Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Bertolt Brecht created his legendary Mahagonny, that "City of Nets" where every pleasure is for sale, he neglected to specify exactly where it was. It was originally thought to be the Nazi-threatened Berlin of the 1920s, but the libretto that he wrote for Kurt Weill's most ambitious opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), seems to be set on a wildly imaginary Florida Gold Coast. But to Jonathan Miller, the gifted British director who was commissioned to stage a new Mahagonny at the enterprising, young Los Angeles Music Center Opera, there could...
What gave him that idea was Kafka's Amerika. "I was thinking about how he and Brecht and others saw America. Obviously, they got their ideas from the movies, the Keystone Kops, Chaplin. You think of these guys sitting in poky little movie houses in Central Europe in the 1920s watching these flickering images. As far as they were concerned, everything in America was all in the same place. You rode down Fifth Avenue straight into Monument Valley...
Some of the best and brightest left the country. Thomas Mann left, and Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Tillich, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder. Some of the less fortunate fell into the hands of Goring's police and ended up in a little village outside Munich where the Nazis had built their first concentration camp. It was called Dachau. This was not yet the era of the gas chambers but rather of the truncheon, not mass murder but the gradual silencing of all opposition. "They came first for the Communists...
...Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill...
...Brecht's intriguing look at the lives of beggars, prostitutes and thieves takes over the Loeb Mainstage this weekend for a two-week performance run. Involving a large cast of 12 men and 12 women, Threepenny Opera should provide a welcome study break from those weary Reading Period evenings...