The Threepenny Opera (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

by Bertolt Brecht (Author), John Willett (Editor, Translator), Ralph Manheim (Editor, Translator), Norman Roessler (Introduction), Nadine Gordimer (Foreword)
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Editorial Reviews

Review
“The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage are the great plays of our time.”
—Lillian Hellman

Product Description
Brutal, scandalous, perverted, yet humorous, hummable, and with a happy ending—Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary masterpiece The Threepenny Opera is a landmark of modern drama that has become embedded in the Western cultural imagination. Through the love story of Polly Peachum and “Mack the Knife” Macheath, the play satirizes the bourgeois of the Weimar Republic, revealing a society at the height of decadence and on the verge of chaos. Complemented with music by Kurt Weill, it was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, and the song “Mack the Knife” became one of the most popular and widely recorded songs of the twentieth century.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (December 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143105167
• ISBN-13: 978-0143105169
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #152,696 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A rather boring translation of the great Dreigroschenoper, March 1, 1999

By	Meik ([e-mail]) (Salzburg, Austria) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Threepenny Opera (Paperback)

One has to know and understand the original German text of the Dreigroschenoper to be really able to judge the quality of the English translations. This one, used among others by Helen Schneider on her album with Weill songs, has nothing of the sarcasms of the German lyrics. Better read the 1954 translation of Marc Blitzstein or the translation made by Frank McGuinness in the early 1990s.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Probably the best translation to capture Brecht's intentions, March 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Threepenny Opera (Paperback)

Of all the translations on the market, this one is the best -- most are watered-down, tepid versions. Manheim & Willet's was used in the late 1970's revival of the piece by the New York Shakespeare Festival, which starred the late Raul Julia and Ellen Greene (of "Little Shop of Horrors" fame, in the role originally intended for Lotte Lenya).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN IMPORTANT LESSON IN OUR AGE OF CORRUPT GLOBALIZATION AND "FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS", October 16, 2008

By	C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Threepenny Opera (Mass Market Paperback)

and our local crime as well.

The Threepenny Opera is so well known and sought after (without many taking the time seriously to study it) that it can be pricey here on the open amazonian market. Don't go for the collector's editions; go for the one you can throw into a pocket and pull out and read. Get the book you will read.

Grove once more, like Beckett, comes to the rescue. Grove (and its Black Cat Evergreen extension) over forty years ago was noted for alone publishing what others would not. Over forty years later Grove's mass market editions still make available to us what otherwise might be out of reach. Bertolt Brecht, the banned playwright, remains here easily acquired, and read.

Certainly this is a bare bones edition. Other critical editions and essays are avaialble, but this is something very portable and readable. For instance for critical essays you might find Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit of interest. The Threepenny Opera (Penguin Classics) may contain more supplementary materials (I do not know). But I find what is supplied here adequate for now, and for reading.

We find here the lyrics to the songs at the proper place in the play, but not Kurt Weil's music. We do have a deeply moving (in the end) and eloquently written Foreword by Lotte Lenya who created her career here, and whose definitive presentation may yet be seen in The Threepenny Opera - Criterion Collection.

We also have included here the excellent stage notes to the actors by the author, Bertolt Brecht, who after general political and philosophical comments about the dramatic arts, gives precise suggestions for staging his play, including never to cut the horse in the end.

In fact, he gives some very good direction for our only surviving widespread and popular form of live dramatic entertainment - the local karaoke: "The actor must not only sing but show a man who is singing. He does not attempt so much to project the emotional content of the song (can one offer others food which one has already eaten?) as to display gestures which are, so to speak, the customs and usages of the body. To this end, he would do well, when studying his part, to use not the words of the text, but common current forms of speech which express similar meanings in the everyday idiom. So as far as the melody is concerned, he need not follow it blindly; there is a way of speaking-against-the-music which can be very effective just because of an obstinate matter-of-factness, independent of and incorruptible by the music and rhythm. If he drops into the melody, this must be an event; to emphasize this, the actor can show clearly his own delight in the melody (pp. 106-107)." SO next time you are forced at a wedding, etc., to sing Karaoke, just read it, against the music, until discovering a section you enjoy singing, and make it show!

I avoid the story for now, as it should be well known to everyone. As Lenya's foreword recounts well, Brecht based this play on an excellent and popular work from the early 1700's by John Gay which mocked the official extortion and theft by the London aristocracy. These well sanctioned thieves and immoral organized crime was thinly disguised with the trade of much poorer (as less royally favored) thieves who were liable for the courts for not having received royal license and monopolies (at a price). That earlier play is called The Beggar's Opera, By John Gay; To Which Is Added the Music To Each Song, available now in several editions, and also a DVD production starring the Who's Roger Daltrey at John Gay - The Beggar's Opera / Jonathan Miller · John Eliot Gardiner · Roger Daltrey · English Baroque Soloists. Yale's ubiquitous Harold Bloom also offers a critical edition at John Gay's the Beggar's Opera (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations).

Please read this book, as being the most easily available, and open yourself for further study of this work and related works, including the interesting remarks on the evils of corporate capitalist globalization which close Sacramentum Caritatis: el Sacramento de la Caridad: una Exhortacion Apostolica Postsinodal. This present work available in a variety of translations (of varying literalness or free translation and interpretation) and formats, including Die Dreigroschenoper: Berlin 1930 and The Threepenny Opera (1954 New York Cast) (Blitzstein Adaptation).