Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 3

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  The first of these, to music by Weill and Hindemith, was Lindbergh’s Flight, which was presented under the heading of ‘original music for radio’ and staged and broadcast accordingly. The other, to music by Hindemith only, was called by him ‘lehrstück’ (with a lower-case ‘l’), then published later by Brecht as the Baden-Baden Lehrstück vom Einverständnis (meaning consent or agreement, a concept of self-sacrifice that became important to the writer for the next three or four years). Both works underwent substantial revision, as we have tried to indicate in our texts. The Lindbergh piece was to have been composed entirely by Weill, who however ran out of time so that Hindemith – a very rapid worker – came in to fill the gaps. After the performance Weill completed his own setting, which was then published; then Brecht made changes before his text was published separately, now with the subtitle ‘A Radio Lehrstück for Boys and Girls’. Prior to this, too, the music of the lehrstück had been published (with due notification) by Schott before Brecht made his alterations. In neither case did the composer set all the revisions and additions which the writer made – so that there is not really a ‘final’ version of either.

  During 1929 two new elements entered the story. The first was Brecht’s traumatic witnessing of the May Day demonstrations in Berlin, when the police – who were still under the Social-Democratic Prussian administration – intervened forcibly and some thirty demonstrators were killed: an experience that is supposed to have impelled him towards the Communist Party. This was some three months before the Baden-Baden performances, though it may have influenced the subsequent revisions, notably the changing of the individual aviator in each case into a collective plural: ‘The Lindberghs’, ‘The Airmen’. The second was his introduction to the cool formality and detached narrative of the Japanese Nō theatre, which may already have been in the air at Baden-Baden, since Weill knew Milhaud, who was a close friend and collaborator of Claudel. As a French diplomat in the Far East this great poet had seen many No productions and had one of his short mime plays staged with Japanese music in the Tokyo Royal Theatre. Now he and Milhaud were planning the production of Christophe Colomb, which Claudel had begun to write in 1927, the year of Lindbergh’s crossing. Its premiere would be in the Berlin State Opera in 1930, and would include some use of film.

  The decisive event, however, was Elisabeth Hauptmann’s reading of Waley’s The Nō Plays of Japan, a book also known to Claudel, which an English friend gave her in the winter of 1928/29. She was translating some of these when Kurt Weill consulted her about a possible text for a school opera he had been asked to write for the ‘Neue Musik’s 1930 Berlin festival. The play called Taniko or The Valley-Hurling seemed to meet his needs, so he then asked Brecht (who apparently had not yet read it) to adapt it for him. Enough of Waley’s style and feeling for language remained to determine those of the German version, and as a result our translation sets out from Waley’s beautiful English, adjusted to Weill’s music as well as to Brecht’s changes and additions. Once again however the music has in effect been left somewhat stranded by the revisions of the text. As we show, the text printed in all the main Brecht editions is a modified version which takes account of the objections raised by liberals and the Left to the starkly authoritarian nature of the Consent or Agreement which the original play seemed to propose.

  In the earlier version used at the premiere the figure of the Boy who goes off to the mountains, endangers his companions and has to be killed, struck some critics as being too much the exemplary model of a well-disciplined conformist, a throwback to the Kaiser’s army of 1914 (or forward to the Third Reich of 1933). In response, Weill made some effort to assimilate Brecht’s revisions, though not all his additional music seems to have survived. But in addition to this revised He Said Yes Brecht also made a counter-play with a changed ending, where the Boy says ‘No’ and refuses to be killed. Called He Said No, it is based on the unrevised text and was not set to music at all, with the result that Brecht’s suggestion of performing the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ versions together can only be fulfilled if the music is dropped.

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  The pairing of He Said Yes and He Said No, however ‘dialectically’ it may be interpreted today, was not at all what Brecht had originally intended. For Eisler, whose collaboration with the poet had so far been limited to the odd song (like the ‘Abortion Ballad’ in 1929), now claimed to be appalled by the ‘feudalism’ of He Said Yes when he read it, and accordingly persuaded Brecht to write a ‘concretisation’ of the same theme. In this, he later said, he was approaching Brecht as ‘an emissary of the working class’, in other words a more experienced and knowledgeable Communist. So the plan for the 1930 Berlin ‘Neue Musik’ was at first that Weill should contribute He Said Yes, as arranged with the organisers, while Brecht and Eisler would submit the ‘counter-play’ Die Massnahme – The Decision (also known as The Expedient or The Measures Taken). Whether this new work would have been ready in time is far from certain, but in the event its submission was refused, and while Weill then loyally withdrew his school opera for production outside the festival, the writing and rehearsal of The Decision took roughly half the year, and they were never actually seen/heard antithetically.

  This was in spite of the fact that Brecht now seemed much clearer about what he was doing, and despite all the discussions that took place both with the participants and with the Party critics there was for the first time no radical reworking of the script. It was also the first of this whole batch of works to be labelled ‘Lehrstück’ from the outset – though a Lehrstück that, according to the note to the Versuche edition, set out ‘to practise a particular attitude of intervention’. In other words The Decision maintained Brecht’s interest in ‘Einverständnis’, which now became the conscious, rational self-sacrifice of an underground agitator, relating to what could be a real political situation. This idea of ‘intervention’ was conspicuously new. It was linked to that of a proletarian revolution, like the hopes of the growing Communist electorate in the towns.

  Eisler was involved, as Brecht so far was not, in the new Communist culture which had been growing up around the activities of Willi Münzenberg, member of the Comintern, organiser of the IAH or International Workers’ Aid, master of a whole stable of Left papers and publishing houses, sponsor of the agitprop group Kolonne Links and of Mezhrabpom-Film in Russia and its German distributors Prometheus. Through bodies such as these, the German Communists had started, from 1927 on, to build their own apparatus for the arts under an IfA or committee for Workers’ Culture. Eisler was already an active contributor, as composer for the ‘Red Megaphone’ agitprop group and music critic for the Party press. Attempts were made to capture the huge German Worker-Singers federation, with its half a million members, for the kind of politically militant music which he had begun to write, and three of its big Berlin choral groups took part in The Decision under one of its conductors, Karl Rankl. A new Communist leadership actually took over the corresponding Workers’ Theatre organisation, the DATB, with Wilhelm Pieck’s son as its secretary. A breakaway section of the Volksbühne together with the Young Actors’ Group, a professional collective which had emerged from Piscator’s collapse, would support Brecht in his work on The Mother and The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads after his didactic phase was over.

  The Decision was a new experience for its author, in that the rehearsals under the direction of the Bulgarian film director Slatan Dudow (who had been studying in Moscow) involved general discussions of the political issues involved. According to a report by the Soviet writer Sergei Tretiakov, who saw the Berlin production in the winter of 1930/31, Eisler told him that it was

  not just a musical work for performance to listeners. It is a special kind of political seminar about questions of party strategy and tactics. Members of the chorus will discuss political questions at rehearsals, but in an interesting and memorable form. The Lehrstück is not intended for concert use. It is rather a means of striving to educate stude
nts of Marxist schools and proletarian collectives . . .

  This was substantially different from the ‘Neue Musik’ ’s idea of exercising amateur performers and their audience in the ideas of a community. It reflects a rapidly changing time, when revolution seemed to be around the corner and Hitler a minor problem.

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  Largely because of its Eisler songs, which would be sung by the German Left from 1932 on, wherever they might be, The Mother is often treated as some kind of sequel to The Decision. And certainly the situation in Germany was not improving while Brecht and Eisler worked on it in the second half of 1931, following the somewhat ungenerous reaction of the Party critics to their earlier work. In a sense the background was the same. But this was not a Lehrstück so much as a piece for professional actors which had started out, in its originator Günter Weisenborn’s hands, as a project for the Berlin Volksbühne with its 2000-seat theatre. It was never to be a simple platform piece, even if Caspar Neher’s 1932 sets, with their dismountable framework of gas piping, were made to be easily moved to wherever the proletarian audience might be. The play was both mobile and ‘epic’ in that it covered some twelve years of Russian history in a succession of tightly conceived scenes. It came nearer to agitprop than any other of Brecht’s works; it centred on an outstanding character, one of the great roles of his wife Helene Weigel; and only a few narrative short cuts seem to reflect the Japanese influence which was so important for the other didactic plays. If in later years the ways of staging the Lehrstücke have become more and more remote from the theatre, productions of The Mother on the other hand have moved steadily closer to convention, starting with the 1951 production of the Berliner Ensemble. The remarkable thing was that following the Prussian government’s 1931 ban on agitprop for political meetings its early German performances could take place at all.

  One reason for its particular interest for us today is that in 1935 it was performed by Theatre Union, one of the principal Left theatres in New York in the days of the New Deal. Here things appear to have gone wrong all along the line. The theatre board thought of Gorky as a Realist, even a Socialist Realist perhaps, and expected a corresponding version of the play. They seem to have taken Brecht on trust as a progressive and friend of Russia; they clearly had no idea that his adaptation of this Socialist classic had been aimed at a German proletarian audience in a desperate time. Hence he was against conventional dramaturgy, and against being truthful to the Russian background; and if his text appealed for revolutionary action it was not to attack Tsarism, but to overthrow capitalism in its local form. Worse still, he was going to fight for what he regarded as ‘his’ play, and somehow managed to get himself brought over to New York to do so, although this had not been part of the arrangement. Once there he expected to be able to enforce compliance through the Communist Party hierarchy, not realising how little say they had. He had no idea how to impress and cajole the American theatrical Left, and to make matters worse he seemed to have a dreadful influence on Eisler, who had been invited and normally got on well with Americans of averagely liberal views. The damage caused by this interesting exercise not only seems to have put the Theatre Union out of business; it also left scars which would affect Brecht’s reception when he arrived in Los Angeles as a refugee six years later. As a study in comparative theatrics the episode is possibly unique.

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  Brecht had written two more Lehrstücke by 1935, the year of the two most formative visits of his prewar exile: the one to Soviet Russia and the other to New York. He had left Germany a month after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, when the Reichstag Fire was a sign to many of the opposition that the last vestiges of the Weimar democracy would now be swept away by the Nazi Brown- and Blackshirts. So, not surprisingly, neither work would be performed where the author could get to it: The Exception and the Rule by amateurs in Palestine in 1938, then in Paris in the 1950s; The Horatians and the Curiatians not at all. All the same he still labelled the former of these a ‘Lehrstück’, and counted both of them at one time or another under that head. The better play is surely the first, which is thought to reflect the Chinese theatre rather than the Japanese. The Horatians and the Curiatians however is interesting for two reasons connected with Brecht’s 1935 visit to Moscow. One was that he linked it too with the performance which he saw by the Chinese actor Mei Lan-fang, from which he drew some important conclusions for his new theory of ‘Verfremdung’ or Alienation. The other was that unless Eisler (his intermediary) was pulling his leg, it was written in response to a commission from the Red Army to write a play for children. The fact that Eisler, now a music figurehead for the Comintern, failed to compose anything for either work suggests that he took the commission less seriously than Brecht.

  If the excitement of the Lehrstück phase from 1929 to 1932 – with collaborators ranging from the immensely fertile but apolitical Hindemith to the militant Communist Eisler – did not last beyond the work on The Mother, the relative isolation of Brecht’s subsequent exile in Scandinavia gave him the impetus and the occasion to sort out some of his theoretical ideas. And in the course of so doing he would open the door to confusion, if not conscious mystification. Part of the trouble was that he only now started thinking about ‘Lehrstücktheorie’, as it has come to be called, when he laid down that ‘the’ Lehrstück needs no audience, that it teaches by being performed and not by being seen, that it should really be considered a ‘Lern-’ rather than ‘Lehr-’ (or teaching) piece, that new scenes can be interpolated in The Decision and that the required acting style is the same as for the epic theatre. The drawback to this reconsideration of the term is that what he was aiming to achieve with one piece may be thought today to apply to them all. Principles laid down for specific circumstances at a particular time are taken as general.

  Thus the idea that He Said Yes and He Said No must be performed together was something that he himself never saw realised; it was not what the children involved with the play actually asked for; nor (to judge from Albrecht Dümling’s researches) was it in fact a response to the Karl Marx School students as Brecht’s notes allege. Again, the ruling on performances of The Decision which Brecht sent to the Swede Paul Patera in the days of the Cold War – and which was still being inexplicably applied some three decades later – appears to mean logically that barely anybody in the hundreds attending the premiere, whether as audience or as performers, can have learnt anything at all from that work. This too is a mystification. On top of that, these general Lehrstück rules are applied by their modern interpreters to incomplete works of Brecht’s like the Fatzer scheme, which he never classed as such. The essential musical component, the work of great modern composers, is largely overlooked. And from this uneven theoretical pudding – which never figured in the Messingkauf or his aesthetic summa, the Short Organum – a modern form of learning experience is evolved, remote from its roots and closer to today’s Performance Art.

  All this is an obstacle to the full realisation of some highly interesting works. The music gets dropped, new music gets written, or maybe improvised. After which the play as conceived by writer and composer is at best only half there. In the case of The Mother this may be because Eisler, unlike Weill, never got the use of his music made obligatory for all would-be producers. In the case of The Decision it is because full-scale productions prior to the 1998 centenary have been barred throughout the European mainland, turning it effectively into an introspective student exercise or at best a piece of fringe theatre, whereas it should emerge as perhaps the greatest music theatre work of modern times. There is still no commercial recording of it and no score is published. Less deliberately, the Hindemith lehrstück was long blocked by both collaborators, and even now is only rarely performed. He Said No is without music. He Said Yes is played less often than it should be, partly because of the pretence that the two texts are best performed together, partly because of Lotte Lenya’s idea that the didactic form was imposed by Brecht on a reluctant Weill. Only Lindbergh’s F
light is open to an authentic performance, though even here the edge of the work has been slightly dented by Brecht’s heavy-handed amendments. The fact is, surely, that this writer’s remarkable sense of topicality should not be crudely updated to fit our own situations at the end of the twentieth century. It can now be seen historically, in relation to a turning point in world events which is still of immense relevance to us all. Then, but only then, it speaks to the modern audience with all the originality and force that we find in his greatest poems.

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  What we have in this group of works is a concern with new audiences and new means of expression that focused the writer’s creativity during the precarious months from the Wall Street crash to the Reichstag Fire. Part of its origins lay in his work with Kurt Weill on The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny, pieces which however had been aimed essentially at the Berlin West End and conceived in terms of the stage apparatus as they found it there. Now, thanks to his experience with the ‘Neue Musik’ and its amateur singers, he proved to be addressing a different public, working with a different collaborator in Hanns Eisler and becoming involved in the very different conceptual world of Communist politics. Could he have made this shift any earlier? Most of the radical, revolutionary-minded German writers, artists and musicians of his generation had been politicised by their experiences of the First World War and the inconclusive mid-European revolutions that followed Lenin’s lead in October 1917. Brecht was too sceptical for this, and the new ideas to which he committed himself in the mid-twenties were theatrical rather than baldly political. May Day 1929 helped to change him, but at the same time it was thanks to his earnings from The Threepenny Opera (including its film version, which was about to follow) that he was able to spend most of those four years concentrating on uncommercial tasks. Such windfalls were, he wrote, ‘my only means of doing my work, much of which can be shown not to pay (e.g. He Said Yes, The Decision, The Baden-Baden Lesson, The Reader for Those Who Live in Cities, the Keuner stories and so on) without the damaging influence of the great financial institutions.’