Brecht at the opera

by Joy Haslam Calico

"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.