Brecht at the opera
By: Joy H. Calico.
Series: California studies in 20th-century music -- 9
Publisher: University of California Press; Ahmanson Foundation
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 282
ISBN-13: 9780520254824
Subjects: Brecht, Bertolt, -- 1898-1956 -- Criticism and interpretation; Brecht, Bertolt, -- 1898-1956 -- Knowledge -- Music; Opera
Description: "Brecht at the Opera takes a systematic look 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. In this book, Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstucke in the 1920s generated a 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. Calico further considers Brecht's concept of estrangement as the dominant aesthetic in today's Regieoper, or radical productions of canonical operas. This highly original study demonstrates the myriad ways in which opera shaped Brecht's most influential theories about theater and the works he created for the stage."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p.   ) and index.
Table of contents: title: Lehrstück, opera, and the new audience contract of the epic theater; title: The operatic roots of gestus in The mother and Roundheads and peakedheads; title: Fragments of opera in American exile; title: Lucullus : opera and national identity; title: Brecht's legacy for opera : estrangement from the canon.