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This article argues that Brecht’s unique musicality as a poet led to a rich and rarely paralleled collaboration with musical composers. While the young Brecht sketched out his own music for his early poetry and songs, he soon turned to professional composers as partners. The article focuses on Brecht’s three major musical collaborators, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. In addition to the innovative works that Brecht created with these composers, they also stimulated important theoretical writings that led to new forms of opera, as in Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, or a revolutionary aesthetics of film music, as in Eisler/Adorno’s Composing for the Films, which is strongly influenced by Brecht.
Bertolt Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, is unthinkable without music.Many of his poems, as well as his forty-eight completed dramas and roughly fifty dramatic fragments, are connected to music.There is hardly another writer or dramatist of the twentieth century who based his work as clearly and decisively on the complex relationship between music, text, and drama.Brecht worked with some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, in particular Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau.Although Brecht rejected some of the aesthetic ideas and ideology of Richard Wagner, in his ambition to combine the arts together and to leave a major legacy, he nevertheless in some respects ultimately came to resemble Wagner.The music connected to Brecht‘s texts is performed and passed on in the media throughout the world, from the early recordings made by the young Brecht himself all the way to innumerable versions of his “Ballad of Mack the Knife” created and spread by the globalized music market.
Having laid the groundwork for debates about jazz reception in Germany in ,explores jazz in the years of immediate postwar occupation in Germany: from the fall of the regime in 1945 to the founding of the GDR in 1949. During these years, Berlin, the former Nazi capital, served as the epicenter for the formerly Allied occupying powers to engage in ideological battle. During this time, both Soviet and Western allies employed culture, music, and jazz as key tools of the postwar rebuilding effort, with each side using jazz as a political tool to sway audiences toward democratic or socialist ideals. This chapter details the prominence Soviet policymakers assigned to music of African-American descent, recruiting it for propagandistic purposes, and shows how jazz served as entertainment for troops in the Western sectors. Charting the political developments that led to the creation of the GDR in 1949, this chapter further explores the personal experiences of German jazz fans in the late 1940s, whose experiences offer key accounts of racial segregation in the American sectors alongside the impact of Soviet propaganda of the time.
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