529X

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One of Bertolt Brecht's best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble). Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar's Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein's classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.

Brecht at the Opera
Brecht at the Opera

Author: Joy H. Calico

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0520942817

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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, 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.

Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera

Author: Stephen Hinton

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1990-07-26

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521338882

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This is a book on the best known of the Weill-Brecht collaborations which explores the extent and significance of the composer's contribution. After a detailed reconstruction of the work's genesis and continued revision over three decades, Stephen Hinton examines the spin-offs on which Weill and Brecht participated: the instrumental suite, the film, the lawsuit, the novel, and the musical and textual revisions of songs. In a survey of the stage history, Hinton pays particular attention to pioneering productions in Germany and Great Britain. Kim Kowalke provides an exhaustive account of the history of The Threepenny Opera in America, Geoffrey Abbott addresses questions concerning authentic performance practice, and David Drew analyses large-scale motivic relationships in the music. Among the earliest writings on the work reprinted here, those by Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin appear for the first time in English translation. The book contains numerous illustrations, a discography, and music examples.

The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera

Author: Kurt Weill

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780802150394

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Brecht's famous adaptation to the modern era of John Gay's The beggar's opera, satirizing social and political beliefs through its portrayal of a world of thieves and prostitutes.

Edward II
Edward II

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1994-04

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780802151476

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Edward II is, in a sense, Bertolt Brecht's only tragedy. Based on Christopher Marlowe's classic of the same name, it departs from its source as widely as The Threepenny Opera departs from Gay's Beggar's Opera. Brecht has made a multitude of technical changes calculated to streamline the play, with a smaller cast and simpler action, and he has created virtually new and totally compelling characters with his extravagant variations on Anne, Edward's queen, and Mortimer, the villain of the piece. Brecht also reinterprets Marlowe's famously homosexual protagonist, creating an Edward initially more crudely homoerotic and ultimately more truly heroic. Brecht's Edward is a hero for the modern era: an existential hero defying a meaningless universe with his courage.

Bertolt Brecht in Context
Bertolt Brecht in Context

Author: Stephen Brockmann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-10

Total Pages: 676

ISBN-13: 1108634141

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Bertolt Brecht in Context examines Brecht's significance and contributions as a writer and the most influential playwright of the twentieth century. It explores the specific context from which he emerged in imperial Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Brecht's response to the turbulent German history of the twentieth century: World Wars One and Two, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, the experience of exile, and ultimately the division of Germany into two competing political blocs divided by the postwar Iron Curtain. Throughout this turbulence, and in spite of it, Brecht managed to remain extraordinarily productive, revolutionizing the theater of the twentieth century and developing a new approach to language and performance. Because of his unparalleled radicalism and influence, Brecht remains controversial to this day. This book – with a Foreword by Mark Ravenhill – lays out in clear and accessible language the shape of Brecht's contribution and the reasons for his ongoing influence.