But for Brecht, then conforming his worldview to that of Marx, Mahagonny was a clarifying experience, and in Notes to the Opera ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’ (1931), also known as The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre, he made clear that though the work was an admirable effort that in part realized his vision, it would not be a model for future endeavors. And so he spelled out the Epic/Dramatic oppositions, in two columns. We must take care to note that even at this early point, BB warns us in a footnote that these are not meant as rigid distinctions, but as emphases. And we must further remind ourselves that, like all great men of the theatre, he continued to revise and to adapt theory to practice. Nonetheless, he didn’t make two opposing columns just to admire how they looked on the page, and their loud report is still echoing today.

And it’s odd. While the musical practices of Weill, the composer, have so far as I can tell left almost no impression on subsequent operatic creation (as distinct from their considerable influence on the American musical), those of Brecht, the playwright, are in evidence daily in the world of opera, which he had sought not so much to reform as to replace altogether. And they are apparent less in the creation of new operas (with an occasional exception like Saalinen’s The Red Line, there hasn’t been much in the way of opera written even partially in conformance with Epic Theatre principles, and certainly nothing that’s earned an enduring position) than in the production of old ones conceived not at all in accordance with those principles. It was an almost passing reference in Hirsch’s book that returned me to Brecht’s Epic v. Dramatic lists for a fresh look.

Sure enough, they’re still there. They don’t include, by the way, the Verfremdungseffekt (or, in its soon-common usage, “V-Effekt”)—that came a bit later, in observations on the acting of the eminent Chinese artist Mei Lan-fang. But there are nineteen others, followed by five more specifically concerned with the role of music, all in support of two interrelated goals: first, that the onloookers not be seduced into mere aesthetic pleasures or into an empathetic experience of the characters’ lives, but rather be led to a more reasoned, distanced view of the social significance of onstage happenings, and so forced make moral decisions about them; second, that the onstage action proceed not in a traditional linear narrative, but by curves and montage, each scene being played for its own sake rather than in relation to the ones preceding or following it. When we add to these ideas that of De-Familiarization, which has largely to do with acting technique—that the actors, instead of losing themselves subjectively in the emotional lives of their characters, learn to not only act “but to be seen acting,” to not only  sing “but to be seen singing,” so that the meaning of their actions is inescapably clear—we have the theoretical bases of the Epic Theatre.