A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"
()
About this ebook
Read more from Gale
A Study Guide for George Orwell's Animal Farm Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for James Clavell's "Shogun" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Louis Sachar's "Holes" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA study guide for Frank Herbert's "Dune" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Auto Detailing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's Macbeth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for James Joyce's "James Joyce's Ulysses" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for Lois Lowry's The Giver Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: JEAN PIAGET Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Furniture Businesses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Study Guide for George Orwell's 1984 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Wole Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horsemen" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: ALBERT BANDURA Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBusiness Plans Handbook: Bakery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide (New Edition) for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Shirley Jackson's The Lottery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for "Postmodernism" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide (New Edition) for William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"
Related ebooks
The Complete Brecht Toolkit Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStudy Guide to Baal and Other Works by Bertolt Brecht Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Peter Weiss's "Marat / Sade" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Man Equals Man" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrecht in L.A.: Brecht in L.A. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTheatre Symposium, Vol. 9: Theatre and Politics in the Twentieth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Good Person (Woman) of Szechuan" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for August Strindberg's "Miss Julie" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWoyzeck: Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for Eugene Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Joe Orton's "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children" Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRealism and the American Dramatic Tradition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStreet Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStudy Guide to The Major Plays of Eugene O'Neill Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for David Rabe's "Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Professions in Contemporary Drama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "Seagull" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStaging Depth: Eugene O'neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnthonius Margaritha and the Jewish Faith: Jewish Life and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Germany Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrand by Henrik Ibsen - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlare Path Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Theory of the Theatre, and Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Teaching Methods & Materials For You
The Success Principles(TM) - 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Speed Reading: Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour: Mind Hack, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Better Grammar in 30 Minutes a Day Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Jack Reacher Reading Order: The Complete Lee Child’s Reading List Of Jack Reacher Series Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Personal Finance for Beginners - A Simple Guide to Take Control of Your Financial Situation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Speed Reading: How to Read a Book a Day - Simple Tricks to Explode Your Reading Speed and Comprehension Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5LSAT For Dummies (with Free Online Practice Tests) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Take Smart Notes. One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inside American Education Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How You Learn Is How You Live: Using Nine Ways of Learning to Transform Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Think Like a Lawyer--and Why: A Common-Sense Guide to Everyday Dilemmas Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How To Do Motivational Interviewing: A guidebook for beginners Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers: The Secret to Loving Teens Effectively Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Principles: Life and Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything You Need to Know About Personal Finance in 1000 Words Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From 150 to 179 on the LSAT Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Science of Making Friends: Helping Socially Challenged Teens and Young Adults Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lost Tools of Learning Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy's Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera" - Gale
4
The Threepenny Opera
Bertolt Brecht
1928
Introduction
Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 play The Threepenny Opera was his most financially successful play and the work with which he is most closely identified. The play is an early example of his epic theater,
consisting of theatrical innovations designed to awaken audiences to social responsibility. Epic theater uses alienating
devices, such as placards, asides to the audience, projected images, discordant music and lighting, and disconnected episodes to frustrate the viewer’s expectations for simple entertainment. This theater of illusions
(as anti-realists such as Brecht termed it) allowed the audience to comfortably and passively view a production without being changed by it. It was Brecht’s intention to use drama to invoke social change, to shake his audiences out of their complacency and expect more from the theater than entertainment.
The disruptive capacity of Brecht’s drama was designed to awaken the theater-goers critical mind and galvanize them into political awareness and action. The Threepenny Opera, which he produced with the aid of his secretary (and lover) Elisabeth Hauptmann (who had just translated John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera [1728] into German) and composer Kurt Weill, is a satire of bourgeois society, containing many of the major elements of epic theater: placards announcing the ballad singers, discordant music, and a plot that frustrates expectations for romantic resolution. The Threepenny Opera is very closely based on Gay’s eighteenth-century play, another social satire. Brecht and Hauptmann borrowed ballads from Francois Villon, and Weill turned them into darkly twisted cabaret songs for this version of the play.
Brecht also made some stylistic changes, transforming the protagonist, Macheath, into a morally ambiguous hero, emphasizing the parallels between Polly and Lucy, and creating the character of Sheriff Jackie Brown, a former army buddy of Macheath’s who protects his friend’s criminal activity in exchange for a percentage of his spoils. Brecht’s play places blame on capitalist society for the criminal underworld that Gay presented merely as a mirror-image satire of eighteenth-century aristocracy. Weill’s discordant mesh of jazz, folk, and avant-garde music adds to the play’s popular appeal, which was the polar opposite of what Brecht wanted: he designed his epic theater
to awaken the audience’s critical judgement, not its empathy. Despite Brecht’s designs, The Threepenny Opera has become one of the hallmarks of musical theater and his most popular play. While it is regarded in modern drama as a significant political work,