Jan 1, 2010

The Threepenny Opera | What Do I Read Next?

John Gay's 1728 comic opera, The Beggar's Opera, was Brecht's source material and offers a good source for comparison. The differences between the two works illustrate the ideologies of the authors who produced them.

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and The Trial give an imaginative sense of the futility and nameless anxiety of the pre-World War I years in Europe. For a British perspective, T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" (1922) expresses a sense of spiritual vacuity, with imagery recalling the devastation of World War I.

The 1972 film Cabaret...