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Reviewed by:
  • Brecht at the Opera
  • Stephen Luttmann
Brecht at the Opera. By Joy H. Calico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. [xvi, 282 p. ISBN: 978-0-520-25482-4. $45.00.] Music examples, bibliographic references, index.

As a title, “Brecht at the Opera” is meant to allude to a number of things, largely by virtue of the polysemous preposition: Brecht as operagoer; Brecht as compared to “cultural touchstones that simultaneously honor and deflate operatic conventions” (p. 15; the Marx Brothers’ and Queen’s A Night at the Opera are cited as examples); even the ominous tone of “Grimes is at his exercise”—although few would argue that Brecht’s “exercise” was as sinister as that of Peter Grimes, and certainly Joy H. Calico, the author of the present volume, does not. Brecht at the Opera seeks to fill a void in Brecht research, namely, that there has been no study that “systematically interrogates or theorizes about Brecht’s lifelong engagement with opera as distinct from other musical genres” (p. 1). Precisely what distinguishes opera from other musical genres is not directly addressed, but this is hardly the author’s fault, and much more an index of the difficulties she faced. Brecht’s writings with regard to opera add up to something less than a comprehensive or consistent theory; he left little in the way of a paper trail of letters and diaries to detail his experiences and impressions; film documentation of stagings in which Brecht had an active hand are virtually nonexistent. Consequently, opera is that against which Brecht polemicized, and from which he borrowed; operas (admittedly of certain kinds) are what he collaborated on in their place. Calico prudently casts her net broadly, scrutinizing a wide variety of Brechtian projects that involved music, including the “anti-opera” Lehrstücke and abandoned fragments (even lost ones), as well as those works that more closely meet genre expectations, such as Die Verurteilung des Lukullus.

One of the great virtues of Calico’s book is her detailing how Brecht “retained an abiding, albeit equivocal, interest in the genre’s potential” (p. 2) throughout most of his mature career, but because of the unevenness of the documentary record, it is understandable that her work, while considerably more than five separate essays presented as chapters, is somewhat less than a unified whole. She also 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. She has also done some excellent archival sleuthing. If her work has one flaw, however, then it lies in the occasional missed opportunity: She gets virtually everything right, but one has the impression that her work could have benefitted from being longer by half. [End Page 784]

A study of Brecht’s engagement with opera, Calico implies, does more than force a reevaluation of Brecht himself, but of the origins of modernist theater as well. Summarizing in her introduction Brecht’s early familiarity with and rejection of Wagnerian music drama, she concludes that “modernist theater, of which epic theater has long been the standard-bearer, may be the illegitimate child of opera” (p. 3). Discussing the Verfremdungseffekt (she prudently chooses “estrangement effect” from among the various attempts to render the concept in English) in her last chapter with regard to recent operatic productions, she argues that “estrangement has its roots in Brecht’s own operagoing experience” (p. 141). There is no doubt some truth to these assertions, but she fails to mention, or perhaps even realize, that in embracing those elements that emphasize the unreality of the stage, Brecht had several nonoperatic theatrical traditions to draw upon, not least of which being the medieval morality play, the highly stylized and codified conventions of Baroque theater, and the political cabaret of his own time. Nor does she investigate works of Brecht’s prior to Dreigroschenoper—none of which are works of musical theater by any stretch of the imagination—for signs (or the absence of them) of nascent epic theater. This is a striking lapse, as Brecht scholarship, and for that matter Brecht himself, have identified his Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (1924...

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