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MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 9 | |
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Happy Birthday, Bertolt A hundred years after his birth, Brecht is still in a class of his own By JOHN WILLETT
From 1933 to 1945 this very German playwright, director and poet was an exile from his country. Over the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe his works could be neither published nor performed. Then, back in Berlin after seven years in America, he set up the Berliner Ensemble mainly for his own works. Wherever it toured--London, Paris, Warsaw--it was a sensation. In 1956 he died on the "wrong" side of the Iron Curtain; a controversial figure in the Cold War. Today he is part of world theater, a subject everywhere of academic study and now, 100 years after his birth, uniformly respected. Many of his new admirers in Germany would say he was a national treasure, even though they may not like his work all that much. Certainly he needs his native language, of which he was a great master. But he used it for clarity, for communication, for drama, for song. And what he had to say also gets across in other languages, including our own. Coming from Bavaria, from the old Roman city of Augsburg, he found his interests and examples in unexpected quarters. Villon and Rimbaud helped to propel his poetry; Latin prose and the Lutheran Bible strengthened his power of expression. Shakespeare and Kipling gave him a special relationship with England; John Gay's Beggar's Opera was the basis of his Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill; Arthur Waley offered him a way into Far Eastern poetry and theater. In short, he was an eclectic, finding his settings in Chicago, Florida, the Far West and British India, all seen through a romantic, geographically cavalier imagination and peopled with ambiguous characters: pirates, gangsters, Salvationists, tarts, landladies, Kiplingesque soldiers, tough mothers and strong peasant girls. He had a rare gift for unforced comedy, not only in his eye for situation and character but also in his ear for dialogue. Generally, he looked at life from below. Both politically and culturally, he was no snob. He was lucky to have been born in the late 1890s so that he could be marked by the First World War and its revolutionary ending without being fatally traumatized by it. This also put him in the generation of George Grosz and other radical innovators who built on the rich achievements of German Expressionism by rejecting its self-indulgent romanticism and taking its modern vision into a new, less individualistic, more mechanized world. A key influence was the practice of montage, the new artistic principle of the 1920s. For Brecht it proved to mean not only the graphic cut-ups of the Berlin Dadaists and the film editing of Eisenstein, but also an approach to play construction which he termed "epic theater." This one-thing-after-another piecemeal method, guided by the story rather than a plot, was the basis of his dramaturgy from then on. The new spirit of the 1920s brought a much more collective approach to artistic creation, and this too was crucial for Brecht's work. He was miraculously lucky in his collaborators. Caspar Neher, his school contemporary, designed his sets, which were elegant, economical and closely geared to each play. Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler were his composers for such brilliant music-theater works as the epic opera Mahagonny, the Gorky-based The Mother, the main Lehrstucke--or didactic cantatas--and a great corpus of songs ranging from political ballads through echoes of Schonberg to Schubertian lieder and the bitterly critical Hollywood Elegies: "This city/Has made me realize:/ Paradise and hell-fire/Are the same city./For the unsuccessful/ Paradise itself/ Serves as hell-fire." (Hollywood Elegy IV) Without his collaborators Brecht's plays and songs would have been a lot less exciting to look at and listen to. But there is no doubt who was responsible for their overall quality. It was Brecht's own gift to be able to imbue the visual, musical and verbal contribution of his collaborators with his distinctive conception of the whole work. It is this creative breadth that makes him special, and it can be felt in many different contexts. His plays are not all flawless; the "epic" approach can prove tedious if wrongly staged; misguided attempts to impose a topical message on a 60-year-old play can destroy its inherent merits. But the poems remain fresh in their simplicity and directness, and can be beautifully enhanced by the right composers. They are the real key to his plays, along perhaps with his strong will and restless perfectionism. Brecht was always changing things, always critically alert, never entirely satisfied. Least of all with himself. John Willett is a leading translator, editor and critic of Brecht's oeuvre. His recently revised Brecht in Context was published this month by Methuen
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few weeks ago in france I heard that representations were
being made to some Euro-body to get Shakespeare promoted to
supra-national status. Since the Germans, it was argued, honored
and appreciated him at least as much as the English, he could no
longer be treated as part of the U.K.'s national heritage, but
must become part of European culture. Presumably there were
financial implications in this--Euro-funds for continental
productions perhaps--but the argument itself is hardly new. And
if anything it is too restrictive: Shakespeare, thank goodness,
belongs to the world--First, Second and Third alike. But it made
me wonder: If Shakespeare, why not Brecht?