The German Genius

first completely serial work is generally held to be Schoenberg’s Piano Suite (op. 25), performed in 1923. Both Alban Berg and Anton von Webern enthusiastically adopted Schoenberg’s new technique, and for many people Berg’s two operas, Woyzeck and the “stately but brutal” Lulu , have become the most familiar examples of, first, atonality, and second, serialism. Berg began to work on Woyzeck , which was based on the short unfinished play by Georg Büchner (see Chapter 14), in 1918, although it was not premiered until 1925, in Berlin. 26 Berg, a large, handsome man, had shed the influence of Romanticism less well than Schoenberg or Webern (which is perhaps why his works are more popular), and Woyzeck is very rich in moods and forms—rondo, lullaby, a military march, each character vividly drawn. 27 The first night, with Erich Kleiber conducting, took place only after “an unprecedented series of rehearsals,” but even so the opera created a furor. It was labeled “degenerate,” and the critic for Deutsche Zeitung wrote, “We deal here, from a musical viewpoint, with a composer dangerous to the public welfare.” Yet it received “ovation after ovation,” and other European opera houses clamored to stage it. Schoenberg was jealous. 28
    Lulu is in some ways the reverse of Woyzeck. Whereas the soldier was prey to those around him, Lulu is a predator, an amoral temptress “who ruins all she touches.” Based on two dramas by Frank Wedekind (see Chapter 27), this serial opera also verges on atonality. Unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, it is full of bravura patches, elaborate coloratura, and confrontations between a heroine-turned-prostitute and her murderer. Lulu is the “evangelist of a new century,” killed by the man who fears her. The opera’s setting was the very embodiment of the Berlin that Bertolt Brecht, among others, was at home in.
    Like Berg, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith, Brecht was a member of the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 and dedicated to disseminating a new art appropriate to a new age. Though the group broke up after 1924, when the second phase of life in the Weimar Republic began, the revolutionary spirit survived. And it survived in style in Brecht. Born in Augsburg in 1898, Brecht was one of the first artists/writers/poets to grow up under the influence of film, and Charlie Chaplin in particular. Brecht was always fascinated by America and American ideas—jazz and the work of Upton Sinclair were to be other influences later. 29
    Bertolt (christened Eugen, a name he dropped) grew up in Augsburg as a self-confident and even “ruthless” child with, according to one observer, the “watchful eyes of a raccoon.” 30 Initially a poet, he was also an accomplished guitarist, with which talent, according to some (like Lion Feuchtwanger) he used to “impose himself” on others, “smelling unmistakably of revolution.” He collaborated and formed friendships with Karl Kraus, Carl Zuckmayer, Erwin Piscator, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Gerhart Hauptmann, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and an actor who “looked like a tadpole,” Peter Lorre. In his twenties Brecht gravitated toward theater, Marxism, and Berlin.
    War themes were not popular in the theater in Weimar Germany, and Brecht’s early works, like Baal, steered well clear, earning him a reputation among the avant garde. 31 But it was with Die Dreigroschenoper ( The Threepenny Opera ) that he first found real fame. This was based on a 1728 ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay, which had been revived in 1920 by Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, where it ran for four years. John Gay’s main aim had been to ridicule the pretensions of Italian grand opera, but after Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it for Brecht, he cleverly moved the action to Victorian times—nearer home—and made the show an attack on bourgeois respectability and its self-satisfied self-image. 32
    Rehearsals were disastrous. Songs about sex had to be removed because the actresses refused to sing them. The first night did not start well. The barrel organ designed to accompany the first song refused to function, and the actor was forced to sing the first stanza unaided (the orchestra rallied for the second verse, though “orchestra” is putting it a bit strongly—the show was scored for seven musicians playing twenty-three different instruments). 33 But the third song, the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown,