Fuegi, John, 1936-

John Fuegi (1936- ) has been the Clara and Robert Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, since 1992. Fuegi holds a Ph. D. in comparative literature from the University of Southern California. In addition to the University of Maryland, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and at institutions in Berlin and Mainz, Germany, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Support for Fuegi's seventeen books and films on subjects as diverse as Virginia Woolf and twelfth-century nun Hildegard of Bingen was derived from grants and awards by the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Danish Film Institute. An authority on the life and work of Bertolt Brecht, Fuegi was the founder of the International Brecht Society in 1970 and edited the first fourteen volumes of its Proceedings.

John Fuegi has written or edited a number of books and articles on Brecht, including Brecht and Co. (New York, 1994), "Most unpleasant things with The threepenny opera: Weill, Brecht, and money," in A new Orpheus: essays on Kurt Weill (New Haven, c1986) and "Business deals of Herr Bertolt Brecht," in The play and its critic (Lanham, [Md.], 1986).

Among the stage works in which Brecht collaborated with Kurt Weill are, in addition to Die Dreigroschenoper (= The threepenny opera), Happy end (Berlin, 1929), which at first appeared to be merely an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the success of the former work, and the ballet-chanté, Die sieben Todsünden (= Les sept péchés capitaux = The seven deadly sins; Paris, 1933). Copyright matters involving Brecht were always complex, and those regarding Die Dreigroschenoper were particularly so, serving as a bone of contention between all the various parties involved--in this case Brecht and the original publisher of the libretto.