Brecht, Bertolt (Eugen Friedrich)

(b Augsburg, 10 Feb 1898; d Berlin, 14 Aug 1956). German playwright. His career divides into three periods. The first is the pre-Marxist period, whose two landmarks were the premières of his play Trommeln in die Nacht (1922), which made his name generally known in literary circles, and of his and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), which was and remains an outstanding popular success. The second period began in 1930 with his wholehearted commitment to Marxism. It included 16 years of exile and relative obscurity, and saw the creation of most of his finest plays. The third period began with his return to East Berlin in 1949 and culminated in the triumphs of 1954 and 1955, when his company, the Berliner Ensemble, was acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest, and he was recognized internationally as a major figure in 20th-century theatre. Since then his international reputation, like his influence, has far outstripped that of any other playwright of his generation.

Brecht’s relationship to music is twofold. As a poetic source for composers and as a theatrical innovator whose ideas inevitably influence librettists, he is in the same position as any major poet-dramatist before him. But he was also directly involved with music through his collaborations with composers, notably Weill, Hindemith, Eisler and Dessau. His relationship to music was prompted at first by a natural musicality (he began his career as a highly effective songwriter-busker) and from then on by his own creative interests and requirements. In the first and most celebrated of his musical collaborations (with Kurt Weill, 1927–30), he had no experience of working with a composer and consequently found himself perilously close to performing the normal functions of a librettist. The need to assert himself led him in 1930 to publish the dogmatic and ill-considered tract ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny”’ as a means of dissociating himself from Weill’s ideas about opera in general and Mahagonny in particular. In his subsequent collaborations, apart from the brief and doomed one with Hindemith, he was in a much stronger position. By far the most important was the one with Hanns Eisler, which lasted from 1930 until the end of his life. Their first venture, Die Massnahme (a Lehrstück or ‘didactic play’), was definitive for his later collaborations in that the music is a subordinate though highly effective partner.

No less influential than Brecht’s body of writings were his contributions to the theory of stage performance. His name is inseparably associated with the ‘alienation effect’ (any theatrical device designed to prompt a critical detachment in the spectator), the ‘separation of elements’ (in which the ingredients of acting conflict rather than coalescing into a unified whole), the ‘didactic play’ (in which the performers and, to a lesser extent, the audience are meant to undergo a learning process) and ‘epic theatre’ (in which, simply put, the Aristotelian unities are suspended in favour of free narrative and characterization). All four of these concepts, transferred to music, have left a lasting imprint on 20th-century stage composition, as have Brecht’s predilections for billige Musik (‘tawdry music’) and that combination of untutored music-making and sound effects which he later referred to as Misuk. Brecht was also the spiritual godfather of Regieoper, a style of opera production in which his theatrical principles are applied to works of the past. Many important practitioners of this school learnt their craft in direct contact with Brecht’s productions in East Berlin.

The fall of the Iron Curtain inevitably tarnished Brecht’s canonical reputation in many circles and occasioned a critique of his achievement, most notably the alleged intellectual exploitation of his female assistants and a depreciation of his more doctrinaire Lehrstücke. Yet the theatre has always been a collaborative enterprise with liberal notions of intellectual property, and all the works published in Brecht’s name bear the indelible impress of his artistic personality. Moreover, his ideas have established themselves as common currency in the musical and spoken theatre, even among artists far removed from his world-view. Altogether, the scores written for or based on his plays may be said to constitute the most distinctive and coherent body of theatre music in the 20th century.

WORKS WITH MUSIC

(selective list)

play with music unless otherwise stated; dates in parentheses indicate original version of play

for fuller list see Lucchesi and Shull (1988)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Willett: The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (London, 1959, 3/1967)

S. Unseld, ed.: Bertolt Brechts Dreigroschenbuch (Frankfurt, 1960, 2/1978)

E. Hauptmann, ed.: B. Brecht: Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, 1967) [plays in vols.i–vii, essays on theatre in vols.xv–xvii]

B. Brecht: Arbeitsjournal (Frankfurt, 1973; Eng. trans., 1993)

H. Ramthun, ed.: B. Brecht: Tagebücher 1920–1922, Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen 1920–1954 (Berlin, 1975; Eng. trans., 1979)

G. Seidel: Bibliographie Bertolt Brecht (Berlin, 1975)

M. Wyss: Brecht in der Kritik: Rezensionen aller Brecht-Uraufführungen (Munich, 1977)

F. Henneberg, ed.: Brecht-Liederbuch (Frankfurt, 1984)

A. Dümling: Lasst euch nicht verführen: Brecht und die Musik (Munich, 1985)

J. Lucchesi and R. Shull: Musik bei Brecht (Berlin, 1988)

H.O. Münsterer: The Young Brecht (London, 1992)

P. Thomson and G. Sacks, eds: The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge, 1994)

DAVID DREW/J. BRADFORD ROBINSON