Brecht at the Opera: Volume 9 (California Studies in 20th-Century Music) - Hardcover

Calico, Joy H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520254821 ISBN 13: 9780520254824

Publisher: University of California Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Joy H. Calico is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University.

From the Back Cover

"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 of Wisconsin, Madison

From the Inside Flap

"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 of Wisconsin, Madison

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520254821
• ISBN 13: 9780520254824
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 302