bertolt brecht

English - English

Definition of bertolt brecht in English English dictionary

{i} (1898-1956) German playwright, founder of the Berliner Ensemble Company

a German writer of plays and poetry. He is famous for writing plays such as The Threepenny Opera, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Mother Courage, which deal with political ideas and are similar in form to ancient Greek plays. (1898-1956). orig. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger. died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin, E.Ger. German playwright and poet. He studied medicine at Munich (1917-21) before writing his first plays, including Baal (1922). Other plays followed, including A Man's a Man (1926), as well as a considerable body of poetry. With the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical musicals The Threepenny Opera (1928; film, 1931), which gained him a wide audience, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). In these years he became a Marxist and developed his theory of epic theatre. With the rise of the Nazis he went into exile, first in Scandinavia (1933-41), then in the U.S., where he wrote his major essays and the plays Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Life of Galileo (1943), The Good Woman of Sichuan (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). Harassed for his politics, in 1949 he returned to East Germany, where he established the Berliner Ensemble theatre troupe and staged his own plays, including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1957). He outlined his theory of drama in A Little Organum for the Theatre (1949)

Hyphenation

Ber·tolt Brecht