brecht
Introduction:
Brecht's only play based on a historical figure, the seventeenth-century Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei (1564) who challenged prevailing notions of astronomy by suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather revolved around the sun, was written in three versions over a period of nineteen years. He wrote the first version (the early title was The Earth Moves) in Denmark in 1938-39 while fleeing Hitler's Germany. This text was performed in Zurich in 1943. The second, the American version reprinted here, was written in 1945-46 in collaboration with British actor Charles Laughton, who played Galileo in a 1947 production in Beverly Hills, California and again on Broadway in 1948. The third and final version (retitled The Life of Galileo and based on the English text) was! written with Brecht's collaborators at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin and produced with Ernst Busch in the title role in 1957, shortly following Brecht's death in the previous year.
Each time Brecht revised Galileo, his emphases changed with his maturity as an artist and political thinker, and with the cataclysm of world history that evolved into a world war, the partition of Western Europe, the advent of the nuclear age.
At the outset for Brecht, Galileo was an intellectual figure in history who outsmarted reactionary authority (the Inquisition), and pretending near blindness, completed his great scientific work, the Discorsi, and smuggled the manuscript out of Italy with the assistance of his pupil, Andrea Sarti. Thus, the individual's subversive political action against reactionary authority, Brecht con concluded causes a light to dawn in the darkness of his age. In the 1930's what commended the subject of Galileo to Brecht was be analogy between the seventeenth-century- scientist's underground activities against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and those of the twentieth-century opponents to Hitler's Germany. In all
Brecht's only play based on a historical figure, the seventeenth-century Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei (1564) who challenged prevailing notions of astronomy by suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather revolved around the sun, was written in three versions over a period of nineteen years. He wrote the first version (the early title was The Earth Moves) in Denmark in 1938-39 while fleeing Hitler's Germany. This text was performed in Zurich in 1943. The second, the American version reprinted here, was written in 1945-46 in collaboration with British actor Charles Laughton, who played Galileo in a 1947 production in Beverly Hills, California and again on Broadway in 1948. The third and final version (retitled The Life of Galileo and based on the English text) was! written with Brecht's collaborators at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin and produced with Ernst Busch in the title role in 1957, shortly following Brecht's death in the previous year.
Each time Brecht revised Galileo, his emphases changed with his maturity as an artist and political thinker, and with the cataclysm of world history that evolved into a world war, the partition of Western Europe, the advent of the nuclear age.
At the outset for Brecht, Galileo was an intellectual figure in history who outsmarted reactionary authority (the Inquisition), and pretending near blindness, completed his great scientific work, the Discorsi, and smuggled the manuscript out of Italy with the assistance of his pupil, Andrea Sarti. Thus, the individual's subversive political action against reactionary authority, Brecht con concluded causes a light to dawn in the darkness of his age. In the 1930's what commended the subject of Galileo to Brecht was be analogy between the seventeenth-century- scientist's underground activities against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and those of the twentieth-century opponents to Hitler's Germany. In all