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 Lehrstuck 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.

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw--a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the Nazis' prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.

""Brecht at the Opera "is a remarkably compelling and exciting book. It not only explains why Brecht's relationship to opera is so vexed, it complicates the formulaic terms by which we have come to understand that vexation--extending, deepening, and refining our sense of the place of music in Brecht's projects as well as Brecht's place in the history of opera. It is amazingly thorough, very well written, and exceedingly provocative."--David J. Levin, author of "Unsettling Opera"
"Calico strikes a subtle balance between attentive elucidation of Brecht's theories and a less obedient exploration of the ways his achievements were grounded in an operatic tradition that he (and most later commentators) have preferred to dismiss as antiquated and irrelevant. The author offers the clearest account I have read of the concept of Gestus and--in a move that might have pleased Brecht himself quite a bit--takes on the promiscuous use of the label 'Brechtian' in recent criticism. The book's final chapter, a lively and personal meditation on what kinds of staging might really produce an effect of estrangement, is likely to become an energizing point of reference for those of us who write about opera in performance."--Mary Ann Smart, author of "Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera"
"In this first systematic, English-language study on Brecht and the opera, Joy Calico provides a carefully documented reconstruction of his lifelong engagement with the genre. The book provides a compelling argument that Brecht's modernist theater practices can be traced back to his early resistance to the emotionalized experience engendered by musical theater."--Marc Silberman, University ofWisconsin, Madison