Exiles Return: Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera in Post-war Germany
Performances of Wagner's operas in Post-war Germany were often conducted by figures such Otto Klemperer and Vienna-born Erich Leinsdorf who spent the war years in exile outside Germany. Together with the renewed activity of such exiled conductors in Germany was the return to the stage of works which have been banned during the war.
The collection features programs and newspaper reviews of renewed performances of Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera in West Germany after the war. The opera was banned in August 1933 and returned to the German stage in the 1950s. The newspaper review from July 1956 included in the Campbell collection additionally discusses a screening of G. W. Pabst 1931 film version of the Threepenny Opera featuring Lotte Lenya and emphasizes the relevance of the work's scathing critique not only to the time it was written but also to present day.
