Word: brecht
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Even if these worthy but obvious sentiments had been set with the wit of a Brecht or the irony of a Weill, the piece would still be weak. But Librettist Tage Danielsson is no Brecht, and Werle shares with Weill only three letters of their surnames. In an opera as dependent as this on sure- handed pastiche, Werle's parodies of American lounge acts and soulful Russian folk songs consistently fall flat. Surely, the company that premiered Conrad Susa's magical chamber opera Transformations in 1973 and has championed resident Composer Dominick Argento could have chosen a better piece...
This idea of human savagery is further reinforced by Richard Peaslee's songs. Set to lilting tunes resembling those of Kurt Weill's, the words are as bitterly ironic as Brecht's. Throughout Marat/Sade, the singers repeat the refrain: "Marat we're poor/And the poor stay poor,/Give us a rise and we don't care how,/Give us a revolution...now!" The link between mass revolt and sexual lust is the theme of another rollicking song: "And what is the point of a revolution/But general copulation?" On the word "copulation", the singers perform a neatly-choreographed little wind...
...golden door, but his ideas, the quintessential and presumably most dangerous part of him, were free, theoretically, to sail in and raise hell up and down the American mind, waving torches, screaming anarchy. Somehow they do not seem that incendiary. Fo's creations sometimes look like Bertolt Brecht being done by the Marx Brothers. The anarchism savors of Duck Soup...
Today Blitzstein's work can be seen as period agitprop, analogous to Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. It is colored with the lyric causticity of the Brecht-Weill collaborations. Yet it is always a mistake to deride the potency of stereotypes in the theater or the power of good-vs.-evil allegories, however simpleminded. Here the premise is that Mr. Mister (David Schramm), the boss of Steeltown, U.S.A., is a cigar-chomping tyrant, and his gutsy prole of a foe, Larry Foreman (Randle Mell), is a knight in blue-collar armor. We meet Mister's toadies: mousy...
...when the author is praised today, it is less as a spellbinder than as a seer. Bertolt Brecht is typical of those who believe that "Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state apparat." But Kafka was no East European Orwell staring into the cracked crystal ball. He was wholly apolitical and without any real presentiments of the Holocaust, which was to consume all three of his sisters. He knew of anti-Semitism when it was virulent but not lethal; he experienced bureaucracy before the days...