Brecht's Reception in Italy at the Time of Fascism

Summary

Although Bertolt Brecht's presence in Italy has already been investigated in a broad and in-depth study by Paola Barbon, recent publications demonstrate the persistence of an old historiographical cliché. A precise “year zero” has been established for the beginning of the Italian reception of Brecht's texts and theories: the premiere of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), directed by Giorgio Strehler at Piccolo Teatro in Milan on February 10, 1956. Indeed, it was from this moment, as Claudio Magris emphasizes, that Brecht's name became well known among Italian audiences, thanks to the resonance of the show—performed in the presence of the author and highly praised by him—and of the following tour. It was the beginning of Strehler's “Brechtian path” that, due to its continuity and inner coherence, overshadowed everything that had gone before it.

The marketing strategies of the first stable, publicly supported theater in Italy were hardly irrelevant in a narrative that wanted to show Strehler and Paolo Grassi, the founders of the Piccolo Teatro, as the first intellectuals to have introduced Brecht in Italy. These events, decisive for the development of Italian theater, have recently been illuminated by Alberto Benedetto, who, on the basis of documents from Piccolo Teatro's archive, shows how Grassi, after Brecht's death, used a note with which Brecht had expressed his esteem for Strehler on the day of the premiere to claim a monopoly on managing the rights to stage his works, thereby preventing most other Italian theater-makers from engaging with Brecht's dramaturgy for many years.

Benedetto reports that on January 9, 1954, Grassi had written to Brecht, claiming “a kind of primogeniture for himself and Strehler in the discovery of the Augsburg playwright in Italy”4: he told Brecht that he had been following his work since 1938, “when your name was completely unknown in Italy.” Due in part to this consciously constructed narrative, whatever had gone before Strehler's stagings of Brecht's works was soon labeled as a kind of “pre-history,” for example, by Ettore Capriolo in 1966. In the same year Giuseppe Bartolucci spoke of a “legendary phase” of Brecht's reception, which had begun in 1930, when director Anton Giulio Bragaglia staged the first Italian Dreigroschenoper, and concluded in 1953, when the scholar Paolo Chiarini started to publish his critical analyses of Brecht's work in the newly founded magazine Arena.