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Brecht at the opera.

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Brecht at the Opera. By Joy H. Calico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. [xvi, 282 p. ISBN: 978-0-520-25482-4. $45.00.] Music examples, bibliographic references, index.

As a title, "Brecht at the Opera" is meant to allude to a number of things, largely by virtue of the polysemous preposition: Brecht as operagoer; Brecht as compared to "cultural touchstones that simultaneously honor and deflate operatic conventions" (p. 15; the Marx Brothers' and Queen's A Night at the Opera are cited as examples); even the ominous tone of "Grimes is at his exercise"--although few would argue that Brecht's "exercise" was as sinister as that of Peter Grimes, and certainly Joy H. Calico, the author of the present volume, does not. Brecht at the Opera seeks to fill a void in Brecht research, namely, that there has been no study that "systematically interrogates or theorizes about Brecht's lifelong engagement with opera as distinct from other musical genres" (p. 1). Precisely what distinguishes opera from other musical genres is not directly addressed, but this is hardly the author's fault, and much more an index of the difficulties she faced. Brecht's writings with regard to opera add up to something less than a comprehensive or consistent theory; he left little in the way of a paper trail of letters and diaries to detail his experiences and impressions; film documentation of stagings in which Brecht had an active hand are virtually nonexistent. Consequently, opera is that against which Brecht polemicized, and from which he borrowed; operas (admittedly of certain kinds) are what he collaborated on in their place. Calico prudently casts her net broadly, scrutinizing a wide variety of Brechtian projects that involved music, including the "anti-opera" Lehrstucke and abandoned fragments (even lost ones), as well as those works that...

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