Customer Reviews

The Threepenny Opera (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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).

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).

I have reviewed some of the Communist master playwright Bertolt Brecht's later more consciously political and didactic plays elsewhere in this space. The play under review is an earlier work, before he fully committed himself to communism, and is an adaptation of John Gay's 18th century Beggar's Opera to the modern theater. The subject at hand is a look at the way those in the lower depths of society survive under emergent capitalist conditions, especially the main character, one MacHealth a.k.a. Mac the Knife. As such Brecht's adaptation has given no end of problems for those critics who want to claim it for the communist cause. It is far too universal in it sentiment about human nature in the capitalist era and therefore properly is a transitional to his later more consciously partisan works like The Measures Taken and The Mother. Thus one should take it for is own worth as a look at survival in a seemingly Hobbesian world.

The plot line is rather simply-MacHealth, a former British imperial soldier, has struck out on his own in dog-eat dog London and has created a name for himself as a master criminal and seducer of the ladies. Other forces including the constabulary, a small disreputable but conniving businessman and, let us be politically correct here, some sexual workers combine in an attempt to deprive Mac of life and limb. However luck and a royal coronation combine to thwart those best laid plans. All of this is performed in a light operatic format that allows Brecht to wax poetic at humanity's plight through a series of sharply-etched songs in which he collaborated with the legendary Kurt Weill.

Above I referred to some controversy about Brecht's intention in this work. That the roguish, incipient capitalist MacHealth is saved in the end through royal intervention has caused some commentators to argue for the organic connection between the rising capitalist class and the monarchy in England. Others have noted the similarities in appetite between the lumpenproletariat element as represented by MacHealth and his criminal crew and the developing capitalism of the time. I think that both views overdraw what one can take out of Gay's story or Brecht's adaptation. This story line is much more conducive to a generalized treatment on the nature of survival in a world that has broken from its agrarian past and has not yet stabilized it bourgeois norms of propriety. Some of these same characteristics were played out in the development of American capitalism, especially in the Wild West. But as presented here this is only a rudimentary outline of where things could go. I stand by my comment in the first paragraph about the unmediated nature of Brecht's take on Gay's little work. He most definitely got more focused on the nature of the human plight under capitalism latter as he developed as a Marxist.

Bawdy, facetious, and unapologetically bleeding hearted, The Threepenny Opera is Bertolt Brecht's most playful and accessible critique of Western society.

It is also the best, gutteral and earthy, this transaltion had audiences and critics cheering in 1977. So why is the recording re-release on CD being blocked by the Weill Estate?

Reading the German playwright Bertolt Brecht today is like reading some medieval theologian whose works were once considered inspired and were an authentic reflection of his times but whose world-view has become so outdated that to comprehend him now requires an effort of will prefaced by extensive historical analysis. The music and the dialogue may still amuse, but the message has become stale and barely comprehensible.

Macheath, more commonly known as "Mac the Knife," made famous by Louis Armstrong's rendition, is not merely the chief protagonist of this "beggar's opera," and the vicious leader of a criminal gang, but is intended by Brecht to be the pre-eminent "bourgeois phenomenon." Reliable only in his duplicity, wealthy only in his criminal reputation and police connections, Macheath is the inevitable result of the workings of the ideological "superstructure" of capitalism, which, in Brecht's Marxian view, causes people to objectify human relations in the quest for short-term profit.

Like most Marxists, Brecht's Marxism is as deep and unquestioned as that of any religious zealot. His goal is to transform the theater from a mere medium of passive amusement for well-endowed bourgeois patrons into a field of action where the players act upon the theater-goers and engage them in the acting process, forcing them to gaze into a mirror and confront their own flawed participation in the "capitalist" economic system. Brecht even shows the elitism of classic Marxists, convinced despite all evidence to the contrary that they alone held the keys to the secrets of history and the salvation of Mankind, by stating that his technique of projecting scene-titles onto well-lit boards to introduce the play's songs is an attempt at "literarization of the theater," as if the average middle-class theater-goer in Berlin in 1928 had yet to learn to read.

In the end, Brecht's Three-Penny Opera is not about art, or the theater, and much less about the London lower-classes where the Opera ostensibly takes place, but about semi-religious proselytizing. He wishes to convert, not educate or entertain. Unfortunately, the Marxian faith of simple economic determinism that he propounds was already fading by the time of the Weimar Republic, having been superseded by successive waves of philosophical innovation that explicitly rejected (Friedrich Nietzsche) or implicitly undermined (Martin Heidegger) the Marxist view, and was replaced among most Marxists by Lenin's conspiratorial Communism during the 1890's. Reading the Three-Penny Opera today is like opening one's door to a wandering Jehovah's Witness. One may have a rousing conversation, but the topic and the purpose of the exchange are pre-determined, and the conversants will soon be reduced to fruitless attempts to refute each other's arguments with snippets of scriptural dogma.