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Bertolt Brecht: Threepenny Opera
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Brecht based The Threepenny Opera on Elisabeth Hauptmann's translation of The Beggar's Opera (produced 1728) by the English dramatist John Gay. While adapting and modernizing Gay's balled opera, Brecht retained the main events of the plot but added topical satirical bite through his own lyrics. In this work he develops to its first high point his own special language - that peculiar amalgam of street-colloquial, Marxist-philosophical, and quasi-biblical diction laced with cabaret wit and lyrical pathos and bound together with the unrelenting force of parody. Brecht borrows freely from many sources - among them François Villon and Rudyard Kipling - but his undisguised plagiarism generally supports sharp parody.
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The lyric poetry Brecht wrote in these years shows a concern for personal rather than universal or mass experience. Recent criticism has increasingly recognized Brecht's eminence as a lyric poet. His verse of the 1920s, in particular Hauspostille (1927; Domestic Breviary), is iconoclastic balladry of a savagely satirical kind. However, his keen interest in Chinese and Japanese poetic forms led through the Svendborger Gedichte (1939) to the austere delicacy of the Buckower Elegien (1954). Brecht ... wrote The Threepenny Novel (1934), which is based on The Threepenny Opera, and some skillful short stories, Kalendergeschichten (1949; Tales from the Calendar ). He died of a heart attack in August 1956.
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It's hard to picture Bertolt Brecht thriving in the collaborative process endemic to filmmaking. Much like such other legendary authors-turned-screenwriters as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, the German playwright-poet could never quite assimilate himself to the demands of the medium; and, like Faulkner, never entirely wanted to. The Criterion Collection is releasing in a highly informative two-disc collection Brecht's first feature-length film as a writer, an adaptation of his "Threepenny Opera." It prompts the question: Did Brecht and celluloid ever get along?
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Brecht collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill on Mahagonny (or Kleine Mahagonny), a play with music written for the Baden-Baden festival of 1927. They then wrote Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera), which was triumphantly performed in Berlin on Aug. 31, 1928. This was the first work to make Brecht famous.
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By 1930, when Brecht began work on the script, his outlook had markedly changed. Burrowing ever deeper into Marxist dogma, Brecht had grown embarrassed by the rapturous reception "Threepenny" got, and sought to toughen it up for the big screen, tinting it a brighter shade of red. Pabst and the film's producers wanted noth ing of the sort, intending to adapt the hit play Brecht had written, not the Communist-tinged spectacle he was crafting from its ashes. They brought in writer Bela Balazs to go back to the original play and weave it together with strands of Brecht's screen treatment. As it is, this "Threepenny" is an unusual musical adaptation, cutting much of Weill's music (the most beloved part of the show) and leaving a satirical melodrama in its place, with songs cast as musical monologues or dramatic punctuation.
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Fall 2003: The Three-Penny Opera (Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera is infused with this sort of sensibility, as though the highwaymen of John Gay's original Beggar's Opera had been replaced with sea robbers. Brecht and Weill's dingy Thames river is menaced by the brigand Macheath, and their famous song to him, "The Ballad of Mac the Knife," sounds like it is explicity based on sea shanties).
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Threepenny Opera