The entire work of Brecht is permeated by profound love and painful compassion for human suffering, for the “sentient and rational beings” whom society, politics, intolerance, violence, ignorance, and inaction humiliate, debase, crush, and enslave. This anguish also dominates The Good Person of Szechwan. This work is a dramatic legend, a theatrical “parable,” an “allegory,” - like many of Brecht's other works.

In The Good Person of Szechwan, he confronts the problem of Good and Evil. And he wonders: Can a good person live with kindness and remain good in this world, which is filled with malice and where the principle “homo homini lupus” reigns?… The question remains, for the author and his heroine (the only good person in all of Szechwan - on the whole Earth), whose kindness leads her to misfortune, love to suffering, and desire to despair… Can kindness, then, survive in our world?… Some kind of solution, the right solution - must exist. It must!

And if Brecht does not reach it, he gazes at it with hope, anticipating the ultimate liberation of humanity in the “tomorrow that sings.” And, feeling his inability to move, for the time being, from the question to the answer, he tells the Posterity again: “We, who wanted to open the way of friendship, could not become friends. But you, when the time comes that man will extend his hand to man, remember us with compassion…”

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898 and died in 1956 in East Berlin. He studied medicine and served in World War I. He wrote poems and plays. During the Weimar Republic, he met and worked with the composer Hans Eisler, and they developed a lifelong friendship. He also met Helene Weigel, his second wife, who later accompanied him into exile until the end of his life.

In 1928, The Threepenny Opera, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, which lampooned the “proper” Berlin bourgeoisie that attributed a lack of morality to the proletariat, caused a sensation in Berlin, and its impact affected the global musical scene. In 1933, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, Brecht went into self-imposed exile until 1948. He first lived in Denmark and Finland and then in the USA throughout the war. In Moscow, he collaborated with other German writers to publish the magazine The Word. In the USA, he faced severe persecution from the McCarthy regime. After the war, he settled in the German Democratic Republic, and along with Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble in 1949. In 1950, he was elected a member of the Academy of Arts. He was awarded the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic in 1951 and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1954.