AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1898–1956, German A poet and playwright, Brecht was best known for his departure from the conventions of theatrical illusion to create ‘epic theatre’ as a tool for social commentary. At its least nuanced and most dogmatic, this amounted to a didactic forum for his communist cause. Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was born and raised in Bavaria, where ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Renaissance

(Ya’-kob Ob’-rekht) c. 1450–1505 Franco-Flemish composer Obrecht, who has long lived in the shadow of his more famous contemporary Josquin, may begin to receive the attention he deserves now that changes in Josquin’s biography show that many of the musical developments once attributed to him first appeared in Obrecht’s music. Innovator or not, Obrecht was a composer of considerable ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

‘Rise and Fall of the city of Mahagonny’ Composed: 1927–29 Premiered: 1930, Leipzig Libretto by Bertolt Brecht Act I Leokadja Begbick, Trinity Moses and Fatty, all wanted by the police, found Mahagonny. They recruit men in search of whisky, gambling and women to join them in the ‘city of gold’. Jenny’s price, thirty bucks, ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1928 Premiered: 1928, Berlin Book by Bertolt Brecht, from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann after John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera Prologue The Ballad Singer sings the ‘Ballad of Mack the Knife’. Act I Peachum controls the begging business in London. His wife’s description of their daughter Polly’s lover, ‘the Captain’, fits the notorious gang leader Macheath (Mack ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1911–60, Swedish For sheer beauty of tone, Jussi Björling may have been the greatest lyric tenor of the twentieth century. He began singing professionally at the age of nine in the Björling Male Quartet, with his father and two brothers. He made his debut at the Royal Stockholm Opera in 1930 as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1900–50, German A precocious compositional talent, Weill’s early operatic works Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (‘The Tsar has his Photograph Taken’, 1928) strengthened his resolve to invent a style of music theatre that used the finest playwrights and dancers. In 1927, he collaborated with writer Bertolt Brecht on Mahagonny Songspiel, and ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

European culture lay in ruins after the end of World War II. There were many who, in company with the philosopher Theodor Adorno, felt that Nazi atrocities such as Auschwitz rendered art impossible, at least temporarily. Others, though, felt that humanity could only establish itself anew by rediscovering the potency of art, including opera. On ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Koort Vil) 1900–50 German/American composer Weill was influenced by his teacher Busoni, by Stravinsky and by the ideal of Zeitoper (opera on contemporary subjects and themes). In his early, successful stage pieces, including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

Nineteenth-century music had developed with an unprecedented awareness of its own history, and by 1900 the European musical legacy seemed as permanent and unshakeable as the institutions – the opera houses, concert halls and conservatories – that nurtured it. Above all, classical tonality and its associated forms and genres, now the everyday stuff of textbooks, had ...