A Study Of The Threepenny Opera: Narrative,Irony And Alienation

The Threepenny Opera,a collaboration between playwright Brecht and composer Weill,is an important work in the history of twentieth-century opera.The Threepenny Opera focuses on the darkness and corruption of capitalist society,and presents a strong ironic character through comedic techniques and musical expression.In the opera,Weill and Brecht are committed to the creation of a "narrative drama",which contrasts with the "Aristotelian" style of dramatic texts and structures widely used in opera at the time,in terms of characterization,libretto content,and song composition.The core quality of the work is Brecht’s "interlude" technique,which allows the audience to think rationally and to maintain a critical distance between the audience and the performance.This paper explores the irony and theatricality of the opera in terms of its creation background,characterization,scene construction,musical and dramatic structure,and the technique of "interruption".This paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter is to sort out the concepts and theories.The first section expounds the basic concepts of the opera from the background and characteristics of the times.The second section mainly focuses on the creator(playwright and composer)and the basic content of the threepenny opera.The third section is to explore the adaptation source of the threepenny opera(beggar opera)and summarize its innovation and inheritance relationship;The second chapter focuses on the micro-level of opera and analyzes the "two-sided" or "one-sided" character portrayal of the four main characters in the opera.The first section takes Polly as the research object to explore the contrastive characteristics of her "love and desire".The second section takes Mackey as the research object to discuss his cunning and hypocritical character.The third section takes Jenny as the research object,and presents her character’s double-sided characteristics by comparing Jenny’s emotional attitude towards Mc Gee.The fourth section takes Pizzom and his wife as the research object to explore their money worship;The third chapter analyzes and studies the scene structure and musical drama structure in opera from the macro level.The first section analyzes the establishment characteristics of the scene paragraphs in the threepenny opera.The second section discusses the characteristics of its musical drama structure;The fourth chapter focuses on the application of "alienation" effect in opera.The first section discusses Brecht’s alienation effect in his script creation.The second section analyzes the alienation effect of music in opera...