A public dramaturgy lecture on the antecedents to THE THREEPENNY OPERA will be held on Wednesday May 23rd at 4:00 pm at the John Dewey Lounge in Old Mill on the campus of the University of Vermont. The talk, given by Dr. Stephen Nissenbaum, emeritus professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and adjunct professor of history at UVM, is entitled:
"Alienation Effects, 1728-1928: Brechtian Theatrical Strategies in THE BEGGARS' OPERA and THE THREEPENNY OPERA"
In 1928, "The Threepenny Opera" made Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill rich and famous. Exactly two centuries years earlier, "The Beggar's Opera" had done the same for its author, the British poet/playwright John Gay. "The Beggar's Opera" was the conscious model for "Threepenny," which Brecht actually termed an "adaptation."
In this lecture, Dr. Nissenbaum will use a variety of media - including paintings by William Hogarth, songs by Weill and Gay (as well as Handel and Purcell), and a list of parallels between Weimar Germany and eighteenth-century London - to show how John Gay used dramatic strategies that anticipated (and may even have surpassed) those which Brecht and Weill employed 200 years later.
Please join us for this very special event.
Map/Directions of Old Mill/John Dewey Lounge
Read more about the history of John Dewey's Lounge here.
A variety of audio, visual, and print materials including the complete facsimile of the Kurt Weill Edition of the score to THE THREEPENNY OPERA are on reserve at Bailey Howe Library at the first floor reserve desk and at Media Services on the lower level.
For more context and background information on THE THREEPENNY OPERA and the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, check out the following links:
The Threepenny Opera Website: http://www.threepennyopera.org/
International Brecht Society: http://german.lss.wisc.edu/brecht/
The Kurt Weill Foundation: http://www.kwf.org/
International Brecht Archive: Website
Brecht's FBI files from the 1940s: Bertolt Brecht-Freedom of Information Act (FBI)
Lotte Lenya's papers are housed in the Weill/Lenya Archives of the Yale University Music Library (New Haven, CT) and the Weill-Lenya Research Center (7 East 20th Street, New York, NY). Finding aids for both collections have been published and are available from the respective institutions.
Last modified April 11 2008 05:46 PM
