Theatermania

Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley, and the Strange Connection Between the Accordion and Lust

Vocalist Karyn Levitt talks about her new album, ”Eric Bentley’s Brecht-Eisler Song Book”

By Zachary Stewart for Theatermania

At the height of World War II, critic Eric Bentley met German playwright Bertolt Brecht while he was living in exile in the United States. Bentley helped the author of Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera mount the New York debut of The Private Life of the Mater Race, Brecht's musical collaboration with fellow refugee Hanns Eisler about fear and misery in the Third Reich. "It was a disaster," Bentley writes in the preface to his book The Brecht Commentaries.

While Brecht and Eisler's openly Marxist plays failed to take hold in a United States increasingly gripped by Cold War paranoia, Bentley never gave up championing their work. In fact, it was Bentley who introduced soprano Karyn Levitt to the collaborations of Brecht and Eisler over half a century later.

Read the full article on Theatermania here.