Bertolt brecht famous works
He soon became an accomplished director and was influenced by fellow German theatre director Erwin Piscator. The two men, both Marxists, would become the foremost practitioners of epic theatre, a form of theatre that advocated social and political reform.
However, Brecht was frustrated the production became popular with the German middle class rather than the working class to whom the piece was aimed, as it was a satire on capitalist bourgeois society. In Brecht married Helene Weigel, his second wife, who would later become famous acting the role of Mother Courage in his Berliner Ensemble theatre company.
Brecht continued to write and mix in literary circles until his career was upended when Adolf Hitler came to power in April Under Hitler, Brecht was forced to write propaganda plays about an all-powerful Nazi world, be silent, or leave the country if he was able. Brecht eventually acquired a U. Yet Brecht had no theatre available to him in which to rehearse and perform his plays.
Brecht went to school in Augsburg , where his father was the director of a paper factory. He completed his degree in Afterwards he studied sciences, medicine and literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. He had to take a break in his studies because he had to join the army. In the s, Brecht went to Berlin and became a part of the cultural scene.
He met his second wife Helene Weigel in Berlin and married her, after divorcing his first wife. It was with his second wife that Brecht had another son. In Berlin he met a lot of artists and intellectuals of the Weimar Republic. His works became very critical about the capitalistic society e. In Brecht returned to his studies but devoted himself increasingly to writing plays.
In September Drums in the Night was presented at the Munich Kammerspiele, where Brecht was subsequently employed as resident playwright. He parodies and ridicules the lofty sentiments and visionary optimism of his predecessors Georg Kaiser , Fritz von Unruh, and others while exploiting their technical advances.
Baal portrays the brutalization of all finer feeling by a drunken vagabond. In Drums in the Night, a drama on the returned-soldier theme, the hero rejects the opportunity for a splendid death on the barricades, preferring to make love to his woman. Such cynicism recalls Frank Wedekind , Brecht's most revered model. Jungle of the Cities decries the possibility of spiritual freedom and reasserts the primacy of materialistic values.
In these two plays Brecht emphasizes the artificiality of the theatrical medium and disregards conventional psychological motivation. In Brecht moved to Berlin and for the next 2 years was associated as a playwright with Max Reinhardt 's Deutsches Theater. His comedy Mann ist Mann ; A Man's a Man studies the social conditioning that transforms an Irish packer into a machine gunner and shows a development toward a terser, more intellectual style.
By Brecht had begun a serious study of Marxism. Also during this period the director Erwin Piscator was teaching him much about the techniques of experimental theater for example, the use onstage of films, projections, and slides. Brecht collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill on Mahagonny or Kleine Mahagonny , a play with music written for the Baden-Baden festival of This was the first work to make Brecht famous.
While adapting and modernizing Gay's balled opera, Brecht retained the main events of the plot but added topical satirical bite through his own lyrics. In this work he develops to its first high point his own special language—that peculiar amalgam of street-colloquial, Marxist-philosophical, and quasi-biblical diction laced with cabaret wit and lyrical pathos and bound together with the unrelenting force of parody.
Brecht wrote several more plays with music in collaboration with Weill and with Paul Hindemith. The latter deals with the issue of "consent"— consent to the extinction of the individual for the sake of the progress of the masses. In Die Massnahme ; The Measure Taken , for which Hanns Eisler composed the score, Brecht publicly espouses Communist doctrine and concedes the necessity for the elimination of erring party members.
Joan of the Stockyards , in which a Salvation Army girl strives to save the souls of Chicago capitalists.
Brecht bertolt biography
Brecht uses the term "epic theater" to characterize his innovative dramatic theory. His new type of drama is non-Aristotelian—that is, his aim is not to purge the audience's emotions but to awaken the spectators' minds and communicate truth to them. In order to achieve this end, drama must not hypnotize or entrance the audience but must continually remind them that what they are watching is not real, but merely a representation, a vehicle for an idea or a fact.
Brecht uses the word "alienation" Verfremdung to describe his method of helping the audience to be receptive to his dramatic intentions. His technique of alienation includes elimination of most conventional stage props, use of charts, slides, and messages flashed on screens, direct involvement of the audience through characters who step out of their roles to function as commentators, and many carefully planned incongruities.
Brecht bertolt poems
Finally, Brecht requires that actors work in a new way: they must not identify with the dramatic characters but, on the contrary, must always demonstrate that they are playing a role. Alienation is Brecht's fundamental dramatic device, and his parody is of course closely dependent on this technique. From to Brecht was an exile, first in Scandinavia, then in the U.
In his books were among those publicly burned in Berlin. These plays demonstrate that Brecht's power and depth as a dramatist are to a high degree independent of, and even override, his theoretical principles. They display an astonishing capacity for creating living characters, a moving compassion, technical virtuosity, and parodic wit.
Mother Courage, a series of scenes from the life of a camp follower during the Thirty Years War , is often misunderstood because the overwhelmingly vital portrait of the central character arouses the audience's sympathies. But Brecht's actual concern was to demonstrate the self-perpetuating folly of Mother Courage's naive collaboration with the system that exploits her and destroys her family.
In Brecht settled in East Berlin, where he remained until his death. He and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble in September with ample financial support from the state. This group became the most famous theater company in East Germany and the foremost interpreter of Brecht. He himself devoted much of his time to directing.
There is some evidence that he modified his austere conception of the function of drama and conceded the importance of the theater as a vehicle for entertainment. The lyric poetry Brecht wrote in these years shows a concern for personal rather than universal or mass experience. Recent criticism has increasingly recognized Brecht's eminence as a lyric poet.
His verse of the s, in particular Hauspostille ; Domestic Breviary , is iconoclastic balladry of a savagely satirical kind. However, his keen interest in Chinese and Japanese poetic forms led through the Svendborger Gedichte to the austere delicacy of the Buckower Elegien Brecht also wrote The Threepenny Novel , which is based on The Threepenny Opera, and some skillful short stories, Kalendergeschichten ; Tales from the Calendar.
He died of a heart attack in August Other useful works are Ronald D. Brecht's literary tradition is illuminated by Max Spalter, Brecht's Tradition A Query in Chronicle Form German playwright, poet, and theatrical reformer Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht — developed theatre as a forum for critical reflection on society in order to advance his Marxist beliefs.
During the early s, he developed an anti-bourgeois attitude and studied Marxism.
Brecht bertolt biography death
Brecht lived in Berlin from to , where he collaborated with composer Kurt Weill — and developed his theory of "epic theater" and his austere, irregular verse. In , Brecht went into exile, spending six years in the United States — , where he did some film work in Hollywood. During exile, Brecht wrote most of his great plays, essays, and poems, while his work was being burned in Nazi Germany.
In , he moved back to Berlin and despite the controversial communist ideals of his work, he enjoyed great success. Brecht died of a heart attack in East Berlin on August Brecht realized that the emerging technologies of film and radio provided important opportunities for rethinking the formal properties of communication.
Brecht bertolt biography images: Bertolt Brecht (born February 10, , Augsburg, Germany—died August 14, , East Berlin) was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.
He was aware of the ways in which new technologies construct their audiences in modes of reception ranging from passive, which he disliked, to active and participatory, which he favored and encouraged. Reception and representation were key to Brecht's idea of what he termed "communication with consequences.
Although he felt the new media had great potential to liberate people, Brecht also maintained that radio ignored the possibilities of organizing its listeners as suppliers of ideas. If radio were to change its focus from distribution to communication, turning listeners also into speakers, then it might generate positive social change.
He did not foresee the use of radio for propaganda by right-wing as well as leftist ideologues. Brecht, like director Erwin Piscator — , felt that film could be used positively within theater, and he was interested in the way new technologies of communication reconfigured content.
Developments within filmmaking, for example, inspired his notion of Gestus , actions that are both simply themselves and emblematic of larger social practices. In some of his productions, Brecht projected subtitles in advance of scenes to announce the plot to the audience. By abandoning the tension and surprise, this "communication with consequences" focused the audience on the more important task of thinking critically, socially, and politically.
Distancing the audience from his plays was also crucial to his Marxist drama. Unlike the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe that what they are witnessing is happening here and now, the Marxist premise that human nature is historically conditioned required an "epic theater," which gave the audience critical detachment.
This was Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt alienation effect that portrayed action in a "scientific spirit" and reminded the viewer that theater is not reality. Critical inquiry that exposed the oppression and inequalities of capitalist production was central to Brecht's view of the potential of new technology. Spectators were able to regard the situations of the characters and the actions of the dramas as indicative of class warfare, thus underscoring the social, rather than psychological, genesis of the human condition.
In a radio speech on March 27, , Brecht stated, "It is my belief that [man] will not let himself be changed by machines but that he will himself change the machine; and whatever he looks like he will above all look human. To this neutralist position, Brecht added a general element of optimism. He argued that science could change nature and make the "world seem almost habitable," by overthrowing the oppressive religious mystification of experience that taught people to tolerate their fate.
Bertolt Brecht — a brief background.
Brecht bertolt biography wikipedia
Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it. Next page. More guides on this topic. Musical theatre Naturalism and Stanislavski Physical theatre Theatre in education.