Timeless Power of 'The Threepenny Opera' | The Juilliard School Timeless Power of 'The Threepenny Opera' Author December 2009/January 2010 Juilliard’s versatile fourth-year actors will get to show off their musical talents this month in a production of The Threepenny Opera , directed by Sam Gold. The work, by playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950), was first performed in its original German as Die Dreigroschenoper at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August 31, 1928, with Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, in the role of Jenny Diver. The show quickly became an international sensation and its opening number, “Mack the Knife,” achieved iconic status as one of the most popular songs of the century. Bertolt Brecht (left) and Kurt Weill, c. 1928, the year their Threepenny Opera was premiered in its original German. The fourth-year actors will perform the work in December.

(Photo by Courtesy of the Kurt Weill Foundation) Lotte Lenya, who played Jenny Diver in the 1928 German premiere of The Threepenny Opera, won a Tony for her performance of the role, in English, in 1956. Above: Lenya performs as Jenny at the Theater de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theater) in Greenwich Village (photo c. 1954). (Photo by S. Neil Fujita) Body The source for the work was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a humorous “ballad opera” with no generic precedent. Gay’s work consisted of dialogue interspersed with 69 songs, mainly popular ballads of the British Isles and France, and well-known opera arias by Handel and Purcell, among others. A satire of both Italian opera conventions and the political corruption of England’s reigning prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, The Beggar’s Opera was tremendously popular with 18th-century theatergoers and had enjoyed a successful London revival in the early 1920s.

In addition to Gay’s text, Brecht also used poems by Rudyard Kipling and Françoise Villon. Translations for all the texts were by made by Brecht’s close collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Retaining the essential plot and characters of The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera updates the setting to Victorian London, where Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, the “boss of London’s beggars,” owns a shop where he outfits and trains beggars in return for a cut of their takings. When Peachum and his wife learn that their daughter, Polly, has married Macheath, a.k.a. the notorious bandit Mack the Knife, they hatch a plan to bring about Mack’s ruin. Other principal characters include “Tiger” Brown, the chief of police and an old friend and ally of Mack; Brown’s daughter, Lucy, to whom Mack is also secretly married; and Jenny, a prostitute with whom Mack has enjoyed a long and seemingly close relationship.

Although Mack is imprisoned twice during the course of the play and is on his way to the gallows at the end of the final act, the king’s mounted messenger saves him at the last minute, providing, in the words of the final chorus, an “alternate conclusion” in which mercy tempers justice—an appropriately ironic ending for the satirical tale. A committed Marxist, Brecht was the most famous practitioner of “ epic theater ,” a genre defined by a non-naturalistic mode of acting, montage-like dramatic construction, and the use of choruses and projections to provide commentary. These techniques are seen throughout The Threepenny Opera, as for example when Jenny steps out of character to deliver the “Pirate Jenny” song—a disruptive moment highlighted in Juilliard’s production by the use of two different actors for the role of Jenny. Brecht utilized such techniques to achieve his goals of breaking down the division between high art and popular culture, and using theater as a platform to advance his political ideals.

Commenting on The Threepenny Opera in the program notes of a 1928 performance, he said that the work confronted “the same sociological situation as The Beggar’s Opera: just like 200 years ago, we have a social order in which virtually all strata of the population, albeit in extremely varied ways, follow moral principles—not, of course, by living within a moral code but off it.” On the other hand, as Weill scholar Stephen Hinton observes in his book Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, “If the work exerts any socio-polemical impact, which [Ernst] Bloch and [Theodor] Adorno claimed, it is at best indirect.

Unlike in The Beggar’s Opera, the outrage expressed in The Threepenny Opera is general, not particular … Gay’s satire contains scarcely camouflaged barbs against the Walpole administration, whereas Weill and Brecht’s satire lampoons conventional bourgeois morality, both in and out of the theater.” Hinton describes The Threepenny Opera as a bold act of “creative vandalism,” but with the exception of one number, “Peachum’s Morning Hymn,” the music was all newly composed by Weill. By the time Weill met Brecht, he had already distinguished himself as a composer of classical works for the concert hall. While his jazz-influenced score for The Threepenny Opera represented a new direction for his own work and for musical theater in general, Weill saw it as part of the continuing evolution of the classical opera tradition, noting in a 1929 interview with the Austrian newspaper Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung that “this type of music is the most consistent reaction to Wagner.

It signifies the complete destruction of the concept of music drama.” On the other hand, having admired Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale as a type of mixed-genre work that could serve as a new prototype for opera, Weill must have been especially pleased, as he wrote in a letter to his wife in January 1930, that “Stravinsky is really enthusiastic about Dreigroschenoper.” Critics were also quick to recognize the work’s originality. In a 1928 review for the Berlin newspaper Die Zeit, A. Ebbutt wrote that The Threepenny Opera “is not … a morality play, it is not a revue, it is not a conventional burlesque, and it is not The Beggar’s Opera; but it is an interesting combination of them illustrating the progress of a movement towards freeing music, acting, and the cinematograph from the ruts of Italian opera, Wagnerian music-drama, drawing-room comedy, and Hollywood, and creating something new with them.” The work’s energy and freshness have won over audiences ever since.

Because of its unique genre, the show presents a special challenge for actors who, as Weill said, “don’t have to be trained singers but … have to be able to put over a song in the special singing style of Threepenny Opera.” Thanks to the Drama Division’s strong emphasis on vocal training, and as they’ve already proven in their cabaret performances last spring, Juilliard’s Group 39 actors are more than ready for the challenge. The music is also demanding for the instrumentalists, especially in attempts to adhere to the original performance standard in which just seven musicians played a total of 23 instruments. (Juilliard’s production will come pretty close, using an eight-member ensemble comprised of both jazz and classical music students.) This will be the first production of The Threepenny Opera in the history of Juilliard’s Drama Division.

Commenting on the show, James Houghton, the division’s artistic director, remarked that “The Threepenny Opera possesses a vitality and relevance that resonates today—we knew that Group 39 and director Sam Gold would seize this opportunity and make the most of this work.” (Gold, an alumnus of Juilliard’s theater directing program, previously directed Juilliard’s Group 35 actors in a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II in 2006.) Houghton also noted that the production “provides a great opportunity for collaboration across many disciplines within Juilliard. This is exactly the kind of project we have been hoping to incorporate in our training and the larger Juilliard community.” More by Lisa B.

Robinson Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera - Kurt Weill | Songs, Reviews, Credits | AllMusic Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera AllMusic Rating google+ AllMusic Review by William Ruhlmann This German-language studio cast recording of The Threepenny Opera, made in Frankfurt in 1999 with the Ensemble Modern conducted by HK Gruber , reflects the newly published official Kurt Weill Edition prepared by Stephen Hinton and Edward Harsh for the Weill estate. As Hinton makes clear in his liner notes, the work has existed in various versions since its premiere in Berlin in 1928, and this one doesn't so much resolve the conflicts as elucidate them. Hinton has opted to include "Lucy's Aria," written for the show but not used originally because it was beyond the range of the actress cast in the role, only as a supplement at the end of the second disc, while he has included other material, notably "Ballad of the Prisoner of Sexuality," which was eliminated because the actress initially playing Mrs. Peachum refused to sing it, in the body of the musical. (German rock singer Nina Hagen , portraying Mrs.

Peachum here, has no such scruples and performs the song with gusto.) Even less standard for this standard edition, Hinton has adapted spoken introductions to the songs written by lyricist Bertolt Brecht , but never previously used, to link the songs, otherwise eliminating most of the dialogue, for what would work as a concert version of the show rather than a theatrical staging. It also makes for a highly listenable recording and one that allows for some understanding of the contours of the plot, especially for those who understand German, although a complete English translation is provided in the CD booklet. Along with Hagen , Max Raabe makes an effective Macheath, while conductor Gruber steps in to play Mr. Peachum with evident relish. Track Listing - Disc 1 Threepenny Opera Basics: Introduction Threepenny Opera: An Introduction A milestone of 20th century musical theater, The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) rolls on unstoppably into the 21st.

In their opera "by and for beggars," composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), with assistance from Elisabeth Hauptmann, transformed saccharine, old-fashioned opera and operetta forms, incorporating a sharp political perspective and the sound of 1920s Berlin dance bands and cabaret. Weill's acid harmonies and Brecht's biting texts created a revolutionary new musical theater that inspired such subsequent hits as Cabaret, Chicago, and Urinetown. The show's opening number, "Mack the Knife," became one of the top popular songs of the century. Poster design by Ezio Toffolutti for the Thalia Theater, Hamburg, 1994. The opening night audience at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm didn't quite know what to expect when the curtain rose on The Threepenny Opera on August 31, 1928, but after the first few musical numbers they began to cheer and call for encores.

The show was a brilliant hit, and Threepenny-fever spread throughout Europe, generating forty-six stage productions of the work in the first year after the Berlin premiere. In 1931, a film version directed by G.W. Pabst entitled Die 3-Groschenoper opened, making an international star of Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya, who repeated her portrayal of Jenny Diver from the show's first production. The Threepenny Opera had already been produced 130 times worldwide by 1933, before the rise of the Nazis forced Weill to flee to Paris in March of that year. He finally settled in America with Lenya in September 1935; Brecht escaped through Scandinavia, finally reaching the United States via Siberia in 1941. Both Weill and Brecht wanted a major production in the U.S. but were unable to make the necessary arrangements to their mutual satisfaction. The Nazis, of course, had banned all Weill's and Brecht's works from the German stage.

Although The Threepenny Opera reappeared in theaters in Germany and the United States right after the end of the war, the work's true renaissance did not get underway until a New York off-Broadway production at the Theater de Lys. Running from 1954 through 1961, the show had a total of 2,707 performances, at that time the longest running musical in history. The cast album sold in record-breaking numbers, and Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Ella Fitzgerald, among countless others, made "Mack the Knife" into a standard. Today, The Threepenny Opera is still entertaining audiences all over the world. The re-released recording from the 1954 revival is available on CD (Decca Broadway), along with a splendid BMG recording of the new critical edition of the score made in 1999; a dozen other recordings of the complete show are available in various languages. There are three cinematic versions of the work, made in 1931, 1963, and 1988.

The most recent Broadway production opened in March 2006, and the Berliner Ensemble production that opened in September 2007 continues to enjoy great success all over Europe. Judging by the evidence, the music and story of The Threepenny Opera remain as irresistible to today's audiences as they were in 1928. The Beggar's Opera: The Music The Music Scene Changes Georg Frideric Handel stopped writing opera after 1741, which can be seen as evidence of the declining popularity of the art form. Handel, the most prolific and famous composer of the 18th century in England realized that the public favor was changing. Many Englishmen believed that the Italian star singers were overpaid and uncivil, that the language was a frustrating barrier, that the recitative (or sung dialogue) was artificial, and that the plots were unrealistic. 8 The rise of the ballad opera offered an appealing alternative genre. In 1728, the first performance of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera attracted the acclaim and attention of the popular audience in England. The first run of the performance lasted 62 nights!

Today, this sounds like a lot, but in the 18th century, it was an unprecedented touchstone. 9 Later, the opera was performed internationally in Dublin, Glasgow, Jamaica and New York. 10 In 1750, The Beggar's Opera was one of the earliest musical comedies produced in America 11 ; appropriately, it was produced in New York, which today is the mecca of musical comedy. The opera launched the popularity of a new form of stage entertainment, the ballad opera. The audience for the ballad opera, unlike opera's noble and upper-class following, included people from the lower class, middle class, and upper class. 12 Londoners loved the realism and satire in the ballad opera; they left the theater talking about it and singing the familiar tunes. The book trade was also stimulated because of its controversial subject matter and satire. Evidence of its popularity in the 18th century, The Beggar's Opera was performed every year of the 18th century after 1728.

13 The Satire and Controversy The Beggar's Opera was a double satire of the Italian opera tradition and of the political corruption of incumbent Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and his government. Gay mocked the Italian opera tradition in many ways: Gay chose popular simple tunes to mock what many British believed to be the overly virtuousic and artificial airs of Italian opera. The composer disposed of recitative altogether in favor of spoken dialogue. Gay's main characters are thieves and bawds, rather than the heroes and kings of Italian opera. Finally, he makes fun of the often-disliked Italian divas. The year before John Gay's opera premiered, the two leading prima donnas in London, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, were well known to be enemies. In 1727, their rivalry escalated to a fight on stage; the two divas scratched and pulled out each other's hair! The rivalry between these ladies inspired Gay's leading female characters, Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, and their quarreling scenes. 14 The ballad opera not only made fun of Italian opera, but also provided a new popularity for native music that the masses knew and enjoyed.

Gay's ballad opera also satirized Walpole and his government. The main characters, Macheath and Peachum, were portraits of well-known criminals John Sheppard and Jonathon Wild, a notorious informer executed in 1725. 15 Peachum was also meant to satirize Sir Robert Walpole. Peachum's behavior as a thief, womanizer, and double-dealer directly stabbed at Walpole who was known as a corrupt leader as well as an adulterer. 16 Walpole had tried to eliminate free press many times through "spies, bribery, imprisonment, and the buying up of journalists and newspapers." 17 When The Beggar's Opera premiered, the most controversial newspaper of the time, "The Craftsman," published numerous reviews praising Gay's ballad opera and reporting its success. Sir Walpole went to see Gay's opera and, not surprisingly, hated it. 18 Walpole banned John Gay's sequel, Polly, in 1729. Although Polly was banned from the theaters, it was published and widely sold in the bookshops at a great profit to John Gay.

Lasting Influence of The Beggar's Opera The Beggar's Opera is still the most successful example of the ballad opera genre. There were many authors in addition to John Gay who attempted to contribute to the genre after John Gay's success in 1728. Some of these ballad operas included: an anonymous Robin Hood (1730) Walter Aston's The Restauration of King Charles II (1732), which was banned John Mottley and Thomas Cooke's Penelope (1728) John Breval's The Rape of Helen (1733) Colley Cibber's Love in a Riddle (1729), which was later cut and successfully produced anonymously as Damon and Phillida Charles Coffey's The Devil to Pay (1731) Henry Carey's The Honest Yorkshireman (1735) numerous examples written by Henry Fielding. 19 The only ballad opera that came close to the success of Gay's opera was the Irishman Coffey's The Devil to Pay. 20 Henry Fielding was an important contributor of ballad operas.

Although he is most famous today for his novels like Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding was a popular dramatist in his day, and he wrote thirty plays which include ten ballad operas. A few of his ballad operas are The Author's Farce (1730), The Welsh Opera (1731), and Don Quixote in England (1734). 21 The success of the ballad opera not only inspired other writers, it also contributed to enlarging the audience for theater to include more of the social classes. This created a greater need for theaters and contributed to the increasing use of the theater in the Haymarket, the use of the Goodman's Fields Theatre, and the building of Covent Garden in 1732. 22 The ballad opera genre undoubtedly led to the body of 19th century work of Gilbert and Sullivan, the British librettist and composer who wrote over 20 satirical operettas that are still popular today. The influence of Gay's opera continued into the 20th century.

In 1928, Bertold Brecht wrote an adaptation of The Beggar's Opera and called it The Threepenny Opera, including music written by Kurt Weill. 23 Gay's opera's lasting influence is confirmed by the fact that it remains the most famous ballad opera in existence today, and some believe it is the only notable one as well. 1000+ images about Mackie Messer on Pinterest | Mack the knife, The threepenny opera and John gay Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Mackie Messer The 1928 Berlin production of "Die Dreigroschenoper" (The Threepenny Opera), by Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht, was based on the English play, "The Beggar's Opera," written in 1728, two centuries before. It features a Jack-the-Ripperesque character named Macheath, known to the public as "Mack the Knife." But, no witness can place him at the scene of his crimes, and so he goes about his knife work with impunity.

The introductory song is titled "Moritat von Mackie Messer," or "Mack the Knife." 31 Pins6 Followers The beggars opera The beggars opera Last Edited: 23rd March, 2015 This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. Explore the ways in which The Beggar's Opera influenced the development ofmusical theatre in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. What were the reasons for its continued popularity? Intro The Beggar's opera' is an outstanding piece of writing, which has for centuries been an inspiration of talent to musical theatre everywhere. John gay's piece has led to the creation of many different production's, that shall be talked about in more depth throughout the essay. The 18th Century is the obvious place to start, with the first production being staged in 1728 on 28 January . This is also where John Gay's marked his place in History as a great Ballad Opera writer.

Ballad Opera was a new Style of musical theatre made huge by it's humorous satire, which could be related to by all types and classes of people, because of it's satire on Italian Opera's and British prime minister Walpole at the time. The play in it's new and unique group managed to relate to a mass amount of people who found the humorous play to be so true in it's own exaggerated wayWhen given the question (Explore the ways in which 'The Beggar's opera' influenced the development of musical theatre in the eighteen and twentieth centuries. What were the reasons for it's continued popularity?) there were certain aspects of the ballad opera which I needed to understand before answering the question. The Production, adaptation's of the play, the stylistic aspects, the construction, and it's popularity within the two Centuries are some of the key aspects needed to answer the question. 'The beggar's opera' and Its low-life settings were Taken and used in pieces like The Cobbler's Opera, which is set in Billingsgate. Charles Johnson's The Village Opera ( 1729 ) started a trend for more emotional and more rural subject, which contained little satire or wit.

None of these two opera's came close to the success of The Beggar's Opera. This waspartly to do with the fact Gay had used most of the best songs in the public domain.(footnote) The popularity of The ballad opera caused a lot of serious difficulties for The composers and Italian opera houses at the time including composers such as Handel. When the obsession had died, there were still shorter pieces of the same style which came onto the scene and became popular afterpieces of the Big shows.(footnote) These pieces were written In the early 1760s, they were unoriginal pieces of ballad opera. One called Thomas and sally(1760) by Arne, and one called Love in a village(1772) also by Arne. These were considered unoriginal because only 5 new songs were written for the opera and some were taken from his previous works. (footnote) Bibliography and More Information about ballad opera R. Fiske , English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1973, 2/1986) Y.

Noble (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Beggar's Opera (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975) Percy Scholes / Nicholas Temperley Only The Beggars opera' is the only one out of the pieces that kept it's popularity. It was a huge milestone of the 20th century for musical theatre, was an adaptation (probably the most well known of all that have been done) of the 'The beggar's opera', The Threepenny Opera. The piece was inspired by 'The beggar's Opera in its social message, using some of the same characters and even one of the songs. Composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht changed old-fashioned opera and operetta forms, an incorporateda political view and the sound of 1920s Berlin dance bands and cabaret into the play. Weill's harmonies and Brecht's writing created a completely new musical theatre that inspired some of the most well known hits such as Chicago and cabaret.

"Mack the Knife," is one of the most well know tunes of the century, this is the opening song to the play.(footnote) The first night of 'Three penny opera' was August 31, 1928. No one knew what to expect from the night, but not long in and everyone began to shout and cheer. The show turned out to be a brilliant success and the popularity spread throughout Europe. This started something huge. After the Berlin premiere, 46 stage productions of the work was generated because of the popularity from audiences. 1931 brought a film version to it's audience, the film was called Die 3-Groschenoper. This made a an international star out of weill's wife, Lotte Lenya. The opera, by 1933 had already been produced 130 times all over the world. The play really took off after the war when there was a New York production at Theatre de lys, this production was off Broadway. It ran from 1954 to 1961 and the show did a total of 2707 performance and was the longest running play in history a the time.

The Threepenny Opera is still entertaining audiences all over the world. There are three cinematic versions of the work, made in 1931, 1963, and 1988. the music and story of The Threepenny Opera as stayed irresistible to audiences everywhere as they were in 1928. This adaptation of 'the beggar's opera' as you can see has had significant inspiration on musical theatre, and had a lot on early popular music of the 20th century. In America, ballad opera began with the importation of an English work, Flora, or Hob in the Well, which was given at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1735. The first American performance of The Beggar's Opera itself took place in New York in 1750. Thereafter all the most popular English comic operas were quickly imported, and, indeed, for long they formed the sole operatic entertainment in the English colonies and successor states, since Italian and French opera did not reach that part of America until the 1790s, and no serious attempt to promote Italian opera was made until 1825 .

Many writer's of the time were sticking to Italian Opera, which were very serious 1953 brought forward a new light on the ballad opera turning it into a film. The film priemered in London on the 5th of June 1953, film1985, Musical theatre before 'The beggar's opera' was very different. During the 17th Century there was a period called interregnum, unfortunately this had an effect on musical theatre and During this time theatrical performances were forbidden under the Puritan government. After this period and when the restoration was finally over, there was a lot of changes to society. There was a lot of positive effects on the country's performing arts, and because of the financial developments the balance of social classes came together. Londoners started to appreciate newer forms of artistic expression. They welcomed teachers of Italian and French to the city, as well as the many Continental musicians who arrived and settled there. An era began where Italian style was put above all other types of entertainment. The Italian castrato was a male singer who was trained to sing with soprano or alto voice.

The Italian Castrato became very popular(footnote) John gay took a lot of his inspiration for the 'The beggar's opera' Production's an adaptations of The beggar's opera since 1728 have been everywhere. I have taken a look at some of these since it's first performance to show how much of a success it was even 250 years on, the influence on musical theatre has shown in many different types of opera. Classical Notes - Classical Classics - Weill and Brecht's Threepenny Opera, By Peter Gutmann We tend to think of great music – and indeed all art – as universal and timeless, transcending the specific circumstances of inspiration. Thus Beethoven may have penned his "Eroica" Symphony in tribute to Napoleon, but its potent subtext of heroism, grief and triumph resonate 200 years later and undoubtedly will be equally effective for generations to come. Yet, some works, while continuing to speak to us across the ages, are very much of their time – from Handel's Water Music conjuring the splendor of baroque royalty to George Crumb's Black Angels evoking the confusion and pain of the Vietnam War.

Die Dreigroschenoper ("The Threepenny Opera") unmistakably recalls Berlin on a precipice between the World Wars, when the vacuum of its shattered culture eagerly embraced new influences, especially the intrigue of American movies and jazz, with a decadent zest fueled by the desperation of a crashed economy and social unrest. Despite its relevance to Berlin of the 1920s, the Threepenny Opera had its origins in London two full centuries earlier. John Gay's 1727 Beggar's Opera had created a sensation by skewering the conventions (and pretensions) of trendy Italianate opera and its florid arias, noble characters and rigid morality. William Hogarth print of the Beggar's Opera, depicting the characters as animals Gay's work introduced a new genre, the "ballad opera," in which bawdy common folk warbled popular tunes while adrift in life's problems.

The music of the Beggar's Opera, arranged by Johann Pepusch, boasted an overture and 68 songs that pop up every minute or so, all broadside ballads or other well-known melodies with new and often satiric lyrics (thus "Oh London is a Fair Town" became "Our Polly is a Sad Slut"). The wacky plot involves Polly Peacham, whose parents run a lucrative fencing ring and are upset that she's secretly married the robber Macheath – until they realize that they can make her a wealthy widow by claiming the reward for turning him in to be hanged. After swearing to be faithful, Macheath heads to his favorite whorehouse, where former lover Jenny betrays him. Perhaps the musical highlight is a soliloquy in which the imprisoned Macheath, torn between the affections of Polly and Lucy, the jailer's flirty daughter, darts through snatches of ten songs to express the varying moods of his despair. In the final twist, Macheath is about to be hanged but is spared because audiences should leave happy although, as the narrator warns, both rich and poor sin while only the poor are punished.

The Beggar's Opera was a huge success – as one critic of the time noted, it made Rich (the theatre owner) very gay and Gay very rich. A 1922 London revival struck a deeply responsive chord in Bertolt Brecht, whose secretary, Elizabeth Hauptmann, brought it to his attention and prepared a translation. Bertolt Brecht A Marxist poet and playright, Brecht was evolving a notion of "epic drama" that would appeal to the masses rather than to the elite, reflect the reality of existence rather than idealism, and promote didacticism and reflection over emotion. Brecht was struck by the resonance with the ferment of Berlin, in which hypocritical entrepreneurs were living off rather than by the established moral codes. The Beggar's Opera seemed an ideal vehicle to condemn bourgeois convention and agitate for social change.

An incessant borrower, Brecht had no compunction against building on the past; as one defender noted, he "stole with genius." At first he wanted to call his adaptation Gerindel ("Scum"), then Ludenoper ("The Pimp's Opera") and finally seized upon Die Dreigroshenoper ("The Threepenny Opera"), by which he meant a work beggars could afford but so splendid in concept that only beggars could imagine it. His ideal collaborator for the project was Kurt Weill, a young Berlin composer who had already written several short operas in which he had sought to expand theatrical convention. Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya As recalled by his wife, Lotte Lenya, Weill had read some of Brecht's poems and found a counterpart to his own outlook and goals of bridging the gap between serious art and public taste.

Their first project, Mahagonny-Songspiel, linked five Brecht poems into a sketchy half-hour tale of idealism, depravity and disillusionment in a mythical city in the exotic locale of South Florida, and had polarized audiences at the 1927 Baden-Baden festival – a "reverse scandal" whose traditional sound shocked through its lack of the expected cutting-edge modernity. The score (which Brecht and Weill would later expand into a full opera) includes "Alabama Song," of which the Doors provided a surprisingly credible rendition on their first album. Brecht had been approached by Ernest-Josef Aufricht, who desperately needed a work to draw attention to his new Schiffbauerdamm Theatre in Berlin. With a mere three months until the opening, Brecht and Weill closeted themselves on the Riviera and emerged with a novel approach that infused old forms with new ideas, as had been urged by Weill's teacher, Ferrucio Busoni. As Dr.

J�rgen Schebera has since noted, Brecht cobbled his lyrics from a deliberately awkward, arrhythmic and repetitious mix of Biblical quotations, tired clich�s and street slang, and Weill's music draws upon and abruptly shifts among classics, popular dance tunes and jazz. Indeed, much of the work's energy derives from these constant multi-leveled tensions, thus perhaps symbolizing the Marxian principle so dear to Brecht of progress arising from a synthesis of opposites. The presentation was intended to counteract the gritty plot. Weill and Brecht drew a clear division between story and song. In so doing, they recalled the origins of opera, The half-curtain and projected slides in the original production in which lengthy arias intruded into essentially theatrical dramas, and distanced themselves from Wagnerian practice, in which operas were through-composed, with arias smoothly blended into the narrative. Indeed, the songs brazenly interrupt the action and are announced by lighting changes and projected slides. The roles were cast with actors rather than trained singers, who spoke their lines rhythmically and with vague intonation, their easy linear melodies often doubled by an instrument.

(Interestingly, both LPs of the original Beggar's Opera use separate casts for the dialogue and singing.) A seven-piece band sat at the rear of the stage surrounding a fairground pipe organ, and a seedy half-curtain hung from a rod, as if to only barely disguise the theatrical artifice, while amply flaunting a rag-tag attitude. Pre-production snags included last-minute cast changes, Weill's fury upon discovering that his wife's name was omitted from the program, producers' misgivings so severe that they had their musical director prepare the original Pepusch score as a stand-by, The 1931 Pabst movie: The Street Singer's Moritat and the lead actor's vain demand for a striking entrance. To cure the last problem, Brecht and Weill wrote a new number overnight, based on authentic street-fair singers' recitations of the crimes of notorious criminals. As the "Moritat von Meckie Messer," Weill quickly fell under its spell, using the tune as an instrumental motif to link scenes.

Three decades later, as "Mack the Knife," it would become a huge hit for Bobby Darin, Louis Armstrong and others, albeit in a vastly watered-down translation – the "hero" of the original isn't a cute rat-pack gambler but a vicious thug, who is asked at the end his price for raping a child. It remains one of the most popular songs of the century. Brecht's book and Weill's score sharpen the social criticism of Gay's original, but always with an intriguing but queasy unrest. Pabst Movie: Lotte Lenya as Jenny After a weighty but sour and intentionally tedious overture and the "Moritat," the first act opens by saluting Peputsch with one of his original songs (the only direct quote from the Beggar's Opera) but its sweet melody is offset with gruff lyrics as Peachum rouses his army of beggars for another day's "work." At her wedding, lavishly celebrated amid food and d�cor stolen by Mac's henchmen, Polly dreams of murdering a whole town of men in the intensely catchy "Pirate Jenny" (chillingly sung by Judy Collins on her "In My Life" album).

Tiger Brown, the police chief, drops in to recall with Mac, his former army buddy, the thrill of soldiering in the rousing Pabst Movie: Mac but viciously racist and bitterly cynical) "Cannon Song" (when they encounter a fellow who's brown or yellow, they chop 'em up into beefsteak tartare). A bedraggled Polly explains to her horrified parents why nice men bore her in the teasingly sweet "Barbara-Song," Jenny laments the futility of wisdom in the waltzy "Solomon Song," Mrs. Peachum bemoans the lot of women in the docile "Ballad of Sexual Obsession," Mac and Jenny recall their blissful former life of pimping and whoring together in a lovely tango, and each act ends in pompous finales that seek to probe the deepest questions of humankind but arrive at far more basic conclusions; the first one ends: The world is poor and man's a shit And that is all there is to it! There are also some bizarre plot twists.

Pabst movie: Polly presides over a meeting of her bank board After Mac grooms Polly to oversee his "business" in his absence, she puts her training to good use as a bank president; as she puts it, why bother robbing one person when you can rob the whole public? Brown's daughter Lucy also falls for Mac and fights with Polly in a mock-dramatic duet. To compel Brown to arrest his friend Mac, Peachum threatens to disrupt the Queen's coronation parade with an army of beggars. And at the end, the Queen herself not only sends a messenger to announce Mac's reprieve but rewards him with a peerage and a lifetime pension. The premiere was sparsely attended, but word of this bizarre entertainment spread quickly. As George Martin noted with irony, the show treads a thin line, managing to keep audiences sufficiently amused so that they come and remain to be insulted. According to Schebera, within the first year alone fifty theatres presented 4,000 performances, and record shops bulged with 40 recordings on 20 labels.

By 1933, with translations made into 18 languages, Dreigroschenoper received the ultimate accolade for its challenging politics and music when the Nazis not only banned further performances but demanded that all scores be relinquished for destruction. 1954 MGM LP cover Weill himself became a prime target for Nazi cultural purification – accused of vilifying music through the dastardly crime of polluting German art with degenerate Negro rhythm, he and Lenya ultimately fled to America, where he would find a new career crafting socially-conscious Broadway shows. While the War understandably dampened enthusiasm for German satire, the Threepenny Opera soon resurfaced. In 1952, Leonard Bernstein led a revival at Brandeis for which Marc Blitzstein fashioned an English adaptation. Moving to the 299-seat off-off-Broadway Theatre de Lys, it played to rave reviews for six years, featuring Lotte Lenya and a cast of then-unknowns (including Bea Arthur). The MGM cast recording LP (now on Polydor 820 260) sold a half-million copies and is musically vibrant and colorful.

Yet for the recording the lyrics were tamed considerably – in the original tango, Mac relates how when a sailor appeared he would get out of Jenny's bed and have a beer while she earned her keep, but in the album version he gets up to pay the milkman while she is out working. In 1976, Joseph Papp mounted a new production for the New York Shakespeare Festival that attempted to restore much of the original conception. In his album notes, Papp chided Blitzstein for vitiating the political and sexual thrust that gave the original its relentless power and for trying to make Brecht's thorny lyrics more singable by fitting them into conventional musical patterns rather than chafing them against the rhythm to make the audience listen more sharply. 1976 NY Shakespeare Festival LP cover The cast album, featuring Raoul Julia as Mac (last on Columbia LP 34326), boasts wonderfully vivid and characterful playing and singing and preserves the fine English adaptation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett that closely approaches the ultimate sting of Brecht's German. Fortunately, we have lots of early recordings that provide a reliable guide to the highly unusual performing style.

The most renown and complete is a set of four Ultraphon 78s featuring 14 of the songs (albeit cut) by Lenya, Erich Ponto and Kurt Gerron of the original cast, the original arrangement for seven players (most of whom doubled - or tripled - on other instruments), the original Lewis-Ruth Band under Theo Mackeben, and introductory narration prepared by Brecht. The playing is lean and tough, the vocals pointed and intense (except for Willi Trenk-Trebitsch's perversely suave and detached Mac) and Lenya, as Polly, gets not only her own songs but "Pirate Jenny" that would become her anthem. The best CD transfer by far is on Teldec 42663. The Ultraphon set was not made until December 1930.

Arguably more authentic still are four songs cut in December 1928 by Harald Paulson, who created the role of Mac and who presents an intriguing range of styles – clipped notes suggesting routine recital for the "Moritat," lusty confidence for the "Cannon Song," rushed urgency for the "Ballad of Good Living," and fervent declamation for the first act finale. Carola Neher, the original Polly, cut "Pirate Jenny," "Barbara-Song" and a medley in May 1929, far more spoken than sung. The Lewis-Ruth Band Brecht himself, who loved to sing and had set many of his poems to his guitar accompaniment, recorded the "Moritat" and the "Song of the Insufficiency of Human Endeavor," also in May 1929, in a flat nasal bleating with ferociously rolled "R"s and farcically upbeat cabaret arrangements.

Although Weill reportedly dismissed as falsified arrangements all of these and the other many recordings, he excepted two irresistibly peppy instrumental excerpts (the tango and "Cannon Song") played in 1929 on an Odeon 78 by the Lewis-Ruth Band under Mackeben. In late 1928 he prepared his own arrangement for woodwinds of ten songs in seven movements, more thickly orchestrated but recorded in 1931 with great zest by the Berlin Staatsoper under Otto Klemperer, who had commissioned and led the premiere. (Klemperer's stereo EMI Philharmonia remake is far less spirited.) Another primary source is a gritty 1931 movie by G. W. Pabst, shot in simultaneous German and French versions on the same sets with wholly different casts. While only the German format (featuring Lenya as Jenny, Neher as Polly and a viciously debonair Rudolph Foerster as Mac) is extant, four songs were issued from the French one ("l' Op�ra de Quat' Sous"), blandly sung but played with great spirit by the Lewis-Ruth Band under Mackeben.

After selling the film rights, both authors sued – Brecht wanted to turn it into a Marxist manifesto (he lost) and Weill sought to prevent the use of outside music (he won, but the producers cut most of his songs anyway, using some as background music). Authentic or not, it's a fascinating document, intensified by expressionist shot composition, garish lighting and nervous camera movements. Pabst movie: The final alliance Much of the remaining music was used more literally – Mac and Polly's love ballad precedes their wedding rather than offsets their parting, Polly sings the "Barbara-Song" at her wedding to justify her love for Mac rather than to shock her parents, Jenny sings "Pirate Jenny" at the whorehouse to explain her betrayal of Mac (rather than Polly using it to strike a discordant key at her wedding), and the "Cannon Song" celebrates a final alliance among Police Chief Brown (power), arch-criminal Mac (brains), banker Polly (capital) and beggar-king Peachum (the masses) to consolidate their grip, both symbolic and literal, over London society.

The ending, though, brings a chilling slap of social reality, turning abruptly from the laudatory merriment to a final shot of the truly downtrodden shuffling off into shadows, as a reprise of the "Moritat" rues that some dwell in darkness, others in light; you see those in brightness while the others drop from sight. Among modern recordings, the Dreigroschenoper volume of Capriccio's 1997 Kurt Weill Edition (60 058) is deadly dull, drained of any hint of style, but two stereo sets stand out. A lavishly documented 1958 Columbia album with Lenya (CBS 42367) strives for stylistic authenticity; although the deliberate pacing struggles to summon the work's full spirit, it's sung with great expressivity and in the three decades since her first recordings Lenya's voice had dropped an octave, replacing her former weirdly perverse shrill girly innocence with a world-weary wisdom.

The avowed intent of a 1989 RIAS Berlin recording peopled with opera stars (London 430 075) was to restore Weill's music to preeminence while evading the "heightened and mannered speech" and "aggressive bellowing and whining" of the producers' conception of the prevailing accepted style. While the singing is full of character but without exaggerated inflection, the accompaniment is exquisitely detailed, often mining lodes of unsuspected splendor and beauty from the score. The potential conflict between adhering to the original manuscript and respecting more recent emendations is finessed, as when "Pirate Jenny" is sung twice – once by Polly (as in the first stagings) and again by Jenny (after Weill shifted his show-stopper to his wife's role). The Threepenny Opera may evoke Berlin in the 1920s, but its cynical distrust of human endeavor, its frantic search for meaning amid moral chaos and its desparate anxiety for a more secure future are far more current than we might want to admit. Copyright 2004 by Peter Gutmann

Question: Who composed the music for "The Threepenny Opera", the 1928 adaptation of "The Beggar's Opera"?
Answer: KURT WEILL