The Threepenny Opera
Last year there was a semi-staging by director Ted Huffman of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank. This performance was sung in German with English subtitles and had a linking narration specially written by Brecht for concert performances such as this.
The Threepenny Opera is an adaptation of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera which is a satire on the corruption of the Walpole government in the aftermath of the financial crash of the South Sea Company. John Gay had a relish for low life, an affinity shared with Brecht who set The Threepenny Opera in a Soho of the lumpenproletariat of thieves, beggars, and whores.
Max Hopp as the Narrator sang Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (The Ballad of Mack the Knife). Max Hopp recently had a leading role in the William S Burroughs-Tom Waits ‘musical fable’ The Black Rider at the Theater Basel.
Low-Dive Jenny performed by Meow Meow sang Seeräuberjenny (Pirate Jenny): ‘you toss me a penny, and I’m always quick to thank/Even though you see my rags/And fifty canons/Will fire at the shore/My Sirs, there your laughter will stop/Because the walls will fall/And the city will be level with the ground.’
Mark Padmore as Macheath and Nicholas Folwell as ‘Tiger’ Brown, the corrupt police chief duet on the Kanonen-Song (Cannon Song): ‘young men’s blood goes on being red/And the army goes on recruiting.’
Macheath and Jenny duet on the materialist II Dreigroschenfinale, Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? (Second Threepenny Opera Finale, What Keeps Mankind Alive); ‘Food is the first thing: morals follow on/You gentlemen who think you have a mission/to purge us from the seven deadly sins/ Should first sort out the basic food position.’
The Threepenny Opera is notable for Weill’s music which was scored for a jazz dance band drawing on the rhythms and idioms of the dance music of the time. Weill’s music is a reaction to the bourgeois genre of operetta. He emulates John Gay in his use of vernacular musical styles.
Brecht aims his satire at the corruption, hypocrisy, greed, self-satisfaction of the capitalist class, the venality of aspirations to bourgeois respectability and what the bourgeoisie had in common with ruthless criminals. Macheath says ‘What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?’
Theodore Adorno judged it the most important event since Berg’s Wozzeck and Brecht later wrote ‘young proletarians suddenly came to the theatre, in some cases for the first time, and then quite often came back.’
Steve Clayton
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