Brecht at the Opera

Brecht at the Opera PDF Author: Joy H. Calico
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520942817
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
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 Lehrstück 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. 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, Brech

Brecht at the Opera

Brecht at the Opera PDF Author: Joy H. Calico
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520942817
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 Lehrstück 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. 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, Brech

Brecht & Co

Brecht & Co PDF Author: Ulrike Garde
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039108329
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
German-speaking playwrights have exercised a considerable if subtle influence on Australian theatre history. Presenting a range of paradigmatic case studies, this book offers a detailed account of Australian productions of German-language drama between 1945 and 1996. The reception of Bertolt Brecht is used as a touchstone for analysing stagings of plays by writers such as Max Frisch, Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz. In addition, more recent developments in the reception of German drama on the Australian stage are discussed.

Bertolt Brecht and the David Fragments (1919-1921)

Bertolt Brecht and the David Fragments (1919-1921) PDF Author: David J. Shepherd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567685675
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004456678
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The publication of this volume of essays marks the centenary of the birth of Bertolt Brecht on 10 February 1898. The essays were commissioned from scholars and critics around the world, and cover six main areas: recent biographical controversies; neglected theoretical writings; the semiotics of Brechtian theatre; new readings of classic texts; Brecht’s role and reception in the GDR; and contemporary appropriations of Brecht’s work. This volume will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth century theatre, modern German studies, and the contemporary reassessment of post-war culture in the wake of German unification and the collapse of Stalinist communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays in this volume also address a variety of general questions, concerning - for example - authorship and textuality; the nature of Brecht’s Marxism in relation to his understanding of modernity, science and Enlightenment reason; Marxist aesthetics; radical cultural politics; and feminist performance theory.

Brecht’s Early Plays

Brecht’s Early Plays PDF Author: Ronald Speirs
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349054496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description


Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht PDF Author: Steve Giles
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042003194
Category : German literature
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The publication of this volume of essays marks the centenary of the birth of Bertolt Brecht on 10 February 1898. The essays were commissioned from scholars and critics around the world, and cover six main areas: recent biographical controversies; neglected theoretical writings; the semiotics of Brechtian theatre; new readings of classic texts; Brecht's role and reception in the GDR; and contemporary appropriations of Brecht's work. This volume will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth century theatre, modern German studies, and the contemporary reassessment of post-war culture in the wake of German unification and the collapse of Stalinist communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays in this volume also address a variety of general questions, concerning - for example - authorship and textuality; the nature of Brecht's Marxism in relation to his understanding of modernity, science and Enlightenment reason; Marxist aesthetics; radical cultural politics; and feminist performance theory.

Brecht and Company

Brecht and Company PDF Author: John Fuegi
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802139108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 804

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Book Description
The result of twenty-five years of research on three continents, Brecht and Company is a revolutionary portrait of one of the world's greatest theater artists -- and the people upon whom he built his reputation. A noted Brecht scholar, John Fuegi traces the evolution of Brecht's parasitic relationships and aggressive ambition through close analysis of diaries, letters, and drafts of the literary works, revealing a man who was personally dazzling, a genius at assembling and directing the plays created in his workshop, but ultimately lacking in literary stamina, for which he depended on his lovers. A landmark study about the life and times of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater, Brecht and Co. will forever change our understanding of Brecht and his oeuvre. "[An] enormous, fascinating biography." -- The New Yorker "One of the most important critical studies of the century." -- New York Magazine

Brecht in India

Brecht in India PDF Author: Dr. Prateek
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000222470
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Brecht in India analyses the dramaturgy and theatrical practices of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in post-independence India. The book explores how post-independence Indian drama is an instance of a cultural palimpsest, a site celebrating a dialogue between Western and Indian theatrical traditions, rather than a homogenous and isolated canon. Analysing the dissemination of a selection of Brecht’s plays in the Hindi belt between the 1960s and the 1990s, this study demonstrates that Brecht’s work provided aesthetic and ideological paradigms to modern Hindi playwrights, helping them develop and stage a national identity. The book also traces how the reception of Brecht was mediated in India, how it helped post-independence Indian playwrights formulate a political theatre, and how the dissemination of Brechtian aesthetics in India addressed the anxiety related to the stasis in Brechtian theatre in Europe. Tracking the dialogue between Brechtian aesthetics in India and Europe and a history of deliberate cultural resistance, Brecht in India is an invaluable resource for academics and students of theatre studies and theatre historiography, as well as scholars of post-colonial history and literature.

Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory

Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory PDF Author: John J. White
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571130764
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
In concert with his work as a politically-charged playwright and dramaturge, Bertolt Brecht concerned himself extensively with the theory of drama. He was convinced that the Aristotelian ideal of audience catharsis through identification with a hero and the resultant experience of terror and pity worked against his goal of bettering society. He did not want his audiences to feel, but to think, and his main theoretical thrusts -- Verfremdungseffekte (de-familiarization effects) and epic theater, among others -- were conceived in pursuit of this goal. This is the first detailed study in English of Brecht's writings on the theater to take account of works first made available in the recent German edition of his collected works. It offers in-depth analyses of Brecht's canonical essays on the theater from 1930 to the late 1940s and early GDR years. Close readings of the individual essays are supplemented by surveys of the changing connotations within Brecht's dramaturgical oeuvre of key theoretical terms, including epic and anti-Aristotelian theater, de-familiarization, historicization, and dialectical theater. Brecht's distinct contribution to the theorizing of acting and audience response is examined in detail, and each theoretical essay and concept is placed in the context of the aesthetic debates of the time, subjected to a critical assessment, and considered in light of subsequent scholarly thinking. In many cases, the playwright's theoretical discourse is shown to employ methods of "epic" presentation and techniques of de-familiarization that are corollaries of the dramatic techniques for which his plays are justly famous. John J. White is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at King's College London.

Theatre Histories

Theatre Histories PDF Author: Daphne P. Lei
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040046312
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 1069

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Book Description
This updated fourth edition of Theatre Histories offers a critical overview of global theatre, drama, and performance, spanning a broad wealth of world cultures and periods, integrating them chronologically or thematically, and showing how they have often interacted. Bringing together a group of scholars from a diverse range of backgrounds and approaches to the history of global theater, this introduction to theatre history places theatre into its larger historical contexts and attends to communication’s role in shaping theatre. Its case studies provide deeper knowledge of selected topics in theater and drama, and its “Thinking Through Theatre Histories” boxes discuss important concepts and approaches used in the book. Features of the fully updated fourth edition include: Deeper coverage of East Asian and Latin American theater. Richer treatment of popular culture. More illustrations, photographs, and information about online resources. New case studies, include several written by authoritative scholars on the topic. Pronunciation guidance, both in the text and as audio files online. Timelines. An introduction on historiography. A website with additional case studies, a glossary, recordings of the pronunciation of important non-English terms, and instructor resources. A case studies library listing, including both those in print and online, for greater instructor choice and flexibility. This is an essential textbook for undergraduate courses in theatre history, world theatre and introduction to theatre, and anyone looking for a full and diverse account of the emergence, development, and continuing relevance of theatre to cultures and societies across the world.