ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 1: Last reminder: Next Friday, Sept. 28, I will be appearing in the Marc Scorca Auditorium at Opera America, 330 Seventh Ave., NYC, to speak and read from my book, “Opera as Opera,” converse about related subjects with Mr. Scorca, and conduct some Q & A. There will be books for sale (sorry, can’t do credit cards), and these will be the only books available for a few weeks, because . . .

ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 2: The initial print run of “Opera as Opera” is SOLD OUT! The pace of sales was much faster than projected. A second printing is scheduled , but owing to a very heavy schedule at the printer’s, books will not be ready to ship till around November 1. We will of course post the exact shipping date as soon as it’s firm. You can still pre-order for this second printing, and be sure of a copy being reserved for you.

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In my last post, I wrote about some of the principles of Epic Theatre, transmitted to us  principally via the plays of Bertolt Brecht and by the copious theoretical literature about them  by the author himself and by followers, critics, and scholars. Being engaged here with opera, I was interested primarily in the way that some of these principles, especially that of a Separation of Elements, continue to exercise influence on that artform, and in the strange fact that this influence has been more on the production of operas quite incompatible with those principles than in the creation of new operas of Epic character. And I noted that Brecht published his formulation in its most direct and succinct form in relation not to one of his plays, but to the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which he and composer Kurt Weill premiered in 1930. ^(I)

Since Brecht was the most important German playwright of his time and a highly regarded poet as well, and since (like Stanislavski, but unlike, say, Reinhardt or even Meyerhold) he wrote out at length his theories on theatre, acting, and music, his ideas have always been before us, and in definitive form. But he was not the only artist writing on the new directions for theatre and opera (and, eventually, on Mahagonny itself) in the aesthetic maelstrom of Weimar Germany. Weill was no mean essayist in his own right, and between 1925 (before his first meeting with Brecht) and 1929 he turned out over a hundred articles for Der Deutsche Rundfunk (the magazine of the then-new German broadcasting system) and other journals. These, however, were never gathered in book form, and simply dropped from sight after the ascension of the Nazis. Since the 1950s, musicologists and other scholars have worked to restore to Weill his independence of thought and to correct the common impression that in the Weill/Brecht collaboration, Brecht did everything but write down the notes. (An overview of Weill’s musical thinking at this time, and translations of some of his articles, can be found in Kim Kowalke’s Kurt Weill in Europe.) With respect to Mahagonny: as Brecht himself rather glumly concluded, it’s an opera, and, brilliant and convention-defying as Brecht’s libretto for it is, in an opera the music is the final determinant of viability.