Life of Galileo
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
2. Primary
Texts: Drama
Bertolt
Brecht. Life
of Galileo.
Supporting References:
- Patterson, Michael. "Life of Galileo." The Oxford Dictionary of Plays. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2006. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Life of
Galileo (Leben des Galilei). AT: Galileo A: Bertolt
Brecht (with Margarete Steffin) Pf: 1943, Zurich Pb: 1955; rev. 1957
Tr: 1953 G: Hist. drama in 15 scenes; German prose with
1 song S: Padua, Venice, Florence, Rome, 1609–37 C:
42m, 10f, extras
Galileo scrapes a living, teaching
students in Padua. When he learns of a new Dutch invention, the
telescope, he sells the idea to the Venetian senate and then uses the
new instrument to prove the Copernican system: that the earth
revolves around the sun. Although warned of the dangers of
disseminating his views, Galileo places his faith in human reason. He
even leaves the liberal regime of Venice to earn a higher salary at
the court of Florence, where he meets with opposition from
reactionary academics. Galileo continues to work on in the city even
when it is affected by the plague. In Rome, the papal astronomer
confirms Galileo's findings, but the Church forbids him to publish
them. A Little Monk begs Galileo not to rob the poor of the stability
of their faith, but is won over by Galileo's appeal to truth. Eight
years later, a new pope, a scientist, is enthroned, and this
encourages Galileo to resume his research. As his ideas become known,
even the common people celebrate the new age that has begun to
question established authority. In 1633 Galileo is summoned to Rome,
and the Grand Inquisitor persuades the Pope, as he is being robed,
that Galileo must be silenced. Galileo recants when he sees the
torture instruments, and his loyal pupil Andrea cries out: ‘Unhappy
the land that has no heroes!’ Galileo replies: ‘Unhappy the land
that has need of heroes.’ Forced to live under house arrest,
Galileo, though half blind, secretly continues his work. When Andrea
visits him, Galileo, aware that he has betrayed his belief in truth
and his responsibility as a scientist, gives him the manuscript of
the Discorsi, which Andrea smuggles across the Italian
border to be published in the Netherlands.
Undoubtedly the best 20th-century play
about a historical figure, Life of Galileo, like all
Brecht's great plays, contains ambiguities and caused the author much
heart-searching. Galileo himself is full of contradictions: a
sensualist who loves intellectual activity, a coward who bravely
defies the plague, and an unrelenting seeker after truth who
perpetrates fraud and subterfuge. Especially after the explosion of
the atom bomb, Brecht began to question whether he had been too
indulgent towards Galileo, and he added a lengthy speech in the
penultimate scene warning of the dangers of scientists abdicating
their social responsibilities. Although essentially realistic, the
play offers many opportunities for ‘gestic’ acting (action
clarified by the visual element, as in Scene 12, where the Pope's
individual beliefs disappear under his robes of office). The American
premiere in 1947, co-directed by Brecht, boasted Charles Laughton in
the title role.”
- Hartnoll, Phyllis, and Peter Found. "Brecht, Bertolt." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. : Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 21 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of the author and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Brecht, Bertolt [Eugen Berthold
Friedrich Brecht] (1898–1956), German poet and dramatist,
who in 1918 was studying medicine in Munich when he wrote his first
play Baal, not performed until 1923. His early writings are
indebted rather to Expressionism
than to the Marxism which was to provide the political mainspring of
his work. The first of his plays to reach the stage was Drums in
the Night (1922). This sober and somewhat cynical study of a
soldier returning from the war proved a great success. It was taken
to Berlin, where in 1924 Brecht settled as assistant to Reinhardt
at the Deutsches
Theater. His next plays, In the Jungle of
Cities (1923), Edward II (based on Marlowe,
1924), and Man is Man (1926), were less successful, but
marked the beginning of his attempt to develop his own form of epic
theatre, with its hotly debated ‘distancing
techniques’ (alienation).
Throughout his career he undertook much theoretical writing, and his
aesthetic position was given its most definitive form in Kleines
Organon für das Theatre (1949). In 1928 Brecht married his
second wife Helene Weigel,
who appeared in many of his plays, and had his first great success in
the theatre with The Threepenny Opera at the Berlin
Schiffbauerdamm. This very free adaptation of Gay's
The Beggar's Opera had music by Kurt Weill, who also
collaborated with Brecht on the operas Rise and Fall of the City
of Mahagonny (1927) and Happy End (1929) and the
opera-ballet The Seven Deadly Sins (1933). Weill's wife
Lotte Lenya [Karoline Blamauer]
(1900–81) appeared in most of these works. In the 1930s Brecht
wrote a number of short didactic plays or Lehrstücke, the
best of which were probably The Exception and the Rule
(1938) and St Joan of the Stockyards, not staged until 1959
but considered by many the first work to show his full stature. When
Hitler came to power in 1933 Brecht went into exile—first to
Switzerland, then to Denmark and Finland, and finally in 1941 to the
USA. During these years he wrote what are generally considered his
best plays—Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The
Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Setzuan (both
1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954)—which combine
maturity of vision and depth of expression with a wider sympathy for
the human predicament. During the same period he also wrote more
overtly political plays such as The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
(1958). In 1949 Brecht returned to East Germany and founded with
Helene Weigel the Berliner
Ensemble. His last years were spent mainly on
revivals of his own plays and adaptations of foreign ones, among them
Shakespeare's Coriolanus (as Koriolan) and
Farquhar's
The Recruiting Officer (as Trumpets and Drums).
(All his adaptations were so different from the originals that they
constituted virtually new works, particularly his Marxist version of
Gozzi's
Turandot, begun in 1930, taken up again in 1954, and left
unfinished at his death.)
“While few would
now dispute Brecht's greatness as a playwright, there remains strong
disagreement between those who regard him as a great Marxist writer
and those who see him as a great writer in spite of his Marxism;
equally, his aesthetic theories are seen both as essential and as
obstructive to his creative work. His presentation of ‘epic’ as a
necessary alternative to ‘dramatic’ theatre remains, however,
persuasive. Writers described by others as his disciples tend to
disclaim his direct influence; but he has undeniably helped to
liberate the English-speaking theatre from the constraints of the
well-made
play. Most of Brecht's plays have now been seen
in English, the first being Señora Carrar's Rifles in
1938.”
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