Bertolt Brecht

Among the most polarizing forces ever to shape musical theatre, playwright, poet and lyricist Bertolt Brecht earned notoriety as an avowed Marxist who frequently collaborated with composer Kurt Weill on some of the stage’s most incendiary works. Born February 10, 1898, in Augsburg, Bavaria, he was conscripted as a medic during World War I while enrolled at Munich University, after which he turned to writing. His earliest Expressionist plays—Trommeln in der Nacht, Baal, and Im Dickicht der Stadte—revealed both a fierce anti-establishment stance and a fascination with brutality; throughout most of the 1920s he performed on cabaret stages across Germany and Scandinavia, repeatedly provoking audiences with the songs’ overt political content and bleak, nihilistic tone.

Brecht achieved his greatest stage triumph in 1928 with Die Dreigroschenoper, Kurt Weill’s musical resetting of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera; together with the prior year’s Mann Ist Mann and 1929’s Mahagonny, the piece displayed his sharp talent for dissecting bourgeois values. Following the Reichstag fire he was exiled to Denmark in 1933, by which time an English-language production of The Threepenny Opera had already reached Broadway and secured his international standing. As an unrelenting opponent of the Nazis, he used plays, poems, and radio dramas to assail the Hitler regime through barely disguised scorn; in 1941 he escaped to Hollywood, where he completed Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis and Leben des Galilei. Summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 over his pro-Communist convictions, he relocated to East Berlin and founded the Berliner Ensemble. He died on August 14, 1956.