When considering New Orleans’ cultural institutions, few would think to include BrechtFest, a satirical musical revue based on the songs and poems of the German modernist Bertolt Brecht, and a benefit for the Innocence Project. But going into its seventh year, it’s hard to deny that New Orleans is getting attached. Its powerhouse of local musicians is only growing, tickets continue to sell out, and the political perspective originally developed in reaction to the rise of German fascism gets ever more relevant by the day. That the salience of his critiques outlived him would have come as no surprise to Brecht, who, following the defeat of the Nazis, faced persecution in the United States during the Red Scare. “Fascism,” he wrote, “can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism.”
Bertolt Brecht is known, in this country at least, as an upper strata intellectual, but he was a class warrior first and foremost. His mind was his weapon, and he wielded it to expose the lies of the powerful. Or in his words, “Cunning is necessary to spread the truth.” At no point, however, did he let his book smarts get in the way of a good time. His political strategy favored mockery, and he took pleasure in calling a buffoon a buffoon. While he largely directed the cutting edge of his wit towards bosses and brutes, he arched his eyebrow at every hypocrite he found. In the poem “Hollywood Elegies,” a gleeful dressing down of L.A. sell-outs, “Dante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat,” and in “The Burning Of The Books,” a poet is offended to learn that his work was not included in a bonfire of dangerous writings. At BrechtFest, such gems are put to music, often original compositions that have been worked over for months, and between the fabulous Weimar tunes and the wicked sense of humor, the BrechtFestians hit you with one hell of a liberationist cabaret. To get the lowdown on this year’s production, I called on organizer David C. Symons and his co-conspirators, Harry Mayronne and Karen Kunkel.
Tell me how this whole thing got started.
David C. Symons: I had a band for a while called The Salt Wives that did a lot of this kind of Brechtian cabaret type stuff, and that’s how I met Harry. He’s really like the resident expert on this material, so when I got the idea to start this show, he was the first person I called. And to my surprise, everybody else I called really wanted to do it, and we got a really great group. The audience just loved it. People were really affected by it. And then Brecht’s granddaughter came to the show, which I wasn’t expecting at all. It turns out she lives half the year here, which I had no idea about. Afterwards she emailed and said it was the only thing she had seen of her grandfather’s work that she thought her grandfather would have liked.
That’s got to be gratifying.
DCS: It was a huge compliment, and we became really good friends. So I thought, OK, I’ll do it again. And so I did it again, and it sold out again, and then each year I keep thinking maybe this is the last time I’ll do this, because it is a lot of work. But we’ve raised many thousands of dollars for the Innocence Project, and it keeps selling out. So I’ll just keep doing it ‘til people stop coming.
What’s your BrechtFest story, Harry?
Harry Mayronne: David and I met a couple years ago. I had just come back from Berlin where I was performing with a Brecht marionette. I found out Nina Hagen, the godmother of punk, was going to be doing a Brecht concert. I had a puppet of her, and then I had the idea to create one of Brecht. When I got there she said, “You will be the spirit of Meister Brecht.” She shared her curtain call with me, and if I never top that moment I can live with that. So the Brecht puppet has been part of the show from the beginning.
I absolutely loved the Brecht puppet last year—I remember it starting off the show—and it really set the wry, whimsical tone.
HM: Yes, the Brecht marionette makes an appearance every year. It starts off the show on a small scale. Last year we reenacted the courtroom scene [from] the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I saw this video of it—he actually got a laugh in the courtroom. I thought, what a humorist! To be in a rather anxiety-inducing situation, and he said something charming that disarmed everyone.
Yes, I loved that! It’s so freeing to hear someone speak with wit and humanity to people who are trying to crucify you. It’s just the kind of liberation humor that makes the show what it is.
HM: This is one of my favorite things I do every year for two reasons: One is Brecht, and the other is the group of people—such a sensational, fabulous group of talented people who are all connected with what it’s all about. It’s a once-a-year family, like the people you always run into on Mardi Gras Day.
And what would you say this is all about?
HM: Well I wrote this little piece [this year] to establish him as an emotionally driven writer, for the sake of someone who’s never heard of him and might have been dragged to this with their friends. We start by traveling through time [to Weimar, Germany], and we’re a little disappointed to find that not much has changed. That’s what it’s all about, that not much has changed.
DCS: Brecht was always kind of in trouble with the authorities, whether it was in East Germany or when he was in the United States. You know, he had to leave the U.S. after being forced to testify before HUAC. It’s worth listening to the testimony sometime—he’s very funny, and he tries to evade answering everything. He’s a freethinker. And also a poet, a great poet. I mean, that’s the thing, his work always feels like it comes from a real person. It’s very full of all of life’s emotions. It’s very tactile. He’s very plain spoken in a way. I think anyone can read his poetry and understand it.
It’s true—his poems can be laugh-out-loud funny, and expertly nail the capitalists to the wall, but simply and succinctly. What’s it like composing music for these poems?
DCS: My entry into all of this really was that music—I fell in love with the music of Kurt Weill before I really knew anything about Brecht. But then I fell in love with Brecht as a person of conscience. I think poetry was something he did every single day of his life. I mean, look at this [gestures at an enormous volume of Brecht’s collected poetry on the coffee table]. Just look at the size of it, you know? He didn’t have a very long life—he died in his 50s. And he wrote poems every day. I think it was just something he had to do.
For me, the important thing is always that the music has to serve the words and the meaning. You never want to feel like it would have been better just as a poem, or like the words are being shoehorned into a melody. So it has to feel natural. It has to feel like it was always meant to be sung. And there’s been some stuff I’ve done that was a little trickier. There’s a sonnet that I set to music, which took me—it’s only a two-and-a-half minute song, but it really took me a year to get that one right, because there was this one part I just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, but I finally got it.
Left to Right: David C. Symons, Bremner Fletcher, Stephanie Reed
A year’s work for a couple minutes of music is quite the commitment. And I think it does illuminate for me what makes this show so special—on one hand it’s a fantastic journey to a different time, but it also feels extremely current, thanks in large part to the original music.
DCS: I never wanted this to be a nostalgia thing. Even though I love the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler—these genius German composers who collaborated with Brecht—and I’ll always want to delve into that music, it’s important to me to be adding to this canon. So we’ve been writing more and more original music. I’ve written a bunch, and another composer in the show, David Buchbinder, has written music for the show, and so has Harry Mayronne. This year, we’re going to have two, three new pieces: one by Anna Laura Quinn, and one by Susanne Ortner, who actually hails from Brecht’s hometown of Augsburg, who are both really great musicians that have been in the show for years. And there’s another one by a friend of mine who’s not in the show, but wanted to write a piece for it—a guy named Scott Stobbe, a really great composer.
I love thinking about Bertolt Brecht as a secret thread tying these musicians together.
DCS: Really, BrechtFest is not about Brecht. That is, it’s not a cult about this one man. Centering it around Brecht’s poetry is a useful framework and gives us a cute name, but we’ve also done pieces by his contemporaries, like Kurt Tucholsky and Friedrich Hollaender, and it’s just as much about the music of Eisler and Weill. It’s about finding parallels between the struggle against fascist barbarism 100 years ago, which these artists were a part of, and today, and how we as artists now should react to the horrors we see being daily enacted by our government.
Karen Kunkel: Something I love about Brecht’s work as a performer is that it invites me as an individual to revel in my rage against the machine. Let’s talk about it, let’s deal with it, and let’s hold that conversation fiercely. The musicians that worked with Brecht were comrades!
HM: Well Kurt Weill got mad at him—after the success of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht was annoyed that the hoity-toity elites didn’t know the play was about them, and he wanted them to know. So in his follow up, Happy End, he had his wife read The Communist Manifesto during the final production. He didn’t tell Kurt Weill he was going to do that. They stopped working together shortly after that. It was a brief but glorious collaboration.
KK: Who was the other composer? Hanns Eisler—I got into him last year—he never abandoned the people! I also arrived to the world of Brecht through the music of Kurt Weill, but now I’m just a fan of Brecht in his own right. I met him as a historical figure just like you meet someone that’s part of the friend group, and you know they’re supposedly brilliant, but the longer you know Brecht the more you see how deep and beautiful he really is, and the more there is to it. The deeper it is the more important it becomes. That’s really rewarding as an artist that’s stumbling into the work. So yeah, I want people to come to the show and revel in their rage, and know that it’s gonna be about dark stuff but we can celebrate having the conversation.
HM: As you say that, I’m thinking you’re preaching to the choir, but that’s why we don’t have to be so serious. They get it.
KK: Each year I do research looking for songs to sing, and it gets deeper. It’s not about me identifying with a jaded woman from Threepenny Opera, it’s about being outraged with hierarchies of violence everywhere. Brecht was so aware from the get go—that is his point. I feel like he’s pretty explicit in his work about pointing out hypocrisy. As someone who used to be a Christian and is not anymore, the kind of Christian I used to be… my religion was complacency. My religion was being told what to do. And everyone has their boxes they are trying to fit the world into—religion was mine, but they’re everywhere, and he saw them all from a young age.
HM: One of the things I love about Threepenny Opera is that hypocrisy is everywhere—your neighbor is the one that executes the violence against you.
KK: Right! It’s about how your neighbor is full of shit!
After seven years, do you feel like Brecht is a friend by now?
DCS: I do kind of feel like he is sort of a friend at this point. Although, not one that I would necessarily completely trust. He does seem a little, you know, slippery maybe.
How so?
DCS: Well, he does refer to himself as a man on whom you can’t rely. It’s probably more in terms of his relationships with women, which are not always so…
Was he a philanderer?
DCS: Oh, yeah, yeah. He was a massive womanizer. But I think that’s oversimplifying it. He also had a lot of respect for women, and collaborated a lot with women writers like Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, and a few others. So I don’t know if we would have gotten along or not. I hope so, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the work that’s important.
What would you like the audience to take away from this year’s performance?
DCS: I hope people leave happy and ready to fight.
BrechtFest VII will take place at the AllWays Lounge February 3 and 4. For more info, check out brechtfest.com. For more info on the Innocence Project, check out innocenceproject.org.
Photos by Eliot Kamenitz
BrechtFest Artwork by Stephanie Reed
