Rise and fall of the city of mahagonny pdf

Methuen Drama Modern Classics

The Methuen Drama Modern Plays series has always been at the forefront of modern playwriting and has reflected the most exciting developments in modern drama since 1959. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Methuen Drama, the series was relaunched in 2009 as Methuen Drama Modern Classics, and continues to offer readers a choice selection of the best modern plays.

The Threepenny Opera First staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble), The Threepenny Opera was Brecht’s first and most outstanding success. Based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera, the play is a satire on the capitalist bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic despite its setting in a mock- Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill’s music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world. Filmed three times, it remains one of Brecht’s best loved and most performed plays.

This new translation, first staged in 1975 at York Theatre Royal and subsequently at the Adelaide Playhouse and the Lincoln Center, New York, is by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, who also include Brecht’s own notes and discarded songs as well as an extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of the play.

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg on 10 February 1898, and died in Berlin on 14 August 1956. He grew to maturity as a playwright in the frenetic years of the twenties and early thirties, with such plays as Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny and The Mother. He left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, eventually reaching the United States in 1941, where he remained until 1947. It was during this period of exile that such masterpieces as The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Puntila were written. Shortly after his return to Europe in 1947 he founded the Berliner Ensemble, and from then until his death was mainly occupied in producing his own plays.

Other Bertolt Brecht publications by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

Brecht Collected Plays: One (Baal, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle of Cities, The Life of Edward II of

England, A Respectable Wedding, The Beggar or the Dead Dog, Driving Out a Devil, Lux in Tenebris, The Catch)

Brecht Collected Plays: Two (Man Equals Man, The Elephant Calf, The Threepenny Opera,

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins)

Brecht Collected Plays: Three (Lindbergh’s Flight, The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent, He Said Yes/He Said No, The Decision, The Mother, The Exception and

the Rule, The Horations and the Curiatians, St Joan of the Stockyards)

Brecht Collected Plays: Four (Round Heads and Pointed Heads, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,

Señora Carrar’s Rifles, Dansen, How Much Is Your Iron?, The Trial of Lucullus)

Brecht Collected Plays: Five (Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children)

Brecht Collected Plays: Six (The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti)

Brecht Collected Plays: Seven (The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweyk in the Second World War,

The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Duchess of Malfi)

Brecht Collected Plays: Eight (The Days of the Commune, The Antigone of Sophocles,

Turandot or the Whitewashers’ Congress)

Berliner Ensemble Adaptations – publishing 2014 (The Tutor, Coriolanus, The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431,

Don Juan, Trumpets and Drums)

Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934-55 Brecht on Art and Politics Brecht on Film and Radio

Brecht on Performance - publishing 2014 Brecht on Theatre - publishing 2014 Brecht in Practice - publishing 2014

The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre Brecht, Music and Culture - publishing 2014

Brecht in Context The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht Brecht: A Choice of Evils

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life - publishing 2014

A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht

BERTOLT BRECHT

The Threepenny Opera translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willet

Original work entitled Die Dreigroschenoper

edited and introduced by John Willet and Ralph Manheim

Contents

Introduction THE THREEPENNY OPERA

After John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera NOTES AND VARIANTS

Texts by Brecht

Additional songs from ‘The Bruise’

Appendix

On The Threepenny Opera

Notes to The Threepenny Opera

Note by Kurt Weill

About The Threepenny Opera (a public letter)

Transcript

From a conversation between Brecht and Giorgio Strehler on 25 October 1955 with regard to the forthcoming Milan production

Editorial Notes

1. General

2. The 1928 stage script

3. From the stage script to the present text

Introduction

First staged only two years after Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera was a very different kind of achievement. For where the earlier play had its roots in Brecht’s Augsburg youth and developed under a variety of influences over many years, The Threepenny Opera – or, more precisely, Brecht’s contribution to it – was quickly written for a specific purpose. Moreover although both remained among his favourite plays he showed his affection this time not by continually revising the text as he did with Man equals Man but by leaving the original version unchanged and instead developing it first as a film story, then as a novel. What we have here therefore is the work as it was written and staged just half a century ago in 1928. Like all his plays it is something of a montage, embracing elements from different sources and periods. But far more than most of them it remains nailed to a particular moment in German history.

The second half of the 1920s was the stable period of the Weimar Republic, starting in 1924, once the effects of the inflation began to be overcome and the new American capital began flowing into the country, and ending in 1929 with the Wall Street crash. In the theatre it began with a succession of new-style productions, among which Brecht’s Edward II and Erich Engel’s Coriolanus early in 1925 were significant as leading to a general re-evaluation of the classics; but the real landmark was Carl Zuckmayer’s Der fröhliche Weinberg at the end of that year, with its revelation of the public appetite for literate but unpretentious down-to-earth comedy. Brecht at this time was trying to grapple with the problem of writing plays about the modern world, with all its economic complexities and its wide-ranging interrelationships, and this led both to a more conscious development of the ‘epic’ form and to a new fascination with the economic analysis put forward by Karl Marx, whom he started reading in 1926. It must have been this twofold interest, coupled with his growing reputation as one of the most vocal and original of the younger playwrights, that took him into the collective of ‘dramaturgs’ formed by Erwin Piscator when he set up his first independent company at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in the autumn of 1927. Though this was a Berlin West End theatre, appealing largely to a fashionable audience, its politics were Communist and its four productions established new ways of tackling just the sort of themes that had begun plaguing Brecht. None the less the particular plays which he was trying to write – notably Joe P. Fleischhacker, based on Frank Norris’s novel The Pit about the Chicago wheat market, and Decline of the Egoist Johann Fatzer about soldiers deserting in the First World War – were neither performed there nor even completed. Indeed from Man equals Man in 1926 to Saint Joan of the Stockyards in 1931 he remained unable to finish the large-scale plays that preoccupied him most.

At the same time his first meeting with Kurt Weill in the spring of 1927, soon after Weill’s enthusiastic review of the Berlin Radio broadcast of Man equals Man, gave him a new and promising line to follow. Weill, who had been one of Busoni’s handful of pupils at the Berlin Academy, was becoming known as a dissonant, strongly contrapuntal neo- classical composer to be ranked with Hindemith, Toch and Ernst Křenek, but he was also a man of considerable literary judgement who had been collaborating with two of the few

playwrights about whom Brecht had anything good to say: Georg Kaiser and Iwan Goll. Enormously impressed not only by the broadcast but also by Brecht’s first book of poems, the Devotions, Weill now wished to collaborate with him too. According to Weill’s account they had no sooner met than they started discussing the opera medium; the word ‘Mahagonny’ cropped up, and with it the notion of a ‘paradise city’. In other words, so it would appear, Brecht at the outset introduced him to that notion of a ‘Mahagonny Opera’ which he had brought with him from Munich (originally with his first wife Marianne in mind, she being an opera singer), and which related to the ‘Mahagonny Songs’ in the Devotions. The idea of turning this into a full-scale opera was thus already in the air when Weill got a commission to contribute one of a series of short operas to the forthcoming Baden-Baden ‘German Chamber Music’ festival that summer. Basing himself on the ‘Mahagonny Songs’, and making some use of Brecht’s own tunes for them, he started in May to compose the jazzy ‘songspiel’ now known as The Little Mahagonny which was performed at Baden-Baden in a boxing-ring stage in July. After this the two collaborators worked throughout the rest of the year on the libretto for the full-scale opera, which was ready for Weill to begin composing early in 1928.

In effect then it can be said that Brecht started the year of The Threepenny Opera with three main irons in the fire. There was his technically and politically stimulating job with Piscator, which was now involving him in the rewriting of the official Schweik adaptation to suit the revolutionary staging which Piscator and his designer George Grosz had devised. There were his own incomplete social-political plays, one of which – Fleischhacker – had already been announced on Piscator’s prospectus. And then there was the very promising collaboration with Weill, involving also his own preferred designer Caspar Neher (who was outside Piscator’s scheme of things). Looking now at the state of the German theatre at the time it can be seen that any reliance on Piscator involved considerable risks, for he was already far exceeding his budgeted costs and the combination of bad planning and expensive technical innovations was soon to be fatal. None the less it was Piscator who sparked off a wave of interest in the Zeitstück, or ‘play of the times’, from which a number of other left-wing writers benefited and which might well have led to a production for one of Brecht’s essays in the genre. Oddly enough, however, it was the opera medium which reflected this first, following the impact of Křenek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf in February (Leipzig premiere) and October (Berlin production) 1927. And with Klemperer’s appointment that year to head the Kroll-Oper, the second state opera house in Berlin, a unique centre for modern opera was created in which such associates of Brecht’s as Neher and Ernst Legal and Jacob Geis (both of whom had been involved with Man equals Man) were soon to find employment.

The critical moment came in March–April 1928, when Piscator had taken on a second theatre and was fast heading for bankruptcy. Some three months earlier a new management had been set up in Berlin, headed by a young actor called Ernst-Josef Aufricht, once a member of Berthold Viertel’s much respected company ‘Die Truppe’. Around Christmas he had been given 100,000 marks by his father with which to open his own Berlin theatre, and he used this to rent the medium-sized late nineteenth-century Theater am Schiffbauerdamm not far from Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. He booked Erich Engel, then busy with Brecht’s Man equals Man at the Volksbühne, to direct the

opening production, if possible to coincide with his own twenty-eighth birthday on 31 August. All that remained was to find a play. This was not quite so simple, even after he had brought in a young friend of Karl Kraus’s called Heinrich Fischer to help him and act as his deputy. Kraus, Wedekind, Toller, Feuchtwanger, Kaiser, even the much older Sudermann were in turn considered or actually approached, but to no effect. Then one of those happy accidents occurred which go to make theatre history: Fischer ran into Brecht in a café, introduced him to Aufricht and asked if he had anything that would answer their needs. Brecht’s own work in progress – presumably Fleischhacker – would not do; it was already promised – presumably to Piscator – and Aufricht appears to have been bored by his account of it. But Brecht also mentioned a translation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera which his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann had begun making the previous November. This eighteenth-century satire had been an immense success in Nigel Playfair’s revival at the Lyric, Hammersmith some five or six years earlier, and to the two entrepreneurs the idea ‘smelt of theatre’. They read all that had so far been written, under the provisional title Gesindel, or Scum, and decided that this was the play with which to open.

Just how much Brecht had had to do with the script at this exploratory stage is uncertain, but he now took the lead and proposed that Weill should be brought in to write modern settings for the songs. Aufricht, by his own account, thereupon went privately to hear two of Weill’s Kaiser operas, was appalled by their atonality and told his musical director Theo Mackeben to get hold of the traditional Pepusch arrangements in case Weill came up with something impossibly rebarbative. In mid-May the whole team were packed off to Le Lavandou in the south of France to complete the work: the Brechts, the Weills, Hauptmann, Engel. Here, and subsequently on the Ammersee in Bavaria, Brecht seems to have written some brand-new scenes (the stable wedding for instance, which bears no relation to Gay’s original), and started adding his own songs, four of them piratically derived from a German version of Villon. On 1 August rehearsals started, with a duplicated script which, as our notes show, still contained a good deal of the original work, as well as songs by Gay himself and Rudyard Kipling which later disappeared. A succession of accidents, catastrophes and stopgaps then occurred. Carola Neher, who was to play Polly, arrived a fortnight late from her husband Klabund’s deathbed, and abandoned her part; Roma Bahn was recruited and learned it in four days. Feuchtwanger suggested the new title; Karl Kraus added the second verse to the Jealousy Duet. Helene Weigel, cast as Mrs Coaxer the brothel Madame, developed appendicitis and the part was cut. The cabaret singer Rosa Valetti objected to the ‘Song of Sexual Obsession’ which she had to sing as Mrs Peachum, so this too went; Käte Kühl as Lucy could not manage the florid solo which Weill had written for another actress in scene 8, so this was eliminated and later the scene itself was cut; Weill’s young wife Lotte Lenya was accidentally left off the printed programme; the play was found to be three-quarters of an hour too long, leading to massive cuts in Peachum’s part and the dropping of the ‘Solomon Song’; the finale was only written during the rehearsals; and late on the ‘Ballad of Mac the Knife’ was added as an inspired afterthought.

All accounts agree that the production’s prospects seemed extremely bad, with only Weill’s music and Caspar Neher’s sets remaining unaffected by the mounting chaos. Even the costumes were simply those available, so Brecht was to say later (p. 103), while the

Victorian setting was decided less by the needs of the story than by the shortage of time. The dress rehearsal must have been disastrous, the reactions of the first-night audience a confirmation of this, lasting right into the second scene, even after the singing of ‘Pirate Jenny’ in the stable. But with the ‘Cannon Song’ the applause suddenly burst loose. Quite unexpectedly, inspiredly, improvisedly, management and collaborators found themselves with the greatest German hit of the 1920s on their hands.

It struck Berlin during an interregnum, as it were: at a moment when Piscator had temporarily disappeared as an active force in the left-wing theatre and the various collective groups which succeeded him had not yet got off the ground. For Brecht and Weill there was now the composition of Mahagonny to be resumed – something that was only completed in November 1929 – as well as a small Berlin Requiem which Weill had agreed to write for Radio Frankfurt on texts by Brecht, and which they sketched out in November and December 1928. Both men probably also had some involvement in the production of Feuchtwanger’s second ‘Anglo-Saxon Play’ Die Petroleuminseln at the Staatstheater in the former month, for which Weill wrote the music and Neher once more provided sets. But the immediate effect of The Threepenny Opera’s success was to establish the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm as the leading left-wing theatre of the moment in Berlin. Retrospectively Brecht came to speak of it as ‘his’ theatre, and indeed to a great extent he does seem to have dominated its entire opening season. For with The Threepenny Opera temporarily transferred to another theatre (and Carola Neher at some point assuming her original role as Polly), he took over the direction of Marieluise Fleisser’s anti-militarist Bavarian farce Die Pioniere von Ingolstadt, a sequel to the play which he had recommended to the Junge Bühne three years earlier. This opened on 31 March 1929 and featured an unknown actor whom Brecht had advised Aufricht to engage on a three-year contract – Peter Lorre – along with Kurt Gerron and Lenya, the Brown and Jenny from his own play. The farce itself was too outspoken for the police and the military, and had to be bowdlerised, but it none the less ran for two months and broke even; Aufricht later judged it the best of all the productions which he sponsored. Then The Threepenny Opera returned for the rest of the season, and the problem of the next play had to be faced.

Aufricht wanted another Brecht–Weill work on the same lines as before. It was scheduled once more for 31 August; Engel and Neher were again booked, and a number of the same actors already under contract. But the moment had passed, the first symptoms of the imminent economic crisis were beginning to make themselves felt, the veneer of political tolerance was wearing thin. Brecht had a seismographic feeling for such changes, and he was already heading towards a much more didactic kind of theatre, in which he briefly also managed to involve Weill. As a result Happy End, the Chicago comedy which was supposed to follow up The Threepenny Opera’s success, never really stirred his interest or drew the same inspired ideas from him as had Gay’s inherently much superior original. Superficially the prospects might have seemed the same as before, with Elisabeth Hauptmann providing the basic dialogue and Brecht writing a number of characteristic songs, some of them eliciting first-rate settings from Weill. But whereas in 1928 Brecht was willing to make many radical changes in the former, so that his stamp on the final play is unmistakable, only a year later this was no longer the case. At some point during

the spring of 1929 he began writing his first Lehrstücke or didactic plays under the twofold influence of the Japanese Noh drama and Hindemith’s concept of Gemeinschaftsmusik – the educational implications of making music in common. Two works for that summer’s Baden-Baden festival resulted. Almost at the same time his hitherto uncommitted left-wing opinions crystallised as a consequence, it seems, of the Berlin May Day demonstration at which the police killed thirty-one people. From then on he was aligned with the German Communist Party, and if this led him to foist a more ‘provocative’ ending on Happy End it also helped further to alienate him from that play without making it appear any better in the eyes of the party critics.

But, however Brecht himself might be changing at this time, The Threepenny Opera was a play which he had no wish to discard. Obviously it was a very much better and solider work than its successor, though the latter’s rehabilitation in the 1960s (which has led it to be performed under Brecht’s name in both England and the U.S.) shows the silliness of its text to be not quite the liability it once seemed. The major difference, however, lay in the former work’s enormous success, which kept it running in different parts of Germany until the Nazis took over and in other countries longer still. This did not immediately tempt Brecht to tinker with the text of the play (as he continued to do with Man equals Man), but when Warner Brothers and Tobis, acting through producers called Nero-Film, contracted in May 1930 to make a film version he started looking at it with changed – and changing – eyes. Though sound film was then in its infancy, the prospects seemed good: G. W. Pabst was to be the director, Lania (of Piscator’s old collective) to write the script; Carola Neher would play Polly, Lenya Jenny; while Brecht and Weill were given a say respectively in the script and the music. Two parallel versions would be made, one German and one French. That summer, accordingly, Brecht wrote Lania the treatment called ‘Die Beule’, ‘The Bruise’, which in effect ignores all that had remained of The Beggar’s Opera and uses the characters and the Victorian London setting to point a radically changed moral. Everything now is on a larger scale – the gang is 120 strong, Peachum heads a Begging Trust – and a higher social level, with peers, a general and a magistrate at Macheath’s wedding in the ducal manège. The gang and the beggars this time are engaged in a war whose symbol is the bruise inflicted by the former on a beggar called Sam. Peachum accordingly uses the beggars to disfigure the smartly repainted slum streets through which the Queen is to pass; he interviews Brown with seven lawyers behind him, and secures Macheath’s arrest after a bucolic picnic and a chase in which a car full of policemen pursues a car full of whores. There is no escape and no second arrest. Under Polly’s direction the gang has simply taken over the National Deposit Bank and converted itself into a group of solemn financiers. Both they and Mrs Peachum now become uneasy about the dangers of unleashing the poor; while Brown has a terrible dream, in which thousands of poor people emerge from under one of the Thames bridges as a great flood, sweeping through the streets and public buildings. So the ‘mounted Messengers’ this time are the bankers who arrive to bail Macheath out; and rather than disappoint the crowds Peachum hands over Sam to be hanged instead. The social façades are maintained as Macheath joins the reunited bourgeoisie awaiting the arrival of their Queen.

This scheme, on which Neher and the Bulgarian director Slatan Dudow also collaborated, was plainly unwelcome to the producers, and the fact that Brecht only met

the agreed August deadline by communicating it to Lania orally did not improve matters. Though Lania needed him to continue working the Nero firm chose to dismiss Brecht at this stage, and brought in the Communist film critic Béla Balázs to help complete the script. A law suit followed, which Brecht lost, and thereafter he had no words too bad for Pabst’s film, which meanwhile went obstinately ahead, to be shown in Berlin on 19 February 1931. Though the long theoretical essay which Brecht thereafter wrote on the ‘Threepenny Lawsuit’, as he termed it, is an illuminating work, not least for its links with the ideas of his new friend Walter Benjamin, the modern reader should not allow its downright condemnation to put him off the film. For in fact not only did the latter capture aspects of the original (for instance Carola Neher’s interpretation of Polly) that necessarily elude any modern production, but it also incorporates a surprising proportion of Brecht’s changes to the story. These, however, continued to itch Brecht, so that while leaving the play itself as it had been in the 1928 production (with all its last-minute decisions and improvisations) he was soon planning its further development in The Threepenny Novel, his one substantial work of fiction, which he was to hand in to its Dutch publisher some months after leaving Germany in 1933. Engel, when he came again to direct the play at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm for the Berliner Ensemble in 1960, after Brecht’s death, wondered at first if he could not incorporate some of the ideas from ‘The Bruise’ and the novel, but soon decided that they were too divergent from the play. Brecht for his part wrote some topical versions of the songs (p. 85 ff.) for other directors in the immediate post-war years, but it is not clear if and when they were used, and certainly he never made them a permanent part of the text; indeed they hardly merit it. All the same, his discussions in connection with Giorgio Strehler’s Milan production in the last year of his life (p. 100) show that he regarded The Threepenny Opera as no inviolable museum piece. For he envisaged a new framework, and welcomed Strehler’s updating of the story to the era of the Keystone Cops.

Like Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera presents a problem to earnest-minded interpreters, since it is hard to reconcile its flippancies with Brecht’s status as a Communist playwright, while its repeated successes in the commercial theatres of bourgeois society – from Berlin of the 1920s to New York of the 1970s – take some explaining away. The trouble here is not only that when Brecht actually wrote his share of this play he was only beginning to explore Marxism and had barely begun to relate to the class struggle (as the leading Communist Party critic Alfred Kemény pointed out), but that the issue was subsequently confused by Brecht’s writing all his own notes and interpretations after adopting a more committed position in 1929. His remarks moreover are too easily taken out of context and at their face value: his insistence, for instance, that the play is a critique of bourgeois society and not merely of the Lumpenproletariat was only a retort – quite unsubstantiated – to that ill-disposed critic in the party’s daily Die Rote Fahne who had accused him of the contrary, referred to him as ‘the Bohemian Bert Brecht’ and dismissed the whole work as a money-spinner containing ‘Not a vestige of modern social or political satire’. Just like Piscator’s productions of the previous season The Threepenny Opera undoubtedly appealed to the fashionable Berlin public and subsequently to the middle classes throughout Germany, and if it gave them an increasingly cynical view of their own institutions it does not seem to have prompted either them or any other section of society to try to change these for the better. The fact

was simply that ‘one has to have seen it’, as the elegant and cosmopolitan Count Kessler noted in his diary after doing so with a party that included an ambassador and a director of the Dresdner Bank.

Brecht himself had far too much affection for this work to admit the ineffectiveness of its message, even after he had tacitly confirmed such accusations by going over to austerer, explicitly didactic forms. Even years later he could still view it through something of a pink cloud, as indicated by his wishful replies to Giorgio Strehler on p. 102. Yet the most favourable criticisms at the time were concerned less with its attack on ‘bourgeois morality’ and capitalist property rights as being based on theft than with its establishment of a highly original new theatrical genre. Thus Herbert Ihering, who from the first had been Brecht’s leading supporter among the Berlin critics, while welcoming this ‘new form, open to every possibility, every kind of content’, pointed out that ‘this content, however, has still to come’. Part of the common over-estimation of the play’s social purpose and impact is due most probably to the intense dislike felt for it by the German nationalist reaction which began gaining ground within a year of the première and was soon to bring the Nazis their first great electoral successes. It was a time of growing polarisation in German political and cultural life, and if the Berlin theatre continued to move leftwards, dragging part of the cinema with it, there was now much less hesitation on the part of the authorities and the great middlebrow public to voice their dislike of anything ‘alien’ and ‘decadent’ in the arts. Not only was Weill a leading target for such campaigns, largely on racialist grounds, but the brothel scene and the cynicism of the songs were certainly enough to qualify Brecht too, whether or not he represented any kind of serious threat. A great wave of irrational feeling was building up, and in so far as it was directed against The Threepenny Opera its political aspects were quite deceptive. Thus that shrewd observer Kurt Tucholsky could write in spring 1930 that the battle was a sham one because the work itself was unrealistic. ‘This writer can be compared to a man cooking soup on a burning house. It isn’t he who caused the fire.’

Yet if its political significance is often overrated today The Threepenny Opera remains revolutionary in a less obvious but equally disturbing sense. For, like The Little Mahagonny before it, it struck almost instinctively at the whole hierarchical order of the arts, with opera on its Wagnerian pinnacle at the top, and reshuffled highbrow and lowbrow elements to form a new kind of musical theatre which would upset every accepted notion of what was socially and culturally proper. This was what the best critics immediately recognised, Ihering writing that the success of The Threepenny Opera was of immense importance:

A theatre that is not smart, not geared to ‘society’, has broken through to the audience.

Far more so the musicians; thus Klemperer included the wind suite from the music in his concerts and is reported to have seen the 1928 production ten times, while Heinrich Strobel compared it with The Soldier’s Tale as ‘showing the way’ and Theodor Adorno judged it the most important event since Berg’s Wozzeck. In many ways the change of values which it implied has proved harder for later societies to assimilate than have the somewhat random gibes at business, religious hypocrisy, individual charity, romantic marriage and the judicial system which make up the political content of the text. Particularly when seen in conjunction with Brecht’s and Walter Benjamin’s current

thinking about the ‘apparatus’ of the arts, it suggested a complete cultural and sociological re-evaluation which would alter all the existing categories, starting with those of opera and operetta (for it was neither), as well as the corresponding techniques of acting, singing and so forth. Today, though certainly poverty, slums, corrupt business practices and biassed justice continue to exist in our most prosperous societies, we no longer feel that The Threepenny Opera has anything all that acute to say about them. But the implications of the new form for singers, musicians, voice teachers and above all for institutionalised opera are still far from fully digested. And because Brecht and his friends did not yet manage to capture the ‘apparatus’ of which they spoke this holds good for Communist as well as for capitalist society.

In reading Brecht’s notes which we print it must be remembered that they were written some two years after the première and only published in 1931. Important as they remain for the development of his theory and practice of theatre, as a guide to the interpretation of the play they tend to ignore the largely irresponsible lightheartedness with which the collaborators originally set to work. Nor is there any material in our own account of the text’s evolution for those directors who would like to sharpen its attack on capitalist morality and institutions – by adding, for instance, episodes from Macheath’s subsequent career as a banker in line with Brecht’s film treatment in ‘The Bruise’; for Brecht himself wrote no such scene. The reallocation of Polly’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ song, too, to Jenny as in the film (where it somewhat overloads the brothel episode), is nowhere suggested by Brecht, though many directors have opted for it either to avoid the confusion of names or to build up the whore’s part. What does emerge from the early scripts (of which nothing has yet been published in Germany itself) is a number of excellent passages and episodes, some of which could certainly help to clarify the story. The poisoning episode with Lucy in Act 3 is dispensable, though it came from Gay and inspired a splendid piece of musical parody from Weill, now in the miniature score. But Peachum’s original conclusion to Act 2 is not only funnier than the rather laboured ‘Semiramis’ speech of the final version; it also explains the otherwise rather baffling start to Act 3. Similarly Lucy’s disclosure of her father’s drunkenness (p. 116) makes his startling ineptitude at that point easier to accept. All such passages, however, date from before 31 August 1928 and are in no sense afterthoughts or amendments in the light of Brecht’s changing interpretations of his story, characters and setting. Aside from the postwar versions of some of the songs (which were not used in the Berliner Ensemble production) he left it as a play of that time.

Of course this is not going to stop directors and dramaturgs from making their own attempts to bring it up to date or put it in some framework more intelligible to a particular audience. But they must be clear that they do this on their own responsibility. They cannot claim to be doing Brecht’s work for him and giving us the play ‘he would have written’ supposing he had been a few years older and a rather better Marxist. After all, he could perfectly well have done this himself if he had wished. Instead he allowed it to remain as it was: the occasional work of a thirty-year-old writer and a composer of twenty-eight. Central as it was to his success in the theatre, it was not in the main line of his aims and concerns either before and after. It was, and is, a brilliant but by no means flawless distraction.

THE EDITORS

The Threepenny Opera after John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera

Collaborators: ELISABETH HAUPTMANN, KURT WEILL

Translators: RALPH MANHEIM, JOHN WILLETT

Characters

MACHEATH, called Mac the Knife

JONATHAN JEREMIAH PEACHUM, proprietor of the Beggar’s Friend Ltd

CELIA PEACHUM, his wife

POLLY PEACHUM, his daughter

BROWN, High Sheriff of London

LUCY, his daughter LOW-DIVE JENNY

SMITH

THE REVEREND KIMBALL

FILCH

A BALLAD SINGER

THE GANG

Beggars

Whores

Constables

PROLOGUE

The Ballad of Mac the Knife

Fair in Soho. The beggars are begging, the thieves are stealing, the whores are whoring. A ballad singer sings a ballad.

See the shark with teeth like razors.

All can read his open face.

And Macheath has got a knife, but

Not in such an obvious place.

See the shark, how red his fins are

As he slashes at his prey.

Mac the Knife wears white kid gloves which

Give the minimum away.

By the Thames’s turbid waters

Men abruptly tumble down.

Is it plague or is it cholera?

Or a sign Macheath’s in town?

On a beautiful blue Sunday

See a corpse stretched in the Strand.

See a man dodge round the corner …

Mackie’s friends will understand.

And Schmul Meier, reported missing

Like so many wealthy men:

Mac the Knife acquired his cash box.

God alone knows how or when.

Peachum goes walking across the stage from left to right with his wife and daughter.

Jenny Towler turned up lately

With a knife stuck through her breast

While Macheath walks the Embankment

Nonchalantly unimpressed.

Where is Alfred Gleet the cabman?

Who can get that story clear?

All the world may know the answer

Just Macheath has no idea.

And the ghastly fire in Soho –

Seven children at a go –

In the crowd stands Mac the Knife, but he

Isn’t asked and doesn’t know.

And the child-bride in her nightie

Whose assailant’s still at large

Violated in her slumbers –

Mackie, how much did you charge?

Laughter among the whores. A man steps out from their midst and walks quickly away across the square.

LOW-DIVE JENNY: That was Mac the Knife!

ACT ONE

I To combat the increasing callousness of mankind, J. Peachum, a man of business, has opened a shop where the poorest of the poor can acquire an exterior that will touch the hardest of hearts.

Jonathan Jeremiah Peacham’s outfitting shop for beggars.

PEACHUM’S MORNING HYMN

You ramshackle Christian, awake!

Get on with your sinful employment

Show what a good crook you could make.

The Lord will cut short your enjoyment.

Betray your own brother, you rogue

And sell your old woman, you rat.

You think the Lord God’s just a joke?

He’ll give you His Judgement on that.

PEACHUM to the audience: Something new is needed. My business is too hard, for my business is arousing human sympathy. There are a few things that stir men’s souls, just a few, but the trouble is that after repeated use they lose their effect. Because man has the abominable gift of being able to deaden his feelings at will, so to speak. Suppose, for instance, a man sees another man standing on the corner with a stump for an arm; the first time he may be shocked enough to give him tenpence, but the second time it will only be fivepence, and if he sees him a third time he’ll hand him over to the police without batting an eyelash. It’s the same with the spiritual approach. A large sign saying ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ is lowered from the grid. What good are the most beautiful, the most poignant sayings, painted on the most enticing little signs, when they get expended so quickly? The Bible has four or five sayings that stir the heart; once a man has expended them, there’s nothing for it but starvation. Take this one, for instance – ‘Give and it shall be given unto you’ – how threadbare it is after hanging here a mere three weeks. Yes, you have to keep on offering something new. So it’s back to the good old Bible again, but how long can it go on providing? Knocking. Peachum opens. Enter a young man by the name of Filch.