This summer I was thrown back into that old milieu by a more-or-less chance second-hand pickup of Foster Hirsch’s Kurt Weill on Stage/From Berlin to Broadway (Limelight Editions, 2003; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), a fine addition to the now-extensive Weill literature. I would have no more occasion than that to write about it now had I not already been thinking anew about the influence of the man who wrote the librettos for these works of Weill the Second and the lyrics for his songs: Bertolt Brecht. For at exactly the time that Lenya and her collaborators were doing so much to keep alive the music of the recently-dead Weill, the critic Eric Bentley was persuasively arguing for the importance of the still-living Brecht. Unlike Weill, BB had not made the hoped-for impression during his American exile. After successive flights to Stockholm and Helsinki after the outbreak of WW2, he landed in what must have seemed the friendly confines of the extraordinary Austro-German expatriate community in Southern California. But whereas Weill had fully embraced his new American identity and almost uncannily transformed his artistic self into Weill 3, Brecht remained a political, cultural, and linguistic alien. He survived by contributing to screenplays, but his sole achievement of artistic note was the collaboration with Charles Laughton on a production of one of his most significant plays, Galileo, with translation by Bentley.

Now Brecht was back in Germany, at the head of the quickly famous Eastern-Zone Berliner Ensemble. Over here, Bentley, who had met Brecht just as he left graduate school in 1941 and immediately entered into a working relationship with him, published In Search of Theatre (Knopf, 1953). Among its many edifying chapters, none was more exciting to young theatre-crazy persons like myself than the one on Brecht, with descriptions and photos of Berliner Ensemble productions and clear explanations of his vision for “Epic Theatre” and some of its key technical precepts, like that of the Verfremdungseffekt (“Alienation [or De-Familiarization] Effect”). Soon, we were getting productions of Brecht plays. We had not one, but two versions of “Man is Man” (or, “A Man’s a Man,” or, “Man Equals Man”) and, down at the Phoenix Theatre, “The Good Woman [sic]) of Szechuan,” with Uta Hagen, directed by Bentley in his own translation. A few years along, the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre of Minneapolis brought us its production of The Rise and Fall of Arturo Ui. Mother Courage nudged onto the scene. Bentley continued to publish articles and translations with prefaces, and recorded an LP of Brecht poems and songs, including some of the unWeillian settings by Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau. Brecht began to come into focus for us.

Mahagonny marked the apex of the brief, though incandescent, Brecht/Weill collaboration, and—despite a couple of further efforts—its dissolution as well. For it was in response to its first (and, until after the war, only) productions (Leipzig, 1930, and Berlin, 1931, followed by a brief run in Zürich) that Brecht first codified his theory of Epic Theatre, and specified the differences between its usages and those of the established dramatic forms, including opera. Weill and Brecht fervently agreed on vital aspects of the artistic imperatives of their time and place: that the social and political climate called for a response that was determined by its social and political consciousness—and so, inevitably, revolutionary in nature—and that such a response must be couched in a clear, accessible idiom. It was for this that Weill was willing, and even eager, to set aside the already successful and respected Weill the First (he of the symphonies, the Violin Concerto, etc.), and place the technical expertise of their “advanced” idiom in the service of a more popular style. And it was for this that the equally established Brecht, though always fearful of the seductions  of any music potentially more blandishing than his own—which could be loosely likened to that of a bitterer, more intellectual Pete Seeger—was for five years or so happy to craft librettos for music theatre pieces and provide texts for concert and radio works in partnership with a composer of high accomplishment.