Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  Stravinsky was in California, but too busy; Brecht never worked with him. And for the rest of his time in America Dessau had to abandon his operatic hopes.

  There was however a first English-language production of the work at Berkeley in California, where Roger Sessions was the resident composer. In September 1946 Heinrich Schnitzler, the Austrian playwright’s son, producer at the university theatre, had asked Brecht for another children’s play like He Says Yes which might make a double-bill with Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale for performance in the spring of 1947. He was sent Hays’s translation of The Trial of Lucullus and the original German texts, but Brecht never seems to have taken any interest in the project, which overlapped with his plans for Laughton’s Galileo and his family’s return to Europe in the autumn. It is regarded by Sessions’s biographer Andrea Olmstead as his ‘most successful dramatic work’, while David Drew, reviewing a later production in New York, calls it ‘an opera that towers above the American operas favoured by the Met’. Yet it has seldom been performed even in the US, and this was at least for a time due to the reluctance of the copyright holders, who ensured that the subsequent Dessau opera was far better known. Until 1989, in fact, the original broadcast text, well translated by Hays and set by Sessions, remained virtually unpublished among Brecht’s works. Consciously or not, the changes made in the 1951 Trial version were camouflaged.

  * * *

  The new phase in this story began when both Brecht and Dessau were back in Berlin, just before Christmas 1948, for rehearsals of the historic opening production of Mother Courage. It seems that they were in the Möwe café, where Brecht was talking to R.A. Stemmle from the North-West German radio. Suddenly Brecht called across the room to Dessau that he could get him a commission for an opera; Stemmle was looking for a radio opera version of The Trial of Lucullus, and there would be a sizeable advance. This appealed to Dessau, who (he said) had no money and no substantial tasks; he would get a contract soon. Unfortunately no contract materialised, but clearly this set the composer thinking, and from 1949 till 1951, the date of the work’s first publication in the Versuche series, he was consulting Brecht about the change of scale and content which seemed to be called for by the ten-year-old radio play. What bothered him was partly the change of medium, but he also felt that the Nuremberg Trials, the Hiroshima bomb and (from June 1950) the Korean War invalidated the original open-minded ending of the 1940 Hörspiel script, whose pacifism would be contrary to the policy of the new (East) German Democratic Republic. Brecht at that time had other and larger problems: notably the establishment of the Berliner Ensemble and its programme, the attempt to get a footing in Salzburg where he had hoped that Von Einem would compose a Lucullus opera and his own position as a leading GDR writer. Nevertheless over the next months he agreed with Dessau to make the required changes in the script.

  In 1949 the newly established Suhrkamp publishing house in West Berlin began to revive the grey-bound Versuche series of Brecht’s more recent works, with Elisabeth Hauptmann, newly returned from America, in her pre-Hitler role as its editor. Formerly Brecht’s chief collaboratrix, she was for a time Dessau’s wife. In 1951 Versuche 11, the third of the new issues, included the Hörspiel The Trial of Lucullus, whose 1940 version had remained unpublished since its appearance in the Moscow Internationale Literatur. Already a fair amount of extra material had found its way into the new text, and this was followed by five pages of ‘Notes to the opera The Condemnation of Lucullus’ signed ‘Brecht. Dessau’. These started:

  The ‘Hörspiel’ The Trial of Lucullus was the basis for the opera The Condemnation of Lucullus. The former work ended with the verses

  The court

  Withdraws for consultation.

  ‘The Judgement’ (scene 14) was borrowed from the latter. It kept its title, however, the better to distinguish it from this.

  The same notes also include the changed passages in scene 9 (‘The Hearing’) where the king whom Lucullus had defeated was applauded for his defence of his own country, and a brief reference to the final damnation of the great general for waging an aggressive war. From then until the first publication of the 1939/40 text in the Berlin and Frankfurt edition of 1989 the 1951 Versuche version was generally taken to be the Hörspiel text, and theatres abroad were not allowed to use the previous ending.

  A first project for the opera was ready by February 1950, when the East Berlin State Opera director Ernst Legal, an old friend of Brecht’s, sent a script to the Ministry for Education. His interest had been stimulated by Brecht’s designer Caspar Neher, an Austrian subject who was independent of the Communist-led GDR, and for the Ministry Kurt Bork agreed. It would open in March 1951. The conductor would be Hermann Scherchen from Switzerland, an admirer of Brecht and outstanding proponent of modern music; the producer, the Opera’s own Wolfgang Völker. At first all seemed to be well. The piano score was finished, even though the latest textual changes had still to be worked in. The Education Minister was Paul Wandel, who had appointed Brecht to the Academy of Arts under Arnold Zweig’s presidency. But following the Soviet campaign against the international modern movement in the arts, the Central Committee made the new crime of ‘Formalism’ the main topic of its Fifth Conference. This too was scheduled for March 1951, when rehearsals for the opera were far advanced. Then in June the first meeting of the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom was held in West Berlin.

  The material for a major controversy was now there; the Party called for reports, not always from the best-qualified judges; the verdict of Dessau’s fellow-composers was bad; it was difficult, dissonant music, with lavish use of percussion, and not helped by a full trial rehearsal on 13 March to piano accompaniment, which made Wandel say he had been right to propose rejecting the work. The ensuing discussion was at the Opera, and was carried on the same evening at the Möwe club, with Georg Knepler and Ernst Hermann Meyer as the main critics. Scherchen too was there, but could not show the final, damning ‘Judgement’ which had not yet been rehearsed. Publicly, the production was cancelled, but the first night on the 17th now took place before an officially recruited audience drawn from

  good, firm comrades and friends who could be counted on for a healthy reaction to this formalistic music. All departments had been told what this discussion was about.

  So said Maria Rentmeister of the Ministry, noting that some 200 tickets had been commandeered by Brecht, Dessau, Scherchen and Legal. The total audience expected must have been at least 1,500, and their reaction was most enthusiastic. Scherchen is reputed to have said he had never known a modern work to score such a success.

  President Pieck was in the audience, as was Walter Ulbricht, the Party Secretary, and now the former took a hand, holding a meeting at his own house a week after the première with Brecht, Dessau, Grotewohl, Wandel and other politicians. Brecht insisted on his contract with Legal. So The Condemnation of Lucullus would remain off the repertoire for the present, but would be performed normally in the 1951/2 season; and during the next few months the two collaborators would work to improve it. Meanwhile there were some organisational changes. Wandel’s Education Ministry lost its responsibility for the arts in favour of a new Committee for Art Affairs, an Office for Literature and other organs poorly thought of by Brecht. Legal resigned from the State Opera and his other functions; he had just passed seventy. What certainly did not change was the official policy of discouraging modern or difficult art under the label of ‘formalism’, and giving priority to the ‘Kulturerbe’ or national heritage. Among the consequences was the denunciation and eventual stifling of Hanns Eisler’s opera Johann Faustus, whose music was never written.

  An interesting story, but for us an upsetting one. How could the very existence of the first and best version of Brecht’s play have been hidden from our view for so many years? It must above all have been because of something intolerable, the cultural Cold War. The Soviet orthodoxy of the 1930s on the one hand, the counter-propaganda of the Congress for Cultural Freed
om on the other – their friction for so many years has given a news value to a case like that of Dessau’s opera which acquired an interest over and above its merits. We have not denied it, but the fusion of some of its elements with the ambiguous ‘radio play’ of 1951 (e.g. in the Versuche edition) will never produce a satisfactory work. What we have done in this volume therefore is to start with the more spontaneous text of 1939/40, list and identify the infiltrated additions or alternatives of the intervening decade, then give the full opera text of 1951, the year of its controversial performance. The objective must be to bring the first of these three versions out of the cupboard and get it played as it deserves.

  THE EDITORS

  Chronology

  1898

  10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.

  1917

  Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university.

  1918

  Work on his first play, Baal. In Augsburg Brecht is called up as medical orderly till end of year. Elected to Soldiers’ Council as Independent Socialist (USPD) following Armistice.

  1919

  Brecht writing second play Drums in the Night. In January Spartacist Rising in Berlin. Foundation of German Communist Party (KPD). Rosa Luxemburg murdered. April–May: Bavarian Soviet. Summer: Weimar Republic constituted. Birth of Brecht’s illegitimate son Frank Banholzer.

  1920

  May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg.

  1921

  Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud.

  1922

  A turning point in the arts. End of utopian Expressionism; new concern with technology. Brecht’s first visit to Berlin, seeing theatres, actors, publishers and cabaret. He writes ‘Of Poor BB’ on the return journey. Autumn: becomes a dramaturg in Munich. Première of Drums in the Night, a prize-winning national success. Marries Marianne Zoff, an opera singer.

  1923

  Galloping German inflation stabilised by November currency reform. In Munich Hitler’s new National Socialist party stages unsuccessful ‘beer-cellar putsch’.

  1924

  ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ exhibition at Mannheim gives its name to the new sobriety in the arts. Brecht to Berlin as assisant in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater.

  1925

  Field-Marshal von Hindenburg becomes President. Elisabeth Hauptmann starts working with Brecht. Two seminal films: Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. Brecht writes birthday tribute to Bernard Shaw.

  1926

  Première of Man equals Man in Darmstadt. Now a freelance; starts reading Marx. His first book of poems, the Devotions, includes the ‘Legend of the Dead Soldier’.

  1927

  After reviewing the poems and a broadcast of Man equals Man, Kurt Weill approaches Brecht for a libretto. Result is the text of Mahagonny, whose ‘Songspiel’ version is performed in a boxing-ring at Hindemith’s Baden-Baden music festival in July. In Berlin Brecht helps adapt The Good Soldier Schweik for Piscator’s high-tech theatre.

  1928

  August 31: première of The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill, based on Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.

  1929

  Start of Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’. Divorced from Marianne, Brecht now marries the actress Helene Weigel. May 1: Berlin police break up banned KPD demonstration, witnessed by Brecht. Summer: Brecht writes two didactic music-theatre pieces with Weill and Hindemith, and neglects The Threepenny Opera’s successor Happy End, which is a flop. From now on he stands by the KPD. Autumn: Wall Street crash initiates world economic crisis. Cuts in German arts budgets combine with renewed nationalism to create cultural backlash.

  1930

  Nazi election successes; end of parliamentary government. Unemployed 3 million in first quarter, about 5 million at end of the year. March: première of the full-scale Mahagonny opera in Leipzig Opera House.

  1931

  German crisis intensifies. Aggressive KPD arts policy: agitprop theatre, marching songs, political photomontage. In Moscow the Comintern forms international associations of revolutionary artists, writers, musicians and theatre people.

  1932

  Première of Brecht’s agitational play The Mother (after Gorky) with Eisler’s music. Kuhle Wampe, his militant film with Eisler, is held up by the censors. He meets Sergei Tretiakov at the film’s première in Moscow. Summer: the Nationalist Von Papen is made Chancellor. He denounces ‘cultural bolshevism’, and deposes the SPD-led Prussian administration.

  1933

  January 30: Hitler becomes Chancellor with Papen as his deputy. The Prussian Academy is purged; Goering becomes Prussian premier. A month later the Reichstag is burnt down, the KPD outlawed. The Brechts instantly leave via Prague; at first homeless. Eisler is in Vienna, Weill in Paris, where he agrees to compose a ballet with song texts by Brecht: The Seven Deadly Sins, premièred there in June. In Germany Nazi students burn books; all parties and trade unions banned; first measures against the Jews. Summer: Brecht in Paris works on anti-Nazi publications. With the advance on his Threepenny Novel he buys a house on Fyn island, Denmark, overlooking the Svendborg Sound, where the family will spend the next six years. Margarete Steffin, a young Berlin Communist, goes with them. Autumn: he meets the Danish Communist actress Ruth Berlau, a doctor’s wife.

  1934

  Spring: suppression of Socialist rising in Austria. Eisler stays with Brecht to work on Round Heads and Pointed Heads songs. Summer: Brecht misses the first Congress of Soviet Writers, chaired by Zhdanov along the twin lines of Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism. October: in London with Eisler.

  1935

  Italy invades Ethiopia. Hitler enacts the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews. March–May: Brecht to Moscow for international theatre conference. Meets Kun and Knorin of Comintern Executive. Eisler becomes president of the International Music Bureau. At the 7th Comintern Congress Dimitrov calls for all antifascist parties to unite in Popular Fronts against Hitler and Mussolini. Autumn: Brecht with Eisler to New York for Theatre Union production of The Mother.

  1936

  Soviet purges lead to arrests of many Germans in USSR, most of them Communists; among them Carola Neher and Ernst Ottwalt, friends of the Brechts. International cultural associations closed down. Official campaign against ‘Formalism’ in the arts. Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet jounalist, founds Das Wort as a literary magazine for the German emigration, with Brecht as one of the editors. Popular Front government in Spain resisted by Franco and other generals, with the support of the Catholic hierarchy. The Spanish Civil War becomes a great international cause.

  1937

  Summer: in Munich, opening of Hitler’s House of German Art. Formally, the officially approved art is closely akin to Russian ‘Socialist Realism’. In Russia Tretiakov is arrested as a Japanese spy, interned in Siberia and later shot. October: Brecht’s Spanish war play Señora Carrar’s Rifles, with Weigel in the title part, is performed in Paris, and taken up by antifascist and amateur groups in many countries.

  1938

  January: in Moscow Meyerhold’s avant-garde theatre is abolished. March: Hitler takes over Austria without resistance. It becomes part of Germany. May 21: première of scenes from Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in a Paris hall. Autumn: Munich Agreement, by which Britain, France and Italy force Czechoslovakia to accept Hitler’s demands. In Denmark Brecht writes the first version of Galileo. In Moscow Koltsov disappears into arrest after returning from Spain.

  1939

  March: Hitler takes over Prague and the rest of the Czech territories. Madrid surrenders to Franco; end of the Civil War. Eisler has emigrated to New York. April: the Brechts leave Denmark for Stockholm. Steffin follows. May: Brecht’s Svend-borg Poems published. His father dies in Germany. Denmark accepts Hitler’s offer of a Non-Aggression Pact. August 23: Ribbentrop and Molotov agree Nazi-Soviet Pact. September 1: Hitler attacks Poland and unleashes Second World War
. Stalin occupies Eastern Poland, completing its defeat in less than three weeks. All quiet in the West. Autumn: Brecht writes Mother Courage and the radio play Lucullus in little over a month. November: Stalin attacks Finland.

  1940

  Spring: Hitler invades Norway and Denmark. In May his armies enter France through the Low Countries, taking Paris in mid-June. The Brechts hurriedly leave for Finland, taking Steffin with them. They aim to travel on to the US, where Brecht has been offered a teaching job in New York at the New School. July: the Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki invites them to her country estate, which becomes the setting for Puntila, the comedy she and Brecht write there.

  1941

  April: première of Mother Courage in Zurich. May: he gets US visas for the family and a tourist visa for Steffin. On 15th they leave with Berlau for Moscow to take the Trans-Siberian railway. In Vladivostok they catch a Swedish ship for Los Angeles, leaving just nine days before Hitler, in alliance with Finland, invades Russia. June: Steffin dies of tuberculosis in a Moscow sanatorium, where they have had to leave her. July: once in Los Angeles, the Brechts decide to stay there in the hope of film work. December: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brings the US into the war. The Brechts become ‘enemy aliens’.

  1942

  Spring: Eisler arrives from New York. He and Brecht work on Fritz Lang’s film Hangmen Also Die. Brecht and Feuchtwanger write The Visions of Simone Machard; sell film rights to MGM. Ruth Berlau takes a job in New York. August: the Brechts rent a pleasant house and garden in Santa Monica. Autumn: Germans defeated at Stalingrad and El Alamein. Turning point of World War 2.