Bentley on Brecht
Bentley on Brecht

Author: Eric Bentley

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2008-03-06

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0810123932

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Recipient of 2007 The Robert Chesley Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in Playwriting Winner of 2006 International Association of Theatre Critics Thalia Prize Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award Since their first meeting in Santa Monica, California in 1942, Eric Bentley has been Bertolt Brecht's other, offstage voice. Just as Brecht reshaped modern theater, Bentley's writings on Brecht helped shape his reputation in the United States and the rest of the world. Bentley on Brecht represents a lifetime of critical and personal thoughts on both Brecht as friend and Brecht as influential literary figure. Brought together in this volume are Brecht-Bentley correspondence, Bentley's personal recollections of his years with Brecht, including Charles Laughton's production of Galileo, Brecht's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Bentley's analysis of Brecht's plays.

Roger Sessions
Roger Sessions

Author: Frederik Prausnitz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2002-08-22

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780195355208

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For more than half of his long life, composer Roger Sessions was a commanding figure on the American musical scene. He enjoyed the solid respect of his peers, and as a teacher of a generation of composers and author of compelling writings on his craft, his influence on musical thought remains profound. Yet, even in his lifetime, his music endured vastly disrespectful neglect. He was a "difficult" composer. Sessions was well aware of it. In a New York Times article, he wrote, "I have sometimes been told that my music is 'difficult' for the listener. There are those who consider this as praise, those who consider it a reproach. For my part I regard it as, in itself, neither one or the other...it is the way the music comes, the way it has to come." The way Sessions's music "had to come" is a recurrent focus of this biography. As the story is told, often in the composer's own words, the complex picture emerges of a remarkable man who, gradually and not very willingly, learned to accept his unexpected lot as a "difficult" composer. Frederik Prausnitz, an acquaintance of Sessions and conductor of his work, combines personal and musical insights to present this fascinating portrait of an influential, yet often overlooked, modernist composer.

Roger Sessions
Roger Sessions

Author: Andrea Olmstead

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-08-06

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1135868921

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Recognized as the primary American symphonist of the 20th century, Roger Sessions (1896-1985) is one of the leading representatives of high modernism. His stature among American composers rivals Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Sessions was awarded two Pulitzer prizes, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winning the Brandeis Creative Arts Award, the Gold Medal of the American Academy, and a MacDowell Medal, in addition to 14 honorary doctorates. Roger Sessions: A Biography brings together considerable previously unpublished archival material, such as letters, lectures, interviews, and articles, to shed light on the life and music of this major American composer. Andrea Olmstead, a teaching colleague of Sessions at Juilliard and the leading scholar on his music, has written a complete biography charting five touchstone areas through Sessions’s eighty-eight years: music, religion, politics, money, and sexuality.

Music and German National Identity
Music and German National Identity

Author: Celia Applegate

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2002-08

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0226021319

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Concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire: composers like the three "Bs" of classical music, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, all of whom are German. Over the past three centuries, many supporters of German music have even nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music. This book brings together seventeen contributors from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and German literature to explore these questions: how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated "the most German of arts." Unlike previous volumes on this topic, many of which focused primarily on Wagner and Nazism, the essays here are wide-ranging and comprehensive, examining philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, rock, and pop. The result is a striking volume, adeptly addressing the complexity and variety of ways in which music insinuated itself into the German national imagination and how it has continued to play a central role in the shaping of a German identity. Contributors to this volume: Celia Applegate Doris L. Bergen Philip Bohlman Joy Haslam Calico Bruce Campbell John Daverio Thomas S. Grey Jost Hermand Michael H. Kater Gesa Kordes Edward Larkey Bruno Nettl Uta G. Poiger Pamela Potter Albrecht Riethmüller Bernd Sponheuer Hans Rudolf Vaget

The Trial of Lucullus
The Trial of Lucullus

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher:

Published: 1943

Total Pages: 46

ISBN-13:

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A short didactic radio play by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht written in verse. It was completed in 1940. In it, the great Roman general Lucullus appears after death before a judge and jury of the underworld, who are to decide whether he should be condemned to Hades or admitted to the Elysian fields. The jury, representing the lower classes, allows Lucullus to call as witnesses portrayed on a triumphal frieze. All the evidence is against Lucullus, except for the fact that he introduced the cherry tree to Europe, grieved over the destruction of books, and was possessed of a fine culinary experience.

Encyclopedia of American Opera
Encyclopedia of American Opera

Author: Ken Wlaschin

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-10-16

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 1476612382

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This encyclopedia lists, describes and cross-references everything to do with American opera: works (both operas and operettas), composers, librettists, singers, and source authors, along with relevant recordings. The approximately 1,750 entries range from ballad operas and composers of the 18th century to modern minimalists and video opera artists. Each opera entry consists of plot, history, premiere and cast, followed by a chronological listing of recordings, movies and videos.

Pompey the Great
Pompey the Great

Author: Robin Seager

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 047077522X

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Pompey the Great gives readers a look inside the political and military world of ancient Rome and at one of the characters that shaped its destiny.

Brecht Collected Plays: 4
Brecht Collected Plays: 4

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2015-03-30

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1472538544

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Now in paperback, the long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930s Volume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930s, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus, a starkly pacifist text originally written in response to a commission from Swedish radio, portrays the Roman general tried by the Underworld for his military triumphs. Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, unique in Brecht's work, consists of some thirty short scenes of life under the Nazis between 1933 and 1938, designed for use by groups in exile. Señora Carrara's Rifles is based on J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, but relocated by Brecht in the Spanish Civil War. Also included are two one-act plays, Dansen and How Much is Your Iron?, minor works designed for amateurs in Scandinavia, where the Brechts lived till spring 1941. The volume includes an introduction and notes by Tom Kuhn and John Willett, as well as Brecht's own notes on the texts.