La ballata di fine millennio - Author's notes

There is history...and History (by Mara Cantoni)

A tango, a waltz and, in between, History: the Weimar years, misery and war, internationalism, revolutions and their betrayal, real socialism, a divided Germany, the American myth. A waltz, a tango, and Brecht's profile. His wild youth, his Marxist ideology, his exile and old age.

Twenty songs by Brecht-Weill and Brecht-Eisler, but also Bierman and Vissotsky, with a passage through the Warsaw ghetto and the words of excellent Germans and Russians such as Tucholsky, Enzensberger and Mayakovsky, together with the spectre of the Wandering Jew, the Ballad for the End of the Millennium puts the accent back on that crossroads between the private and the political, between history and History, which is not only a dominant theme in the life and work of Brecht, but a fundamental knot in every culture and finality left to drift for the past twenty years. In this way, laughing and weeping, different moments of different importance of our century, in a show which is both linear and bizarre, offering emotions and a few surprises.

We're sure the imperturbable Brecht won't mind.