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Brecht in Exile: Songs from Galileo, The Good Soul of Setzuan, and Mother Courage

by Irondale Ensemble Project

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1.
The Exile Theme 00:58
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2.
The Song of Mother Courage 01:31
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3.
The Ballad of the Wise Woman to the Soldier 02:41
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4.
The Fraternization Song 02:32
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5.
The Song of the Hours 02:41
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6.
The Song of the Great Capitulation 03:01
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7.
The Peace You'll Find 01:34
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8.
From Ulm to Metz 00:37
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9.
Better Off Without 00:53
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10.
The Song of Shelter 01:56
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11.
Only Miracles 01:50
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12.
The Song of the Smoke 02:10
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13.
The Song of the Water Seller 01:22
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14.
The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and Good Men 02:20
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15.
Saint Nevercome's Day 01:36
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16.
The Song of the Eighth Elephant 03:24
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17.
I Need No Gravestone 01:03
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18.
Galileo Galilei: Bible Buster 04:09
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about

From the director, Jim Nieson:

Pete Seeger wrote, “a good song is often a bittersweet combination of sadness and humor, farce and pathos. So, Bertolt Brecht was naturally a great songwriter. Like folk songs, his songs also rest on a bedrock of blunt reality.

I often see pictures of the young Brecht grasping a guitar, often in the manner of a Picasso painting, and singing what I like to imagine is a ballad of his own composition, all hunched overlooking like a scruffy young folk singer á la Bob Dylan or a German cabaret singer of the 1920s, which he was. A man whose work and talent led him to journey from the small makeshift stages of smoke-filled Berlin bars to epic collaborations with the composers Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau and to the worldwide fame generated by The Threepenny Opera and Mack the Knife.

On February 27th, 1933, the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag, blaming it on the communists. The next day Hitler declared a state of emergency to protect the German people and the German state from high treason. Warned by a friend in the foreign ministry that he should leave Germany, playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and his wife, actress Helene Weigel, made preparations to flee. Elisabeth Hauptman, Brecht’s collaborator, and one-time lover, would look after the two Brecht children Stefan and Barbara, who would follow later. On the last photograph taken of the family before they departed Berlin, Brecht wrote “The cases are packed.” He left boxes of his manuscripts with Hauptman. On the night of February 27th, their friend Peter Suhrkamp gave them money and drove them to the train station where, the next morning, they boarded the train to Prague. Their Berlin flat was searched the same day.

Throughout the late thirties and early forties, the family continued running. First to Denmark, then to Norway Finland and finally Across Russia and the Pacific to California. They did not return to Germany for the next sixteen years. This is the period of The Good Soul of Setzuan, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Life of Galileo, and the Caucasian Chalk Circle; Brecht’s four greatest plays, the first three of which have now been produced by Irondale, forming, as one performance event: Brecht in Exile.

The word “Exile” has taken on a multiplicity of new meanings in the five years since we began work on this “Irondale Project”, whether it’s exile from family and work brought on by the Pandemic, or the terror of people being savagely driven into forced exile from their homes and country that we are now witnessing daily on the television. And so have the meanings and significance of the words and music that make up the songs that Brecht and his collaborators created for these plays.

Unlike the songs of the more conventional structure of the American music theater, these songs do not further action nor serve to develop and heighten the emotional state of a character in a scene, but, rather, step out of the story to comment about, often with irony, at times with hot anger, but always with the insight of, what has just taken place in the preceding scene.

These new songs were written in a variety of musical styles ranging from neo-Weimar jazz, to trip-hop, to psychedelic rock. For Brecht in Exile, Sam Day Harmet, whom I have collaborated with since we worked together on a musical “Emo Fairytale” for Letter of Marque Theater, and whose own knowledge and musical expertise stretches across a diverse range of styles, has been stunningly put to use in the songs you are about to hear.

credits

released March 10, 2023

Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht
Original music by Sam Day Harmet, BMI

Production: Sam Day Harmet
Mix engineer: Stephen LaRosa
Mastering engineer: Frankie Sunswept

SINGERS:
Vicky Gilmore, Terry Greiss, Joey Collins, Stephen Cross, Michael-David Gordon, Nolan Kennedy, Erica Mancini, Renata Soares

MUSICIANS:
Sam Day Harmet: guitar, bass, keys, clarinet, banjo, baglama, synths, programming, taishogoto
Erica Mancini: vibraphone, accordion, organ, percussion
Stephen LaRosa: bass taishogoto (5)
Luca Susti: drums (6)

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Irondale Ensemble Project Brooklyn, New York

Irondale exists at the intersection of art, education, community engagement and social justice. We develop in long-term artistic collaborations to create theatre that expands the boundaries of the art form and helps audiences and artists make sense of today’s world. ... more

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