Group from Upper 1, age 18
. . . The play could be used to show what damage is done by superstition. It might be understandable in its own Japanese context, but here it is only for aesthetic connoisseurs.
M. Tautz, Lower 3a, age 14
. . . Most of the form feel that the play should definitely remain as it is. At most there should be an introductory note in the programme to convince the audience of the necessity of this brutal yet not unrealistic affair.
H. Zeschel, Lower 1b, age 17
. . . The group must act in solidarity to bring the inadequate invalid home. . . The rest of the group must on no account exert any moral pressure on the Boy to secure his agreement. . . The question is that of testing whether the advantage secured is great enough to justify the Boy’s sacrificing his life.
Gerhard Krieger (Workers’ Course), age 20
[From Brecht: Schriften 4, Berlin and Frankfurt edition, edited by Peter Kraft and others, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1991. Brecht may also (as suggested by Ernest Borneman in his slightly hazy account in Die Urszene, S. Fischer, 1977) have consulted participants from other schools.]
Editorial Notes
The message of agreement
After Kurt Weill’s death in 1950 his widow Lotte Lenya would suggest that it irked him to compose such severely didactic plays under Brecht’s (by that time undesirable) influence, and that he needed ‘sich auszumusizieren’, to discharge the music in him, by composing operas or symphonic works instead. His remarks quoted above show that she was wrong. It was in the first place Weill who was drawn to Waley’s text when Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it, and who wished to set it as a radio or school opera. And despite its unpretentious style and scale, he did not want it considered a ‘Nebenwerk’, a secondary work.
The changes made to Waley’s version represent two stages in their shared conception of this highly successful piece (which had two or three hundred performances in Germany before Hitler came to power). First came the introduction of the notion of ‘Einverstándnis’, Consent or Agreement – a combination of understanding and approval or acquiescence. Then there were the further alterations which Brecht made following the first (1930) production and its critical treatment by liberals like his old friend Frank Warschauer, who saw this supposed virtue as entailing mere obedience and conformism among the country’s youth. These are the changes made in autumn 1930 before the play’s appearance in the 1931 Versuche, as indicated in our translation and taken into account by Weill in his two musical additions.
But beside what we may call the Brecht/Weill changes there is the alternative text offered in He Said No – to which the composer was not a party, so that it can only be performed without his music and is wrongly termed a school opera. And finally, lying almost ignored beneath the original Waley text, there are Waley’s annotations which Hauptmann did not translate: the first at the end of Act 1, the second at the end of the play. The former says: ‘Here follows a long lyric passage describing their journey and ascent. The frequent occurrence of place-names and plays of word on such names makes it impossible to translate.’ The second, following after ‘And. . . flat stones they flung’, reads:
I have only summarized the last chorus. When the pilgrims reach the summit, they pray to their founder, En no Gyoja, and to the God Fudo that the boy may be restored to life. In answer to their prayer a Spirit appears carrying the boy in her arms. She lays him at the Priest’s feet and vanishes again [. . .].
There is no mention of these in the Versuche edition of 1931 or in Weill’s piano score (UE 8206). Only in Peter Szondi’s ‘Materialien’ volume (Suhrkamp, 1968) is the Hauptmann translation followed by an unattributed footnote, to say, less ambiguously, that ‘The ending of the Japanese original tells how the boy was awakened to a new life.’
From Hauptmann’s translation to the double text
Szondi’s useful publication also shows what the three collaborators had added to Hauptmann’s translation to make the text of the first performances and piano score. In brief these changes were, taken scene by scene:
Act One
1 The chorus on ‘consent’ is new.
3 So is the term ‘Forschungs-’ (scientific), as applied to the expedition.
4 The Teacher’s speech was originally in prose. The Boy’s four lines following, with their reference to ‘doctors in the town. . . , medicine and consultation’, are new.
5 Similarly with their reiteration in the Teacher’s speech. The Mother’s speech was in prose. The four concluding lines of the scene are also new.
6 The four lines for the Teacher and the Mother (mentioning ‘consent’) are new.
Act Two
7 This whole chorus has been developed from the Boy’s two lines at the end of 6.
8 Waley’s ‘Leader’ and ‘Pilgrim’ have become the Three Students. ‘Pilgrims’ are now the Full Chorus. Substance of the scene is the same up to the ‘Long pause’. Then the three lines from ‘Once past the hut’ to ‘one’s to cross it’ are new, as is the exchange from ‘down to the valley?’ to ‘Boy sits down’.
9 Up to ‘tell him tenderly of this Great Custom’ it is effectively Waley’s text apart from the interpolated phrase ‘Also he has sat down’. Thereafter the Three Students’ intention to ask the Boy’s agreement, and the Full Chorus’s repetition of this are both added to Waley’s text.
10 Is mainly new, apart from the Teacher’s first two sentences, the Boy’s response from ‘I knew quite well’ down to ‘drove me on to join you’, and the concluding Full Chorus, except for its opening mention of the jug. The crucial addition is where the Boy says ‘Yes’. To which the Teacher adds ‘He says yes to me’ and the Three Students echo ‘He says yes to us’.
To summarise these, we may say that the idea of ‘Einverständnis’ or agreement was inherent in the original play by Seami’s son-in-law Zenchiku, where it is expressed by the Boy, on hearing of his unavoidable fate, saying ‘I understand’ (Waley p. 235, our scene 10). The collaborators sought to spell this out, starting with the new opening chorus and hoping to secularise the idea, but it remains rooted in a religious discipline, though certainly an un-Christian one. Doctors, medicine, the town beyond the mountains, the jug, are so many accessories to the original notion of praying for the sick mother: non-religious ways of motivating the Boy’s understanding and reconciling it with what Brecht saw as ‘the scientific age’.
This did not work. Not only critics like Warschauer, but also some of the schoolchildren for whom the play was intended objected to what Weill and Dr Fischer (above) saw as its stressing of ‘the importance of obedience’. It was Warschauer who attacked this concept most strongly in his review for Die Weltbühne (8 July 1930), comparing it with the attitude of supporters of the First World War and accusing the work of
subtly but very effectively embracing every nasty ingredient of reactionary thinking grounded in irrational authority.
The order of events
Brecht himself was not at the premiere, but among those who attended was one of the music teachers at the Kaiser-Friedrich Realgymnasium in the Neukölln (south central) district of Berlin – a progressive school then in the process of changing its (imperial) name to that of Karl-Marx-Schule. This was Paul Hermann, who then seems to have raised the possibility of performing the work with some of his senior students. His first discussions with them and his fellow-teachers revealed a mixture of approval and scepticism, notably (reports Albrecht Dümling in Dorothea Kolland’s symposium Rixdorfer Musen, Neinsager und Caprifischer, Edition Hentrich, Berlin, 1990) with regard to the need for the Boy’s self-sacrifice. Since Brecht himself appeared open to suggestions, Hermann that autumn brought a group of students round to the writer’s flat to talk their problems over.
‘At an early stage’, writes Dümling, ‘Brecht put forward the idea of He Said No: an alternative version to be performed along with He Said Yes, leaving the audience to decide the matter for itself. This would have been ‘a similar pairing to t
hat of Lindbergh’s Flight and the Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent in 1929’. The students however wanted a clear-cut solution, and so ‘a few weeks later [Brecht] came up with a third version of the play, which at once met with their approval’ (see p. 128 of the cited article). This took into account a number of the points raised in further discussions held throughout the school following the autumn meeting, ranging from the views of ten-year-olds like Karl Korsch’s daughter Barbara (whose mother was on the staff) to those of young adults of eighteen or twenty. A full report of these discussions was sent to Brecht by Hans Freese, the school’s head of Arts, on 9 December. The selection which we print above was immediately given by him and Hauptmann to be published in the Versuche edition of 1931, where they constitute his only notes on the play.
The new version was publicly performed by the school on 18 May of that year; the conductor was Willi Linow, a senior student who had rehearsed under Kurt Weill; the director Heinz Kuckhahn, another student who would be an assistant to Brecht in 1948. He Said No was not then performed, despite the suggestion in the Versuche note, nor do we know of any performance before Hitler came to power two years later. Brecht’s German editors, including Elisabeth Hautpmann in later years, all treat it as having been written after the new version, but the Dümling account is much more plausible. Otherwise why was it derived from the first He Said Yes, rather than the second? And why does it by-pass points emphasised in the school discussions?
During Brecht’s lifetime it seems that He Said No was only once staged in tandem with He Said Yes. This was a studio performance by the Living Theater in New York in 1951. The first German production of both plays was in Düsseldorf in 1958.
THE DECISION
Texts by Brecht and Eisler
NOTE TO THE TEXT
The Decision, with music by Hanns Eisler, is an attempt to practise a particular attitude of intervention by means of a ‘Lehrstück’.
[From Brecht: Versuche 4, 1931.]
OPEN LETTER TO THE ARTISTIC BOARD OF THE ‘NEUE MUSIK’, BERLIN, 1930: Heinrich Burkhard, Paul Hindemith, Georg Schuenemann
Berlin, 12 May 1930
You have refused to take responsibility for our ‘Lehrstück’ as agreed between us, and referred the matter to a ‘Programme Committee’ of unknown membership. You ask us to submit our text to this committee to dispel political reservations. (You add that this check is required for all works.) We have refused, for the following reasons:
If you wish to continue your very important performances aimed at opening up new applications of music, then you should on no account make yourselves financially dependent on persons or institutions that are out to forbid you a number of applications (possibly not the worst) on other than artistic grounds. Just as it is not your artistic task to criticise the police, so is it inadvisable for you to let the police of all people finance your artistic performances; you might then be having them prejudged by the police. There are some tasks for the new music that cannot be forbidden by the state, but cannot exactly be financed by it. Grateful as we should be if the police president does not forbid our works, we don’t have to go on and call for a police band!
Apart from that, we have at last reached the position we always wanted; didn’t we always call for amateur art? Haven’t we long had our doubts of these huge institutions whose hands are tied by a hundred reservations?
We are cutting these important performances clear of all kinds of dependence, and allowing them to be realised by those they are meant for, who alone have a use for them: by workers’ choruses, amateur dramatic groups, school choruses and school orchestras, in other words those people who neither can pay for art nor are paid for art, but just want to take part in it.
We hope you realise that as things are, your resignation from the artistic board of Neue Musik Berlin 1930 as a protest against all attempts at censorship would do more for new music than any staging of a further music festival in summer 1930.
(Signed) Bertolt Brecht. Hanns Eisler
In the event the festival was held and performance of The Decision was refused ‘due to formal inadequacy of the text’.
[From Notes in Versuche 4, 1931. First published in the Berliner Borsenkurier on 13 May 1930 along with a response by the addressees to say that the work had not been rejected, as only the text had been sent them and the Programme Committee still had to see the music. Asked by the paper about this new body, they stated two days later that it had no role in the planning of the festival programmes, and they would permit no censorship by it. ‘From what we have learnt of the text however, we must assume that the music takes a subordinate place. We have neither the right nor the obligation to use our events for the experimental staging of literary trends or intentions.’ Their board, they said, ‘bases its decisions on strictly artistic viewpoints, just as it did in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden’. At this the paper commented that it was odd for a Programme Committee to have no influence on the programme. Brecht’s letter 153 to Eisler from France a month or two later shows him calling this episode an ‘Edelpleite’, a splendid fiasco.]
NOTE TO THE AUDIENCE
The ‘Lehrstück’ The Decision is not a play in the normal sense. It is an event put on by a mass chorus and four players. In today’s performance, which is meant to be more like a kind of demonstration, the role of the players is taken by four actors. But it can of course also be performed in a perfectly simple and primitive manner, and this is its primary aim.
Briefly the story is as follows: four Communist agitators are facing a Party inquiry, represented by the mass chorus. They have been conducting Communist propaganda in China, and in the course of this they had to shoot their youngest comrade. In order to convince the court of the need for their decision to shoot him, they show how the Young Comrade behaved in a number of different political situations. They show him as revolutionary in his feelings but inadequately disciplined and too reluctant to listen to his reason, so that in the end he became a real threat to the movement. The ‘Lehrstück’’s aim is to show incorrect political attitudes and thus to teach correct ones. The performance is meant to provoke discussion of the political usefulness of this type of event.
[Cited in Reiner Steinweg: Die Massnahme. Kritische Ausgabe, Suhrkamp, 1972, p. 237. Steinweg thought this was probably a programme note for the first performance on the night of 13 December 1930, but had so far been unable to locate a printed copy.]
REHEARSING ‘THE DECISION’
The dramatic presentation has to be simple and sober; there is no need for special energy or particularly ‘expressive’ acting. The players simply have at any moment to show the attitude on the part of the four which one must know in order to understand and judge the situation. (The three agitators’ text can be shared out.) Each of the four players must have at least one chance to show the attitude of the Young Comrade; hence each should play one of his principal scenes.
The performers (players and singers) have the task of teaching as they learn. As Germany has half a million worker-singers, what occurs in the process of singing is at least as important as what occurs in that of listening. However, no attempt to derive recipes for political action from The Decision should be made without knowing the ABC of dialectical materialism. Some of the ethical concepts occurring in the play are subject to Lenin’s remark about morality: ‘We base our morality on the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat!’
[‘Einübung der Massnahme’, from Notes in Versuche 4, 1931.]
SOME TIPS FOR REHEARSAL OF ‘THE DECISION’
1 First and foremost it is essential to break with the ‘lovely singing’ typical of choral societies. The profound murmur of the basses, the poetic resonance (not to say Schmalz) of the tenors – these have no place in The Decision.
2 The aim has to be a very precise, tight, rhythmic kind of singing. The singer must try to sing without expression; that is to say, he must not put his feelings into the music as in a love song, but present his notes as a reporter, like a r
eport at a mass meeting, i.e. cold, sharp and trenchant.
3 Above all the aim must be to perform not with feeling but with clarity.
4 The whole audience must be able to understand the text throughout. The best thing is for the chorus to speak the text in the rhythm of the setting before learning the musical notes. Above all so as to secure consistent pronunciation of the words.
5 The basic tempo of The Decision is that of walking, marching; above all the tempi must not drag.
6 It is very important that the singers should not treat the text as self-evident, but should discuss it during the rehearsals.
7 Each singer has to be quite clear about the political content of what he is singing, and should criticise it.
8 The choruses in The Decision are a mass report, communicating a specific political content to the masses.
[Article by Eisler in the Berlin magazine Kampfmusik, March/April 1932, republished in his Musik und Politik. Schriften 1924–1948, edited by Günter Meyer, Leipzig, 1973, p. 168.]
QUESTIONNAIRE FOR THE AUDIENCE
1 Do you think an event like this is politically instructive for the audience?
2 Do you think it is politically instructive for the performers (players and chorus)?
3 To which lessons embodied in The Decision do you object politically?
4 Do you think our choice of form is right for your political objectives? Can you suggest alternatives?
Brecht Collected Plays: 3: Lindbergh's Flight; The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent; He Said Yes/He Said No; The Decision; The Mother; The Exception & the ... St Joan of the Stockyards (World Classics) Page 34