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Bertolt Brecht: Threepenny Opera
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The disruptive capacity of Brecht's drama was designed to awaken the theatergoers critical mind and galvanize them into political awareness and action. The Threepenny Opera, which he produced with the aid of his secretary (and lover) Elisabeth Hauptmann (who had just translated John Gay's The Beggar's Opera [1728] into German) and composer Kurt Weill, is a satire of bourgeois society, containing many of the major elements of epic theater: placards announcing the ballad singers, discordant music, and a plot that frustrates expectations for romantic resolution. The Threepenny Opera is very closely based on Gay's eighteenth-century play, another social satire. Brecht and Hauptmann borrowed ballads from Francois Villon, and Weill turned them into darkly twisted cabaret songs for this version of the play.
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Brecht's choice to place the actors in completely new types of roles that keep the audience -- and the actors -- on their toes. Knopf described how, in "The Threepenny Opera," the robbers have to sing even though they are not trained singers, then they change the scenery around, and after that they have to play upstanding citizens.
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The year after "Threepenny," another Brecht script, "Kuhle Wampe," raised hackles. Named after a Berlin district, the film concerns the suicide of an unemployed young man, and was banned by Weimar-era censors, and later condemned by the Nazis. "One fewer out of work," a woman sardonically comments on seeing the corpse splayed out on the ground, capturing the sense of economic hopelessness and moral rot that characterized the Berlin of the early 1930s - a situation that Brecht keenly hoped would lead to communist revolution.
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Brecht's most famous work to many is probably The Threepenny Opera, which is available on video as Mack the Knife. Biting social commentary was his trademark. Some quotes from characters in the plays:
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The masterpiece of the Brecht/Weill collaborations, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), caused an uproar when it premiered in 1930 in Leipzig, with Nazis in the audience protesting. The Mahagonny opera would premier later in Berlin in 1931 as a triumphant sensation.
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Klaus Maria Brandauer's new production of "The Three Penny Opera," scheduled to premiere Friday in Berlin's historic Admiralspalast, is a focal point of the Brecht year. Rock star Campino from the band Die Toten Hosen will make his theatrical debut as Mack the Knife.
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Threepenny Opera