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• 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 ...

• 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

he was ordered to rest, yet he was still singing when he succumbed to his final heart attack aged 49. Introduction | Modern Era | Opera Personalities | Bertolt Brecht | Modern Era | Opera Houses & Companies | The Birth of the Metropolitan Opera | Turn of the Century | Opera ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him an ideal collaborator with Brecht on Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera’, 1928) – an updating of the eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera – and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (‘Rise and Fall of the city of Mahagonny’, ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

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 this led to a string of massive successes that included Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera’, 1928), Happy End (1929), Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

early poetry as an imaginative springboard, copying and updating it. His self-conscious use of the past had many artistic parallels, from the neo-classicism of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) to Brecht and Weill’s satirical Dreigroschenoper (‘Threepenny Opera’). Pound’s dissociation from the recent past and evocation of works of far-distant ages found many other artistic parallels. Referentialism Pound encouraged many other poets. ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

social satire in the form of what Germans called Zeitoper – among the earliest examples were Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inspired Jonny spielt auf (‘Johnny Strikes Up’, 1926) and the ground-breaking Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and his collective of writers, and Kurt Weill (1900–50) collaboration, Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera’, 1928). Yet these great artistic and political talents were also suppressed, ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

and cultural issues in a mixture of operatic and popular idioms. Royal Palace (1927) by Weill was one of the genre’s early successes and Weill went on to explore with Brecht a more politically engaged type of music theatre, notably in Rise and Fall of the city of Mahagonny, a sardonic allegory of Weimar decadence, and the well-known ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

bourgeois stranglehold of the opera house. Besides Britten, significant predecessors included Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918), a work conceived in terms of portability; and the ‘epic theatre’ of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1900–50). Diverse in form and content, such works are often labelled ‘music theatre’. Among the characteristics implied by the term are smallness of scale, though ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1933–35 Premiered: 1938, Zürich Libretto by the composer Scene I Mathis is painting a fresco. Schwalb, a leader of the peasants’ revolt, shelters in the monastery with his daughter Regina. He reproaches Mathis for ignoring his fellow men. Mathis helps them escape. Scene II Catholics quarrel with Protestants. Riedinger, a wealthy Protestant, successfully protests to ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Kärl Fre’-drikh A’-bel) 1723–87 German composer Abel was born at Cöthen, where his father played in J. S. Bach’s group. In 1759 he travelled to London, where he eventually settled, becoming a chamber musician to King George III’s wife Charlotte. It was also in London, in 1764, that Abel, together with J. C. Bach, established ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Frants Shrek’-er) 1878–1934 Austrian composer A contemporary and friend of Schoenberg (he conducted the first performance of his Gurrelieder), Schreker never followed him into atonality. He was strongly influenced by Mahler (in his fine Chamber Symphony, by the chamber textures often found in late Mahler) and by Richard Strauss in his operas, of which Der ferne Klang (‘The Distant ...

• 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 ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Baroque

(Yan Dez’-mas Ze-leng’-ka) 1679–1745 Bohemian composer Zelenka was born near Prague but worked for most of his life in Dresden, where he was double bass player in the court orchestra. He studied with Fux in Vienna and Antonio Lotti (1667– 1740) in Venice. Although he wrote three oratorios and at least 20 Masses, and was eventually appointed vice-Kapellmeister of church ...