Joy Haslam Calico. Brecht at the Opera. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 304 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25482-4.
Reviewed by Siegfried Mews
Published on H-German (December, 2008)
Commissioned by Eve M. Duffy (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
Brechtian Opera Forever
In the event that the unsuspecting reader is misled by the title of the present study into assuming that s/he is dealing with an investigation of Bertolt Brecht's "own opera-going experience" (p. 141), Joy H. Calico provides a clarification by emphasizing that the ambivalent and "polysemous" nature of the preposition "at" refers not only to the playwright's physical presence at the opera house but, more importantly, to his reaction to and his lifelong endeavors to come to grips with--in both theory and practice--the genre of opera in general (p. 15). Indeed, Calico puts the matter more unambiguously in the heading of her recent article in Opera Quarterly, "Brecht on Opera and/in the Americas."[1]
Yet readers expecting a thorough examination of the two of "operas" (both of which originated in collaboration with Kurt Weill) from the period of the Weimar Republic (the immensely popular, indestructible Die Dreigroschenoper [1928], which Calico, in essential agreement with the critical consensus, terms a "parody" of an opera rather than a genuine example of the genre [p. 87], and, more importantly, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [1930]) will likely be disappointed. But it is precisely the familiarity of these "operas" that Calico cites as a plausible reason for the lack of an intensive, new investigation. Similarly, in marked contrast to, for example, John J. White's encompassing study of Brecht's most important theoretical writings concerned with the theater in general, Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory (2004), which includes a very substantial chapter on the "Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny" (1929-30), Calico devotes comparatively little space to what is generally assumed to be not only an analysis of the function of (Wagnerian) opera in bourgeois society, but also the playwright's first comprehensive statement about his theory of epic theater.
Yet even without recourse to a new scrutiny of well-known works and theoretical writings, Calico seeks to advance her credible claim that Brecht's "engagement with opera was not just influential but essential to his theoretical and dramatic oeuvres" (p. 163) in five chronologically arranged, lucidly written, and copiously annotated chapters. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Calico begins her discussion with the "Lehrstück" or "learning play" of the late 1920s and early 1930s by polemically rejecting the "dominant discourse" of "narrow, litero-centric" approaches indulged in by literary scholars (pp. 21-22). Primarily based on the fact of Brecht's cooperation with composers such as the aforementioned Weill, as well as Paul Hindemith and Hanns Eisler, Calico argues that the "Lehrstück" pertains to the "musical genre" in general and the "anti-opera musical genre" in particular (p. 23). Moreover, because of its anti-operatic features, Calico claims, the "Lehrstück" has a function essential to Brecht's epic theater in general, that is, to promote a "new audience contract" (p. 40) that involves transforming the spectator from an emotionally engaged viewer into a rational observer, or, in the case of the "Lehrstück," aims at practically abolishing the distinction between audience and actors by having the former actively participate in the play--a not entirely unproblematic procedure.
As is well known, exile changed Brecht's life and work in significant ways, but Calico advances the thesis that, for all practical purposes, the playwright was forced to adapt to the conditions of exile and go beyond the "Lehrstück" by developing the influential concept of "Gestus" or, in John Willett's translation, "gest" (p. 47). Whereas the Brechtian term "Gestus" is usually associated with the expression and/or demonstration of (social) attitudes via physical gestures, Calico locates its origins in nineteenth-century opera in general and Wagner's operas in particular in that they are based on the premise of music carrying a communicable "meaning" (p. 47) via the "sounding body" on stage that has virtually replaced the "showing body" (p. 54). As evidence Calico offers her readings of Die Mutter (1932), strictly speaking not a play from Brecht's exile period, and Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe (1936), which also originated during the final phase of the Weimar Republic, in which she in particular analyzes Eisler's musical and other contributions to both plays. Although Calico's argument about the "operatic roots of Gestus" (p. 43) appears to be persuasive, one wonders about the comparatively meager textual evidence on which she bases her conclusions. For example, she fails to even mention Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941), which was also set to music by Eisler, and, which is, without doubt, Brecht's best-known play from his European exile period; whichit also enabled him to gain a foothold in East Berlin after World War II.
Calico's departure from what may be called the Brecht canon is evident as well in her chapter on Brecht's American exile, in that she refers only in passing to two other important works from this period, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, (1948; set to music by Paul Dessau), and the American version of Galileo (1943; set to music by Eisler). Whereas Brecht unsuccessfully endeavored to have the former play produced on Broadway, he succeeded in having the latter drama staged in Los Angeles. However, Calico concentrates on three "exploratory opera fragments" (p. 77)--among which she includes, apart from the genuine fragments Goliath (1937) and Die Reisen des Glücksgotts (1939-53), Brecht's abortive, not particularly well-documented project of an "all-black" production of Die Dreigroschenoper (p. 83), a joint venture with African American actor Clarence Muse. The lack of success did not, however, signify the end of Brecht's "exploration" of racial issues in the United States, Calico claims. Brecht simply shifted his focus from "opera" to two "non-operatic productions" (p. 87) in New York City, that is, those of Furcht und Elend des III. Reiches (1945) and the adaptation of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1614). The fact that Calico attributes "estrangement potential" (p. 85) to a black actor's appearance in whiteface in the former play would seem to entail a modification of her insistence on the centrality of the musical/operatic origins of "Gestus."
The penultimate chapter of Calico's study, which deals with Brecht's final phase in East Berlin, is, perhaps, the most problematic. It is exclusively devoted to one opera, Brecht's cooperative endeavor with Dessau, Das Verhör des Lukullus/Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (1949), and seeks to explore, as the subheading of the chapter has it, "Opera and National Identity." True, Calico reconstructs, in painstaking detail, the chronology of the debates and controversies accompanying the opera from Dessau's completion of the first version in 1949 to its first public performance in 1951 (see the listing of events, pp. 116-117 and 124-125) and provides both musical and textual examples (p. 129 and passim). But she regrettably tends to reduce her previously advanced, more encompassing arguments concerning the desideratum of a national opera in the early years of the GDR's existence to the claim that the cultural functionaries of the governing party, the SED (as well as Brecht and Dessau), were primarily motivated by having to perform a balancing act in an attempt to "appease" two entirely opposite "audiences": the "external (Western) press and the internal (Soviet) apparatchiks" (p. 109).[2] True, the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) did indeed vigorously, but covertly, participate in the campaign against the alleged "formalism" of particularly the music of the Lukullus opera, but Calico's repeated use of the term "Soviet audience" (p. 116 and passim) appears odd. If taken literally, the term would seem to suggest a potential non-German (or more specifically "Soviet") audience--hardly the target group for a GDR "national" opera intended for the general public. Whereas Calico meritoriously emphasizes the political, Cold War context in which discussions about the opera took place, she does not address questions such as what precisely constituted the GDR “nation” in postwar divided Germany or, for that matter, whether the subject matter of Roman general Lukullus was suitable for a GDR national opera. All in all, Calico tends to take an overly optimistic view of the opera's potential contribution to "East German nation building" and the chances for the "success of socialism on German soil" (p. 139).
In her concluding chapter, Calico returns to issues related to the staging of opera via investigating (canonical) opera's indebtedness to Brecht, an indebtedness that she perceives as springing from the use of Brechtian (a fashionable, but ambivalent term) defamiliarization devices of the Regietheater or "director's theater" (p. 140). In vogue since approximately the 1970s, its proponents and practitioners incline towards dispensing with the traditional, literal staging of the respective work. It is, unsurprisingly, specifically opera rather than theater in general that Calico singles out as the "ideal" vehicle for creating the "conditions for a Brechtian experience" during which the "spectating audience" is exposed to auditory impressions without unconditionally surrendering "to the siren song of [the opera's] theatricality" (p. 149). As her chief example of how operatic estrangement can be used successfully, Calico cites the 2005 Berlin Staatsoper production of Verdi's La forza del destino (1862). She provides a fairly detailed, subjective account of her impressions at the performance she attended and concludes that the third act had become an "opera about Opera" as well as about "operagoing and operagoers" (p. 160) in the manner of the aforementioned Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny--a perception that she takes as evidence of the posthumous validation and vindication of Brecht's lifelong concern with opera.
Whereas, as indicated above, Calico's arguments may not meet with general approval, there can be no doubt that we are dealing with a noteworthy, compelling, and occasionally provocative addition to the vast body of literature about Brecht that even literary scholars would not want to miss perusing.
Notes
[1]. Joy H. Calico, "Brecht on Opera and/in the Americas," Opera Quarterly 22 (August 2006): 512-520.
[2]. Ibid. See also Calico, "'Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper': Opera in the Discourse of Unification and Legitimation in the German Democratic Republic," in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 190-204.
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Citation:
Siegfried Mews. Review of Calico, Joy Haslam, Brecht at the Opera.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=22959
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