Milva
Brecht (live 1975)

LA RECENSIONE

It's difficult to talk about Brecht without raising doubts, whether manifest in the sense of real discord or in the insidious doubt of facing something anachronistic.

This disharmony stems from the clear political stance of the author; a stance that has cost, and continues to cost, Brecht the quick judgment of his work: judged according to the identity or divergence of political views.

Brecht believed in the popular purpose of art, in line with Tolstoy’s poetics. Tolstoy calls, in fact, "popular art" that form of art that passes through the popular masses educating them. With this not meaning, therefore, a vulgarization or, as we would say today, a subservience to the "commercial end" of art, but rather its wider distribution. Likewise, Brecht, in a provocative tone would say:

"If people only want to see things they can understand, they shouldn’t go to the theater; they should go to the bathroom."

but above all, he would say that theater should speak to the

"great masses of those who produce a lot and live hard, so that they can be usefully entertained."

Two are the keywords of Brechtian poetics: "epic theater" and "alienation".

By "epic theater" we mean the form of theater that deviates from dramatic - mimetic theater and wants to make the audience not just a spectator, but a critic and, therefore, an actor of the message received. By "alienation" we mean the use of the "Brechtian third voice", which is the attempt to clearly separate the actor from the character portrayed so that, like the spectator, they can become aware of the historical, political, and sociological role sewn to them.

Regarding the "Brechtian third voice", Milva is an excellent interpreter of the authorial will. The singer manages, indeed, with the use of an ostentatious crudeness and a phrasing not matching the expected prosody, compared to normal spoken or sung - mimetic, to criticize the various characters to whom she is called to lend a sound dimension. She demonstrates, thus, that conscious subjectivity which is Brecht’s poetic intention.

The most effective alienation effect is probably realized in "a horse complains", as, having to lend her voice to an animal, it is much more difficult to fall into the identificatory trap.

The animal's naivety also lends itself to a formative Pirandellian humorous effect:

"It was the people I knew who were different

The same that yesterday gave me bread and covered my back with sacks to protect me from flies

Yesterday so human

Today so inhuman

Had they suddenly turned into so many beasts, why?"

I conclude with a quote from Marcuse about Brecht and Bob Dylan:

"In the absence of any political context, their works evoke, for a fleeting moment, the image of a liberated world and the pain of an alienated world"