Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 3 Read online

  Bertolt Brecht

  Collected Plays: Three

  Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent,

  He Said Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother,

  The Exception and the Rule, The Horatians and the Curiatians,

  St Joan of the Stockyards

  The Lehrstiicke or short ‘didactic’ pieces, Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Exception and the Rule and The Horatians and the Curiatians, were written during the years 1929 to 1933, a crucial period of creativity and political experiment for Brecht. Rejecting conventional theatre, they are spare and highly formalised, drawing on traditional Japanese and Chinese theatre. They show Brecht in collaboration with the composers, Hindemith, Weill and Eisler, influenced by the new techniques of montage in the visual arts and seeking new forms of expression.

  The Mother, a longer play, again with music by Eisler, based on the novel by Gorky, is a story of dawning political consciousness told with irony and narrative drive. Its central character is one of Brecht’s great female roles.

  St Joan of the Stockyards, full of pastiche and parody, is a battle of good and evil set in a mythical Chicago. As a big drama for the established professional theatre, it occupies a special position both in Brecht’s oeuvre and in the theatre of his time.

  The volume, edited and introduced by John Willett, includes Brecht’s own notes and all the important textual variants.

  Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898 and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956. He grew to maturity as a playwright in the frenetic years of the twenties and early thirties, with such plays as Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera and The Mother. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, eventually reaching the United States in 1941, where he remained until 1947. It was during this period of exile that such masterpieces as Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle were written. Shortly after his return to Europe in 1947 he founded the Berliner Ensemble, and from then until his death was mainly occupied in producing his own plays.

  Other Bertolt Brecht publications by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

  Brecht Collected Plays: One

  (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of

  England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog,

  Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Two

  (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,

  The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Three

  (Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said

  Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and

  the Rule, The Horations and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Four

  (Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,

  Señora Carrar’s Rifl es, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?,

  The Trial of Lucullus)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Five

  (Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Six

  (The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,

  Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)

  Brecht Collected Plays: Seven

  (The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi )

  Brecht Collected Plays: Eight

  (The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,

  Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)

  Berliner Ensemble Adaptations

  (The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431,

  Don Juan, Trumpets and Drums)

  Brecht on Art and Politics (edited by Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles)

  Brecht on Film and Radio (edited by Marc Silberman)

  Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks (edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman)

  Brecht on Theatre (edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn)

  Brecht in Practice (David Barnett)

  The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre (Ekkehard Schall)

  Brecht, Music and Culture (Hans Bunge, translated by Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements)

  Brecht in Context (John Willett)

  The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht (John Willett)

  Brecht: A Choice of Evils (Martin Esslin)

  Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (Stephen Parker)

  A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (Stephen Unwin)

  Bertolt Brecht

  Collected Plays: Three

  Lindbergh’s Flight

  translated by John Willett

  Original work entitled:

  Der Flug der Lindberghs

  The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent

  translated by Geoffrey Skelton

  Original work entitled:

  Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis

  He Said Yes/He Said No

  adapted from the translation by Arthur Waley

  Original work entitled:

  Der Jasager / Der Neinsager

  The Decision

  translated by John Willett

  Original work entitled:

  Die Maßnahme

  The Mother

  translated by John Willett

  Original work entitled:

  Die Mutter

  The Exception and the Rule

  translated by Tom Osborn

  Original work entitled:

  Die Ausnahme und die Regel

  The Horatians and the Curiatians

  translated by H. R. Hays

  Original work entitled:

  Die Horatier and die Kuriatier

  St Joan of the Stockyards

  translated by Ralph Manheim

  Original work entitled:

  Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe

  Edited and introduced by John Willett

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chronology

  THE PLAYS

  LINDBERGH’S FLIGHT

  THE BADEN-BADEN LESSON ON CONSENT

  HE SAID YES/HE SAID NO

  Later additions and substitutions by Brecht

  He Said No

  THE DECISION

  Textual variants

  THE MOTHER

  THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE

  THE HORATIANS AND THE CURIATIANS

  ST JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS

  NOTES AND VARIANTS

  LINDBERGH’S FLIGHT

  Texts by Brecht, Hindemith and the organisers

  From a letter to Ernst Hardt

  Music for radio

  To be projected

  Introductory speech

  Note to the text

  Explanatory notes

  To the South German Radio, Stuttgart

  Prologue, to be spoken before broadcasting ‘The Ocean Flight’

  Editorial Notes

  THE BADEN-BADEN LESSON ON CONSENT

  Texts by Brecht and Hindemith

  About the ‘Lehrstück’

  Music for amateurs

  Programme of the premiere

  Introduction to Hindemith’s piano score

  Note

  Note to the text printed in Versuche 2

  Editorial Notes

  HE SAID YES/HE SAID NO

  Texts by Brecht, Waley, Weill, Hauptmann

  Note to the text

  Note on Taniko and Ikeni
ye

  From an interview with Elisabeth Hauptmann

  From an interview with Kurt Weill

  Weill on his school opera

  From a report of discussions about He Said Yes at the Karl Marx School, Neukölln

  Editorial Notes

  The message of agreement

  From Hauptmann’s translation to the double text

  The order of events

  THE DECISION

  Texts by Brecht and Eisler

  Note to the text

  Open letter to the Artistic Board of the ‘Neue Musik’, Berlin, 1930

  Note to the audience

  Rehearsing The Decision

  Some tips for rehearsal of The Decision

  Questionnaire for the audience

  Letter of 21.4.1956 to Paul Patera

  Editorial Notes

  From He Said Yes to The Decision

  The order of events

  THE MOTHER

  Texts by Brecht and Eisler

  Note on The Mother

  Song of the Mother on the heroic death of the coward Vessovchikov

  Notes

  Optional choruses

  Hanns Eisler on the Theatre Union’s production of Mother

  Recommendations to Theatre Union

  Projections, 1932 and 1935

  Memorandum about the distortion and mutilation of the text

  Discussion Jerome/Brecht/Eisler

  Letter to the New York workers’ company ‘Theatre Union’ about the play The Mother

  Editorial Notes

  Structure and characters

  Details of changes and cuts since 1933

  Appended scenes

  (a) The Small Store or The Paper Overcoat

  (b) Scene in a Railway Carriage

  THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE

  Texts by Brecht

  Note on The Exception and the Rule

  Notes

  Speech

  Editorial Notes

  THE HORATIANS AND THE CURIATIANS

  Texts by Brecht

  Note to the text

  Preparatory work on The Horatians and the Curiatians

  Traditional Chinese acting

  Instruction for the actors

  Editorial Notes

  ST JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS

  Texts by Brecht

  Preliminary note to the stage script

  Note to Saint Joan of the Stockyards

  Meaning of Saint Joan of the Stockyards

  Is Saint Joan of the Stockyards a realistic work?

  Notes to Saint Joan of the Stockyards

  About the drama’s way of depicting business matters

  Building up a part by the inductive method

  Draft for a radio talk

  Notes of Uncertain Authorship

  Inscriptions for the Black Straw Hats’ meeting-house

  Bert Brecht Saint Joan of the Stockyards – Extracts for radio

  Editorial Notes

  General structure

  Incomplete material

  Final scene of the stage script

  From the stage script to the Versuche edition of 1932

  Svendborg amendments and additions

  Introduction

  WEIMAR AT THE END OF ITS ROPE

  Both politically and culturally 1929 was a crucial year for Europe and the United States, above all for Germany. The Weimar Republic was a fragile, if vibrant institution, and as soon as the American economy crashed that autumn its remarkable decade of liberal government and Socialist local administration was doomed. German unemployment, from nearly three million at the start of the year, rose to five million by the end of 1930. Increasingly the new Chancellor Heinrich Brüning bypassed parliament and ruled by presidential decree. Hitler’s National Socialist Party emerged from the Bavarian fringe, allied itself with the Nationalist Right and began its steep climb to power, first in local and Land elections, then in the Reichstag elections of autumn 1930, when it won the second largest number of seats. The following year there were a number of bank crashes, and the last major Socialist stronghold, the Prussian Provincial government, was seized in a coup by the Right. The Left tamely surrendered.

  Already there were signs, too, of a cultural backlash. Part of this was due to economic retrenchment: the closure of Klemperer’s Kroll Opera in mid-1931, for instance, and the ending of the great modern replanning schemes in Frankfurt and Berlin. Part was ideological, enforcing the anti-modernist tastes of militant Nazis like Wilhelm Frick and the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg in Thuringia, Alfred Rosenberg with his ‘Militant League for German Culture’ and the master builder Adolf Hitler himself. Part however was no longer specifically German but due to the Zeitgeist: the return to conventional forms in Austria, the ending of the Soviet engagement with modern art and architecture, the dissolution of all existing Russian arts organisations and the increasing imposition there of ‘Socialist Realism’ with its nineteenth-century models. Except in the Scandinavian countries, Holland, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia, the modernist excitement that had prevailed in central Europe for the second, relatively prosperous half of the 1920s was everywhere becoming stifled or at best dying down.

  In September 1929, just before Wall Street’s Black Monday, there were two notable failures in the Berlin theatre. One was the Piscator production of The Merchant of Berlin by the ex-Dadaist Walter Mehring, with sets by Moholy-Nagy and music by the Schönberg pupil Hanns Eisler. The other was the Hauptmann/Weill/Brecht gangster play Happy End. Piscator closed his theatre, went on tour with a play about abortion, briefly took over a more downmarket house with an actors’ collective, then in 1931 moved to Moscow to make a film. Brecht however was already setting off on a more radical track, where both Weill and Eisler had become involved in what was one of the most hopeful and original movements of an otherwise disastrous time. Perhaps if he had been less committed to this new direction – philosophically as well as artistically committed, that is – the playwright would have worked harder to rescue Happy End, whose basic idea, as well as its song texts, seems to have originated with him. But now he was much too interested in his new tasks to rewrite and overhaul Hauptmann’s script as he would previously have done. The result was that, for much of the three years (inclusive) from The Threepenny Opera to The Mother, his primary work was taking place outside the established Berlin theatre. The aim for Brecht, as also for Eisler, was what both men saw as a new or alternative ‘apparatus’.

  * * *

  This apparatus was partly a matter of new cultural technologies, derived from the experiments of previous years, which were now supplementing, if not actually replacing, the traditional ‘establishment’ of opera houses, subsidised or commercial theatres and what Eisler termed ‘the bourgeois concert business’. There was the radio, a 1920s medium which had started to perform specially written plays, song cycles and cantatas under the leadership of some outstanding producers and administrators; already Kurt Weill had been commissioned by Frankfurt Radio to set a cycle of Brecht poems as a Berlin Requiem for the tenth anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder in 1929; while other specialists in broadcasting included the conductors Hermann Scherchen and Jascha Horenstein. There was the sound film, and the early synchronisation experiments before the real breakthrough of sound-on-film in 1928/29. And there was also a new concern with the social/educational aspects of the arts; notably the involvement of the amateur singer, actor, photographer or musician who got his pleasure from performing, along with the schoolchildren who were being encouraged to practise an art rather than study art history or music ‘appreciation’. All this had begun to stimulate the avant-garde musicians: Milhaud in France; Hindemith, Weill, Eisler and Dessau in Germany; Shostakovitch in Soviet Russia; Antheil in the USA. Its real laboratory or think-tank was not the radical theatre but the German ‘Neue Musik’, with its festivals first at Donaueschingen, then from 1927 on at Baden-Baden and finally in 1930 in Berlin. Hindemith and Heinrich Burkard were the leaders, Schott of Mainz the interested
publishers, ‘Gebrauchsmusik’ and ‘Gemeinschaftsmusik’ the catchwords – Applied Music and Community Music, as opposed to music for consumers. The notion of ‘Lehre’, meaning teaching or doctrine, was inherent in the second.

  While what is now seen as the mainstream modernism, represented in the International Society for Contemporary Music, was primarily concerned with new forms and systems, more or less irrespective of accessibility, the ‘New Music’ was interested in the economic constraints and new inventions that underlay the German ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ in all the arts – from architecture to cabaret – while at the same time building on a national tradition of education through art which went back to the Renaissance. It was socially and economically alert, technically curious, although (like Hindemith himself) broadly unpolitical, and among its practitioners before Hitler came to power were such varied partnerships as Hindemith and Gottfried Benn, Ernst Toch and the novelist Alfred Döblin, Wilhelm Grosz and Béla Balázs, Edmund Nick and Erich Kástner. In France too there were the collaborations of Milhaud with Cocteau and Paul Claudel. In 1927 the Baden-Baden Festival turned its ears to the short opera – as against the full-scale ‘opera of the times’ (or ‘Zeitoper’) intended for the traditional grand opera apparatus and audience. Weill was prominent among those interested. Through his work as a critic for Radio Berlin he had just begun a collaboration with Brecht, and as a spin-off from their work on a full opera the two men now contributed the jazzy music theatre piece, the ‘Little’ (or ‘Songspiel’) Mahagonny. This was new in scale, idiom, casting (Lotte Lenya, no diva she), staging (in a boxing ring) and intelligibility of the text.

  In 1929 the set subjects (as it were) included works for radio, with Ernst Hardt of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne as an interested patron, and a new extension of the Gemeinschaftsmusik developed by Hindemith with the guilds of amateur singers in 1928. This was the origin of an up-to-date cantata-like form. Eisler composed a seventeen-minute ‘radio cantata’, Tempo der Zeit, to a text by ‘David Weber’ (i.e. Robert Gilbert, a successful writer of lyrics). Walter Goehr set Lion Feuchtwanger’s pseudo-American poems Pep. And Brecht, whose initial contribution Hindemith had clearly valued, wrote the texts for two linked works on the topical subject of the first flights across the Atlantic, that of the American Charles Lindbergh in May 1927, which became world famous, and that of the French airmen Nungesser and Coli some twelve days earlier, which had failed. Here was the origin of the modern ‘Lehrstück’ or didactic piece.