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University of California Press

Brecht at the Opera

by Joy H. Calico (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $49.95 / £42.00
Publication Date: Sep 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780520942813
Trim Size: 6.14 x 9.21
Series:
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About the Book

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.


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, Brech

About the Author

Joy H. Calico is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology and Professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Arnold Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw' in Postwar Europe.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Lehrstück, Opera, and the New Audience Contract of the Epic Theater
2. The Operatic Roots of Gestus in The Mother and Round Heads and Pointed Heads
3. Fragments of Opera in American Exile
4. Lucullus: Opera and National Identity
5. Brecht's Legacy for Opera: Estrangement and the Canon

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Excellent. . . . Recommended.”
— Opera Journal
“[An] illuminating way to reconsider opera in the post-Brecht era.”
— Opera
"Joy Calico's new study of Brecht's work with, in, and against opera deserves to be celebrated across the scholarly spectrum of Brecht studies. Literary scholars will find a subtle, well-grounded, and revealing new exploration of Brecht's textual practices- including some new drafts and revisions of passages of text from his later opera projects that expand the available source material."
 
— Brecht Yearbook
“Demonstrates an astonishing breadth of familiarity with the critical literature, and is able to apply insights from it to her own investigations with uncommon lucidity. [Calico] has also done some excellent archival sleuthing.”
— Notes
“Thoughtful and engaging . . . an impressive debut monograph, and an important one besides; it helps document, with elegance and sensitivity, Brecht’s profound indebtedness and contribution to opera and musical theater. Hopefully, it will inspire other Brecht projects.”
— Opera Quarterly
“A noteworthy, compelling, and occasionally provocative addition to the vast body of literature about Brecht that even literary scholars would not want to miss perusing."
— H-German
“An impressive book. . . .impeccably researched”
— Comparative Drama
“[A] unique scholarly angle—a combination of musicology, performance studies, and cultural history—[which] generates a whole set of new perspectives and theories on Brecht’s work and on 20th-century opera more generally. . . . The result is a study on Brecht that makes a strong case for a continued interest in this writer, and for the increasingly inter-disciplinary approach of a New Musicology.”
— German Quarterly
“Brilliant scholarship. . . .does well beyond full justice both to Brecht and to opera.”
— Politische Traulichkeiten / Political Intimacies
"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