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Singing Brecht vs. Brecht singing: Performance in theory and practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Kim H. Kowalke
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Extract

During the last hour we spoke about the transformation of opera into music drama, and I explained the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. So that nobody has any excuses, I'll write on the blackboard once more the names of

Richard Wagner

Richard Strauss

Now we come to a new chapter. You'll remember that I read to you from Wagner's texts. They always dealt with gods and heroes and curious concepts like forest murmur, magic fire, knights of the Grail, etc., which you found rather strange. Then there were some difficult thought processes, which you were unable to follow, and also certain things that you could not yet comprehend and are as yet none of your business. None of this was of much interest to you't want to go to sleep. You want to hear music you can comprehend without special explanation, music you can readily absorb and sing with relative ease. … Nowadays there are matters of greater interest to all, and if music cannot be placed in the service of society as a whole, it forfeits its right to exist in today's world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 55 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Earlier versions of this essay were read at ‘German Literature and Music: An Aesthetic Fusion’, University of Houston (2–4 March 1989) and the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Chicago (6–10 November 1991). I am indebted to several colleagues for their helpful comments, especially to Stephen Hinton's formal response in Chicago. A slightly revised version will appear in Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Gilliam, Bryan, to be published by Cambridge University PressGoogle Scholar

1 Weill, Kurt, ‘Der Musiker Weill’, Berliner Tageblatt, 25 12 1928Google Scholar; rpt. in Weill, Kurt, Musik und Theater. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hinton, Stephen and Schebera, Jürgen (Berlin, 1990), 52–4Google Scholar; partially translated in The Musical Times, 70 (1 03 1929), 224Google Scholar; complete English translation and facsimile of original clipping with Arnold Schoenberg's marginal commentary in Ringer, Alexander, ‘Schoenberg, Weill and Epic Theater’, Journal of theArnold Schoenberg Institute, 4 (06 1980), 77–98Google Scholar (rpt. as ‘Relevance and the Future of Opera: Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill’, in Ringer, , Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jere [Oxford, 1990], 83–102Google Scholar). For additional commentary on the essay, see Drew's, David Letter to the Editor in the Kurt Weill Nmsletter, 5 (Fall 1987), 3Google Scholar; and Kowalke's, Kim H. notes in A Nerv Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill (New Haven, 1986), 150f.Google Scholar The cliché comparing the effects of Wagner's music to those of alcohol was far from new in 1928: Nietzsche had already so characterised it in Der Fall Wagner (1888).Google Scholar

2 The song, billed on the label of Orchestrola 2131 as ‘Moritat’ and ‘Ballade von der Unzulänglichkeit’, were recorded in May 1929 and released shortly after. Carola Neher's ‘Barbara Song’ and ‘Seeräuberjenny’ were recorded at the same time and appeared as Orchestrola 2132. In both cases, the orchestra is unidentified; although similar in instrumentation to the Lewis Ruth Band, conducted by Theo Mackeben in the original production, the recorded arrangements are not Weill's. Brecht's renditions, said to have been strongly influenced by the Bavarian clown Karl Valentin, have been re-released most recently on compact disc (Mastersound DFCDI-110). One suspects that Weill suggested coupling the two ballads; in composing Kleine Dreigroschenmusik in December 1928, he had already combined the closely related songs within a single movement, and it was one of the four Otto Klemperer had recorded shortly after the official première in February 1929.

3 Bernard Reich has noted: ‘Brecht picked from the deep impressions left by the barrel organ singer one major element – one might call this the naïvetée of representation.… The composers of fairground Moritaten neither allow themselves to be led astray by reflections on the material, nor do they let themselves be overly specific through the use of minute nuances in the material.’ See Fuegi, John, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan (Cambridge, 1987), 25.Google Scholar

4 A teenage friend recalled that ‘Brecht did not sing in a polished way, but with a passion that swept others along, drunk from his own verses, ideas, and creations as other people would be drunk from wine, and his singing made those who heard him drunk also’. Carl Zuckmayer remembered that when ‘Brecht picked up the guitar, the hum of conversation ceased, while all around him people sat as though caught up in a magic spell’. See Fuegi, , 4, 26, 40.Google Scholar

5 John Willett deemed the maxim so central to an understanding of Brecht's work that it appears as the epigram for Brecht on Theatre (New York, 1964).Google ScholarFuegi, (see n. 3), 16 and 49Google Scholar, notes that as a director Brecht could and did demonstrate to his actors nuances of any role and as a lyricist he tried to show to his musical collaborators what he expected from a song.

6 Brecht, Benoit, ‘Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmässigen Rhythmen’, Das Wort, 3 (03 1939)Google Scholar; rpt. in Gesammelte Werke, XIX, 395–403.Google Scholar

7 ‘It is hard to think of another example anywhere, by any author, which has had an equally potent or misleading effect.… The problem is not only how to read and evaluate Brecht's theoretical works, but how to deal with the confusions that these have created in the ranks of his interpreters.’ Brown, Hilda Meldrum, Leitmotiv and Drama: Wagner, Brecht, and the Limits of ‘Epic’ Theatre (Oxford, 1991), 68f.Google Scholar Brecht's voluminous theoretical writings about theatre are unsystematic and inconsistent. The shifts in both theory and practice over the four decades of his career cohere only if one considers the very different resources available to him at different stages in his life and his ever-changing world views. The fact, for example, that Verfremdung is routinely applied to production and criticism of Brecht's entire oeuvre even though he did not invoke the concept until 1935 should serve as ample warning to those who would assemble a unified aesthetic code by combining statements from different periods. See Fuegi, (n. 3), 51.Google Scholar

8 Brecht, , ‘Über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater’, Gesammelte Werke, XV, 472–82Google Scholar; rpt. in Lucchesi, Joachim and Shull, Ronald K., Musik bei Brecht (Berlin, 1988), 157f.Google Scholar; translated as ‘On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre’, in Willett, (see n. 5), 84–90.Google Scholar

9 Mersmann, Hans, ‘Die neue Musik and ihre Texte’, Melos, 10 (05/06 1931), 171.Google Scholar Eisler recalled, however, that ‘Brecht was interested in music only in how it might be useful for his theatre’. Lucchesi and Shull, 86.

10 Normative obstacles to translations are dwarfed by those which Brecht's musico-dramatic works present, and the most recent edition of the texts of these works – Bertolt Brecht Werke: Groβe Kommentierte Berliner and Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Hecht, Werner, Knopf, Jan, Mittenzwei, Werner, Müller, Claus-Detlef (Berlin and Frankfurt/Main, 1988)Google Scholar – demonstrates the editorial complications posed by musical settings of Brecht's texts, in that the ‘authorised’ literary versions differ markedly from those published and performed with the musical scores.

11 See, for example, Hennenberg, Fritz, ed., Das groβe Brecht-Liederbuch (Frankfurt/Main, 1984)Google Scholar; Engelhardt, Jürgen, Gestus und Verfremdung: Studien zum Musiktheater bei Strawinsky und Brecht/Weill (Munich, 1984)Google Scholar; Willett, John, ‘Brecht and the Musicians’, in Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Weisstein, Ulrich, ‘Von reitenden Boten und singenden Holzfällern: Benoit Brecht und die Oper’, in Brechts Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Hinderer, Walter (Stuttgart, 1984), 266–99Google Scholar; Dümling, Albrecht, Laβt euch nicht verführen: Brecht und die Musik (Munich, 1985)Google Scholar; Gilben, Michael John T., Bertolt Brecht's Striving for Reason, Even in Music: A Critical Assessment (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Hermand, Jost, ‘Kurt Weill und andere “Brecht-Komponisten ”’, in Beredte Töne: Musik im historischen Prozess (Frankfun/ Main, 1991).Google Scholar Notable exceptions include Lucchesi's and Shull's Musik bei Brecht, which, apan from its lengthy introduction, has few critical aspirations. The short monograph of Fowler, Kenneth, Received Truths: Bertolt Brecht and the Problem of Gestus and Musical Meaning (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, confronts this issue head-on. In his perceptive survey of Eisler's music, ‘Eisler and Austrian Music: Notes for the Almeida Festival’, Tempo (06/09 1987), 24–35Google Scholar, David Drew pointed out a corollary of this critical approach to ‘Brecht's composers’: ‘For many years the parallactic view of Brecht's musical collaborators that rendered them figuratively and even functionally indistinguishable from Brecht himself was supposed to justify the idea that resemblances between (for instance) the music of Weill and of Eisler were simply attributable to the influence of Brecht.’ (For the most blatant exposition of such a naïve view, see Willett's, ‘Brecht and the Musicians’, 176f.)Google Scholar

12 Brecht, Benoit, Arbeitsjournal, 3 08 1938Google Scholar; quoted by Lucchesi, and Shull, (see n. 8), 175.Google Scholar Brecht's primitive notation used no time signature or bar lines, as the rhythm was to follow that of the words, which were not to be distoned when sung. Some of Brecht's texts are hardly more than tropes on songs by Wedekind; compare, for example, Wedekind's ‘Ich war ein Kind von fünfzehn Jahren’ (Lautenlieder 53 Lieder mit eigenen und fremden Melodien [Munich, 1920])Google Scholar with Brecht's ‘Surabaya Johnny’ and ‘Nannas Lied’ (‘Meine Herren, mit siebzehn Jahren’), the latter set by both Eisler and Weill.

13 Zuckmayer's description of Brecht's cabaret performances is quoted by Willett, (see n. 11), 152.Google Scholar

14 Quoted by Willett, (see n. 11), 152.Google Scholar Willett identifies a number of popular tunes Brecht borrowed, including most incongruously both ‘There's a Tavern in the Town’ and ‘Un bel di’ for the ‘Benares Song’.

15 Brecht, Benoit, Tagebuch, 26 08 1920Google Scholar; quoted by Lucchesi, and Shull, (see n. 8), 97.Google Scholar

16 Berlin Börsen-Courier, 9 12 1923Google Scholar; quoted and translated by Fuegi, (see n. 3), 15.Google Scholar See also Hanns Henny Jahn's description of the 1926 Berlin production of Baal, 54–5.Google Scholar

17 Brecht, , ‘über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater’, trans. Willett, , Brecht on Theatre (n. 5), 84.Google Scholar

18 Eisler's comment was recorded by Bunge, Hans, Fragen Sie mehr aber Brecht: Hanns Eisler im Gespräch (Munich, 1970), 210.Google Scholar Brecht introduced the descriptive term ‘dialectic’ in the ‘Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper’, Versuche, 3 (1931)Google Scholar, but seldom used it thereafter until the end of his career. See Willett, , Brecht on Theatre (n. 5), 46.Google Scholar

19 For a biographical sketch of Bruinier, who was a student of Egon Petri and a friend of Klabund (Carola Neher's husband), see Lucchesi, Joachim, ‘Franz S. Bruinier: Brecht's erster Komponist’, Das Magazin [Berlin], I (01 1985), 66–70.Google Scholar Bruinier's settings of nine songs survive in the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Berlin.

20 Weill previewed and reviewed the production for Der deutsche Rundfunk in 03 1928Google Scholar; both are reprinted in Weill, Kun, Musik und Theater (see n. 1), 248–50.Google Scholar

21 When Brecht published a revised text of the lehrstück in 1930Google Scholar, he retitled it Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis. Hindemith also set Brecht's poem ‘Über das Frühjahr’ for male chorus in 1929. Brecht vehemently disagreed with Hindemith's emphasis on the opportunity for collective amateur music-making (Gemeinschaftsmusik) within the new genre of the learning play and his de-emphasis of the text's content and significance. Their confrontation at the 1930 New Music Festival in Berlin over Die Massnahme precluded the possibility of any further collaboration. See Gilben, (n. 11), 89–96.Google Scholar

22 Letter from Zelter to Goethe, , 7 04 1820Google Scholar; Goethe, to Zelter, , 11 05 1820Google Scholar; quoted by Bode, Wilhelm, Die Tonkunst in Goethes Leben (Berlin, 1912), 180f.Google Scholar

23 Eisler's Brecht-compositions are only one component within a large and diverse oeuvre, and the Eisler of the String Quartet (1939) differs from the composer of Die Mutter (1931)Google Scholar as much as the Weill of Symphony No. 2 (1933–4) from the composer of Lady in the Dark (1940).Google Scholar David Drew observes that ‘neither the power nor the extraordinary durability of Eisler's collaboration with Brecht would have been attainable but for the self-awareness and the mastery he had first achieved within Schoenberg's orbit and then developed on the tangential path he took in 1927. Theoretically, the post-Schoenbergian tangent presupposed the possibility of re-entry. Eisler repeatedly availed himself of that possibility.’ See ‘Eisler’ (n. 11), 29.Google Scholar

24 The scores on which Brecht collaborated for the original productions of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941)Google Scholar, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (1948)Google Scholar and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943)Google Scholar achieved little identity after the plays' premières and are seldom used in performance today. Paul Dessau subsequently wrote new scores for each, as well as for DieAusnahme und die Regel (1948)Google Scholar and Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1949).Google Scholar It is important to distinguish between those works on which Brecht collaborated with composers (almost exclusively Weill and Eisler) in the actual planning and drafting, and those to which the composer contributed only ex post facto incidental music subsequent to the conception and execution of the structure and content of the work. In the case of the former, ‘joint’ works from the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927)Google Scholar through Die Rundkopfe und die Spitzköpfe (1936)Google Scholar, it would be inconceivable to substitute a new score for the original, which has now become common practice for the latter group.

25 Brecht's comment about Eisler is quoted by Willett, , Brecht in Context(see n. 11), 162Google Scholar; his appraisal of Weill, appears in the Arbeitsjournal, 7 10 1940Google Scholar; reprinted by Lucchesi, and Shull, (see n. 8), 182.Google Scholar Other than the two ‘cantatas’ Vom Tod im Wald and Das Berliner Requiem, Weill composed outside the theatre only two songs with texts by Brecht. Eisler, in contrast, was a prolific composer of independent Lieder, many with texts by Brecht.

26 Brecht, Bertolt and Suhrkamp, Peter, ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, Versuche, 2 (1930)Google Scholar; trans. in Willett, , ed., Brecht on Theatre (see n. 5), 37Google Scholar. Brecht continues: ‘So long as the arts are supposed to be “fused” together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere “feed” to the rest. The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) pan of the total work of an. Witchcraft of this son must of course be fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce sordid intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up.' Note that the question ‘Which is the pretext for what?’ is precisely the one that also occupied Wagner throughout his career; his own changing verdict prompted him to reverse the thesis of Oper und Drama (that music is the means and drama the end) and to disown the expression ‘music drama’ by formulating the alternative ‘ersichtlich gewordene Taten der Musik’ (events in music made visible) in ‘Über die Benennung “Musikdrama”’ (1872). For an extended discussion of this point, see, with caution on musical issues, Brown, , Leitmotiv and Drama (n. 7).Google Scholar

27 Letter from Blitzstein, Marc to Simon, Stella, 28 01 1930Google Scholar; quoted by Gordon, Eric A., Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York, 1989), 55.Google Scholar

28 ‘Über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater’, Gesammelte Werke, XV, 480.Google Scholar

29 Ibid.; trans. Willett, , Brecht on Theatre (see n. 5), 87.Google Scholar

30 Brecht, , ‘Texte für Musik’. Gesammelte Werke, XIX, 406Google Scholar; rpt. in Lucchesi, and Shull, , Musik bei Brecht (see n. 8), 150f.Google Scholar The short essay is undated, but probably originates from c. 1934/5.

31 Brecht's objections to denying music social meaning and ascribing to it transcendental significance have been taken up and extended by numerous critics in recent decades. See, for example, McClary's, Susan foreword to Catherine Clément's Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1988), ix–viii.Google Scholar

32 Brecht ‘Texte für Musik’. Brecht complained that ‘very seldom have I found my name on gramophone recordings and concert programs, and when it is there, then it's printed very small’.

33 Cone, Edward T., The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, 1974), 45.Google Scholar

34 Eisler, Hanns, ‘Benoit Brecht and die Musik’, Sinn and Form (1957), 439–41Google Scholar; trans. Meyer, Marjorie in A Rebel in Music: Selected Writings, ed. Grabs, Manfred (New York, 1978), 173f.Google Scholar Eisler concluded the essay: ‘Writing these lines I recall that Brecht accused me of having a skeptical and condescending attitude towards Misuk, his invention. Unfortunately he was right.’ See also Ringer, Alexander, ‘Kleinkunst and Küchenlied in the Socio-Musical World of Kun Weill’, A New Orpheus (n. 1), 37–59.Google Scholar

35 Jackson, Felix, ‘Portrait of a Quiet Man: Kurt Weill, His Life and His Times’, unpublished biography (photocopy in the Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York), 110.Google Scholar

36 Brecht, Benoit, Arbeitsjournal, 16 10 1940Google Scholar; rpt. in Lucchesi, and Shull, (see n. 8), 183.Google Scholar

37 ‘That Was the Time!’, Theatre Arts (05 1956)Google Scholar; rpt. as ‘August 28, 1931’, the foreword to Desmond Vesey's and Eric Bentley's translation of The Threepenny Opera (New York, 1964), ix.Google Scholar George Davis derived the essay from interviews with Lotte Lenya and Elisabeth Hauptmann; the transcripts of those interviews and the typescript of the essay are now in the Weill-Lenya Research Center. The nature and extent of the few documented musical ‘borrowings’ by Weill from Brecht are discussed by Drew, David, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (London, 1987), 201–5.Google Scholar

38 Winding, Ole, ‘Kun Weill i Exil’, Afters-Aviser (Copenhagen), 21 06 1934Google Scholar; German trans. in Weill, , Musik und Theater (see n. 1), 314–17.Google Scholar

39 Weill refers to gestische Musik. Eisler recalled that Brecht used the term Gestus, as opposed to Geste, as early as 1924, but it does not appear in his writings with reference to music until c. 1930. For a chronological survey of Brecht's usage of Gestus, social Gestus and Grundgestus, see Fowler, , Received Truths (n. 11), 40–6.Google Scholar

40 In the absence of unambiguous definition by either Weill or Brecht, many critics have been forced to derive their own definitions from the unstable base of changing usage in the collaborators' writings, thereby running the risk of combining statements from different periods which are, in fact, mutually exclusive. Martin Esslin has defined Gestus very simply, as ‘the clear and stylized expression of the social behavior of human beings towards each other’; Brecht: The Man and His Work (Garden City, NY, 1961), 134.Google Scholar More recently Renate Voris has attempted to reconcile the conflicts inherent in Brecht's usage, claiming that Gestus ‘weaves together Gest (gesture) and Grundgestus (gist) … in an attempt to distance the signifier from the signified, the sign from the referent’; ‘Brecht's Gestus: The Body in Recess’, paper delivered at 1989 MLA-IBS session, Washington, DC; Abstract published in Communications, 19 (Winter 1990), 19–22.Google Scholar Shuhei Hosokawa maintains that ‘Gestus condenses the narrative to be interpreted by the spectators, assigns a comprehensible form to the amorphous mass of the social process and interpersonal relationship unravelling themselves on stage, and aniculates the progressive development of the production of the multilinear network of events over the whole strata of the stage’; ‘Distance, Gestus, Quotation: Aufstieg and Fall der Stadt Mahagonny of Brecht and Weill’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 16 (1985), 181–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Perhaps the most valuable English-language discussion of problems presented by Gestus is Pavis, Patrice, ‘On Brecht's Notion of Gestus’, trans. Melrose, Susan, in Semiotics of Drama and Theatre: New Perspectives in the Theory of Drama and Theatre, ed. Schmidt, Herta and Kesteren, Aloysius van (Amsterdam, 1984), 292–303.Google Scholar For specific insight into gestische Musik, see Morley, Michael, ‘“Suiting the Action to the Word”: Some Observations on Gestus and gestische Musik’, in A New Orpheus (n. 1), 183–201.Google Scholar

41 Brecht, , Arbeitsjournal, 2 02 1941Google Scholar; rpt. Lucchesi, and Shull, (see n. 8), 185.Google Scholar

42 Stravinsky, Igor, An Autobiography [1936] (New York, 1962), 150f.Google Scholar

43 Weill, , ‘Über den gestischen Charakter der Musik’, Die Musik, 21 (03 1929), 419–23Google Scholar; trans. in Kowalke, Kim H., Kurt Weill in Europe (Ann Arbor, 1979), 491–6.Google Scholar Although Weill claimed that ‘gestic music is, of course, in no way bound to the text’, his examples tend to contradict this assertion.

44 ‘Über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater’, Gesammelte Werke, XV, 476.Google Scholar

45 ‘Vorwort zum Regiebuch der Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, Anbruch, 12 (01 1930), 6.Google Scholar

46 Brecht had ‘borrowed’ the name Mahagonny, as well as specific word-play for ‘Auf nach Mahagonny’, from a popular song by Krauss-Elka and O. A. Alberts (1921) entitled ‘Komm nach Mahagonne’, subtitled in various publications and recordings either as an ‘Afrikanischer-’ or ‘Amerikanischer-Shimmy’. See Hauff, Andreas, ‘Mahagonny … Only a Made-Up Word?’, Kun Weill Newsletter, 9 (Spring 1991), 7–9.Google Scholar Weill's notation of Brecht's melody for the essay differs from both the Taschenpostille and Hauspostille versions; there is also a word inversion: ‘We must now say goodbye’.

47 Adorno, T. W., Anbruch, 14 (02–03 1932), 53Google Scholar; rpt. in Moments Musicaux (Frankfurt/Main, 1964).Google Scholar

48 Weill had already inserted a similar coloratura embellishment in the vocal part used by Irene Eden at the première in Baden-Baden. In a cast originally comprising only opera singers, Lenya had been an eleventh-hour substitute. See Drew, , Kurt Weill (n. 37) 172.Google Scholar

49 See, for example, Adorno's review of Die Dreigroschenoper, ‘Zur Dreigroschenoper’, Die Musik, 21 (03 1929), 424–8Google Scholar, trans. Hinton, Stephen in Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera (Cambridge, 1990), 129–33Google Scholar, and of the Berlin production of Aufstieg and Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (n. 47), trans. (with many errors) Daniel, Jamie Owen, Discourse, 12 (Fall–Winter, 1989–90), 70–7.Google Scholar

50 In ‘Der Messingkauf’, the 200–page, unfinished ‘four-sided conversation about a new way of making theatre’, Brecht described his company: ‘The Augsburger's theatre was very small. It performed very few plays. It trained very few actors. The chief actresses were Weigel, Neher and Lenya. The chief actors were Homolka, Lorre and Lingen. The singer Busch likewise belonged to this theatre, but he seldom appeared on the stage. The chief scene designer was Caspar Neher, no relation to the actress. The musicians were Weill and Eisler.’ Willett, , Brecht on Theatre (see n. 5), 173.Google Scholar

51 For a comprehensive discography of these recordings, see Meyer-Rähnitz, Bernd, ‘Drei Groschen and mehr: Werke von Brecht-Weill auf 78er-Schallplatten’, Fox auf 78 (Autumn 1987), 44–50Google Scholar; (Spring 1988), 24–8. Also Schebera, Jürgen, ‘Kurt Weill's Early Recordings: 1928–1933’, Kurt Weill Newsletter, 4 (Spring 1986), 6–9.Google Scholar The principal re-releases of these early recordings on compact disc are Mastersound DFCDI–110 and Capriccio 10346 and 10347.

52 Those works which Weill composed on Brecht texts he had assembled without collaboration, including Das Berliner Requiem and Vom Tod im Wald, were of course left untouched.

53 ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper Mahagonny’ trans. Willen, , 41–2.Google Scholar For a comparison of Weill's and Brecht's comments on Mahagonny, see Hinton, Stephen, ‘The Concept of Epic Opera: Theoretical Anomalies in the Brecht-Weill Partnership’, in Festschrift Carl Dab/haus (Laaber, 1988), 285–94.Google Scholar

54 In an interview with himself dating from c. 1933, Brecht answered the question, ‘What, in your opinion, accounted for the success of Die Dreigroschenoper?’: ‘I'm afraid it was everything that didn't matter to me: the romantic plot, the love story, the music’. See Kowalke, Kim H., ‘Accounting for Success: Misunderstanding Die Dreigroschenoper’, The Opera Quarterly, 6 (Spring 1989), 18–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hinton, (n. 49), 181–92.Google Scholar

55 See Hinton, , 19 and 57.Google Scholar The description of the piece as a ‘comic literary operetta’ comes from Ernst Josef Aufricht, the original producer.

56 Brecht, , ‘Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper’, trans. Willett, , Brecht on Theatre (see n. 5), 44f.Google Scholar Note that Brecht is so advising all the actors, not just those playing Peachum and the Streetsinger, whose roles lend themselves to this son of delivery.

57 See Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), 10f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58 Brecht, , Arbeitsjournal, 2 02 1941Google Scholar; rpt. in Lucchesi, and Shull, (seen. 8), 185.Google Scholar In his notes to Mahagonny, Brecht had asserted that ‘the orchestral apparatus needs to be cut down to thirty specialists or less’. For a concise history of the term ‘lyrisches Ich’ and a comparison with Cone's use of ‘persona’ in The Composer's Voice, see Fehn, Ann Clark and Thym, Jürgen, ‘Who is Speaking? Edward T. Cone's Concept of Persona and Wolfgang von Schweinitz's Settings of Poems by Sarah Kirsch’, Journal of Musicological Research, 11 (1991), 1–3, 18f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Brecht, , ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper Mahagonny’, trans. Willett, , Brecht on Theatre (see n. 5), 38.Google Scholar Because often the performer is ‘reporting’ rather than experiencing first-hand, many of Brecht's songs may be sung interchangeably by various characters within a given play or even in different plays. Thus, at different times in the run of the original production of Die Dreigroschenoper, Polly and Lucy each sang the ‘Barbarasong’, and in later years Lenya appropriated ‘Seeräuber Jenny’ for Jenny's role. For a practical application of Brecht's theories to her own renditions of five songs by Weill, see Trexler, Roswitha (with collaboration by Fritz Hennenberg), ‘Was der Sänger von Brecht lernen kann oder Meine Auffassung von Weill’, Brecht Jahrbuch 1979, ed. Fuegi, John, Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt/Main, 1979), 30–45.Google Scholar

60 The Berliner Ensemble's ‘Bühnenfassung’ of Mahagonny was credited to Manfred Karge and. Matthias Langhoff, but the musical arrangements by Dieter Hosalla were uncredited, and thus subject to confusion with Weill's almost unknown originals. ‘Das kleine Mahagonny’ has been preserved on recording, Litera 8 60 034–035. For further details of the production and its subsequent influence, see Drew, , Kurt Weill (n. 37), 174f.Google Scholar

61 Mann, Thomas, ‘Über die Kunst Richard Wagners’, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt/Main, 1974), 841f.Google Scholar; trans. Brown, , Leitmotiv (see n. 7), 28.Google Scholar See also Kesting, Marianne, ‘Wagner/ Meyerhold/Brecht oder die Erfindung des “epischen Theaters”’, in Brecht-Jahrbuch, 7 (1977), ed. Fuegi, John, Grimm, Reinhold and Hermand, Jost (Frankfurt/Main, 1977), 111–30.Google Scholar

62 Fuegi, , Chaos (see n. 3), 16f.Google Scholar

63 Johann Harrer's recollection, quoted by Gilben, (see n. 11), 11.Google Scholar