ABSTRACT
The chapter is devoted to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager (1930). Brecht created with Weill a work that radically transforms opera. The chapter analyses what their idea of school opera comes to and how it aims to recast opera’s aesthetic, social, and political function. The opera reflects on the notion of consent and on the victimization inherent in the demand for consent, and it does so on the basis of a tale that, via a child’s horrific sacrifice, seems to continue opera’s legacy of the death of heroines. And yet Brecht and Weill precisely do not seek to immerse us in the tragic dimension of opera; rather, Der Jasager seeks a kind of estrangement. The chapter traces the opera back to its origin in a Japanese tale and to Brecht’s involvement with the Asian theatre of gesture. It considers how the different themes of Der Jasager can be taken as variations on core gestural content. Gestures constitute the bridge from the voice to the staging and performance. In directing Der Jasager, the author has explored various possibilities of refraction and doubling of the voice through gesture, acrobatics, muting the voice, and separating it from the body.
