BERTOLDT BRECHT

(1898 - 1956)
MUSIC ::: PLAYWRIGHT ::: POET :::

Bertolt Brecht didn’t want theater to make you forget the world — he wanted it to wake you up inside it. A poet and playwright forged in the wreckage of early-20th-century Europe, Brecht rejected emotional immersion in favor of confrontation, insisting audiences think rather than simply feel. His work treated politics, class, and power not as background conditions but as the main event, stripping drama of illusion and replacing it with questions that lingered long after the curtain fell.

That vision crystallized through his collaborations with composer Kurt Weill and performer Lotte Lenya, most famously in The Threepenny Opera. Songs like “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song” turned cabaret into critique, using melody as a Trojan horse for social indictment. The work skewered capitalism, hypocrisy, and moral posturing with a grin sharp enough to cut — music you could hum on the way out while the ideas quietly rearranged your head.

Brecht’s afterlife in culture is vast. “Mack the Knife” escaped the theater and entered pop history through voices as different as Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, The Doors, and David Bowie, each carrying Brecht’s irony into new eras. That endurance wasn’t accidental. Brecht understood something essential: art doesn’t have to soothe to survive. Sometimes its job is to unsettle — to remind you that the stage, like the world, is built, and therefore can be rebuilt.