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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 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
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