Complete Recordings Of Bert Brecht & Kurt Weill / Die Dreigroschenoper, Mahagonny, Der Jasager, Die sieben Todsunden, and more / Lotte Lenya, Wolfgang Neuss, Erich Ponto, Johanna von Koczian, Frank Sinatra / Documents 10x Audio CD / 600124

UPC 4053796001245

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the so-called V-effect.

During the Nazi period, Bertolt Brecht lived in exile, first in Scandinavia, and during World War II in the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German (later American) composer, active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall. He became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943.