Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera)

The debate about what constitutes The Threepenny Opera and whether it is a play by Brecht with music by Weill or a musical theater work by Weill with text by Brecht is as old as The Threepenny Opera itself. In the program for the 1928 premiere at this theater, it is subtitled as a play based on The Beggar's Opera, a ballad opera from 1728 by John Gay with ballads by François Villon and Rudyard Kipling. Elisabeth Hauptmann discovered, suggested to Brecht, translated, and co-edited the original work. Brecht himself (without his first name) is listed second as "editor" and third is "Music: Kurt Weill." Reclam's opera guide from 1929, on the other hand, elevates Weill to the main author, while the first editions of the text do the opposite with Brecht. It was later revealed that Karl Kraus allegedly wrote the second verse of the jealousy duet. Lion Feuchtwanger invented the title. Thus, several people, not least those involved in the turbulent rehearsal period, had a hand in the birth of this surprising theatrical coup, which suddenly achieved worldwide fame. The Threepenny Opera was performed 50 times in its first season and translated into numerous languages in the following years. In 1930, three productions ran simultaneously in Japanese in Tokyo. Comparing the original with Brecht's adaptation, it becomes clear that he gave it a completely new character of its own and thus wrote a different play. Brecht scholar Werner Hecht sums up the difference succinctly, saying that the Beggar's Opera of 1728 is a "disguised criticism of open abuses," while the Threepenny Opera of 1928 is an "open criticism of disguised abuses": Set in a cold, reified world, the characters are shown to be primarily concerned with their own, primarily material advantage, and they go to considerable theatrical lengths to achieve it without scruples, while at the same time concealing or glossing over this very fact. After all, who wouldn't want to be good? But in Brecht's work, it is not individual vices that create social injustices, but the other way around. However, the characters are too busy pretending to others and themselves to draw the appropriate conclusions and change the fundamental conditions. In doing so, they continue to work on their own alienation and a world in which everything, feelings and ultimately art, become commodities. The play toys with common, clichéd notions of unique love as a romantic relationship between two people, with ideas of eternal friendship, family care, and compassion as indispensable prerequisites for the fight against injustice.The Threepenny Opera does not focus on a real criminal milieu, but on a "normal bourgeois capitalist" way of life (Erich Engel), which to a certain extent fulfills the promise of prosperity for some and attempts to mask the antisocial aspects of this way of working and living with feigned sophistication and false theater. The idea that people cannot be good under capitalist conditions is first hinted at in The Threepenny Opera and is developed more specifically in later plays. More decisive for the creative process of The Threepenny Opera was the serious frivolity, the chaotic collaboration of all those involved, and the desire to play with traditional ideas and forms, as Patrick Primavesi emphasizes: "The supposedly clear intentions of The Threepenny Opera mostly result from the mixing of many subsequent statements. If one also considers how quickly The Threepenny Opera was written and composed, and the chaotic rehearsal process, in which feverishly deletions and rearrangements were made, one should be cautious about asserting any prior intention. […] In any case, in the 1928 premiere version, I don't see so much a moral finger-wagging aimed at educating the audience, but rather a highly artificial, assembled, and in parts improvised construct from very different sources and with several layers of time. At first, it was a rather anarchic bit of fun, in which a group of risk-takers allowed themselves to play with bourgeois forms of theater, bourgeois ideas of romance and crime, love and compassion—with a somewhat surprising success, which they then immediately exploited and each reinforced in their own way."Brecht adopted John Gay's mocking approach to theatrical forms such as melodrama, heroic drama, and sentimental comedy, which, with their excess of sentimentality, contrast with a sober and harsh language oriented toward economic constraints and purposes. Weill, in turn, "wanted, like many young composers of the time, to oppose Wagner. It was necessary to emerge from his shadow, and that meant that everything narcotic, intoxicating, and opiate-like in Wagner's music became the enemy. Weill countered this with the rhythm of the big city." (Arne Stollberg) Similar to Brecht on a textual level, Weill played with different musical genres from completely different contexts – ranging from influences of Jewish synagogue music to Bach, Mozart, operetta, jazz, and popular dance music – and thus created something idiosyncratic and new. The door to their journey through the world was probably opened by The Threepenny Opera's open form, its cleverly reworked, essentially trivial story of love, betrayal, business, and morality, and, last but not least, its music.

A MISUNDERSTANDING?

To Brecht's subsequent disappointment, the audience at the premiere reportedly left the theater less enlightened than well entertained. After four years of sustained Threepenny fever, he noted in a soliloquy staged in 1933:

"What do you think makes The Threepenny Opera so successful?

I'm afraid it's everything that didn't matter to me: the romantic plot, the love story, the music. [...]

What would have been important to you? Social criticism. I had tried to show that the world of ideas and the emotional life of street bandits are extremely similar to the world of ideas and the emotional life of respectable citizens."

This contrast between the emotional, romanticized view of The Threepenny Opera, for which Brecht blamed the musical elements, and the subversive, critical view he had in mind as the author, echoes a theme that has become permanently anchored in the history of its reception: the thesis, first put forward by Adorno in 1929, that the success of The Threepenny Opera was based on a misunderstanding on the part of the audience. The work needed to be protected against its own success. However, Adorno's defense does not focus on the allegedly misunderstood social criticism that Brecht emphasizes, but on the music. In the brilliant opera and operetta form of his compositional surface, Weill skillfully reveals the irrelevance and meaninglessness of worn-out worlds of sound and imagination. On the level of the characters, Weill thus succeeds in capturing both the unfulfilled need for security and closeness and the failure of a facade-like world and the false consciousness in which the search for commitment is undertaken. "Adorno already hit the core of the piece when he said that in the end, only darkness remains. Thus, the sting of Brecht's theatrical work, especially in The Threepenny Opera, lies not only in the realm of obvious social criticism. It is easy to understand that conditions are bad overall and that we should therefore change them." (Patrick Primavesi) The unease festers in the glamorous as well as in what lies excluded in the darkness: "When Tiger Brown marches into Peachum's office to put a stop to his activities by arresting all the fake beggars, Peachum is able to save himself for the time being by threatening to bring in the masses of 'real paupers' who will ruin the queen's coronation procession. However, the fear that emerges here can also be seen as a premonition of the social threat made possible by the state's sanctioning of injustice only a few years later." (Ibid.) The "misunderstanding" thesis is based on several layers of meaning in The Threepenny Opera and the assumption that popularity and social criticism are contradictory. After the premiere, the then 23-year-old writer Elias Canetti offered a different perspective: the audience understood very well the commonality of the ideas and emotions of citizens and criminals—and enjoyed it instead of feeling criticized: "That was themselves, and they liked it. First came their food, then came their morals; none of them could have said it better [...]: pity was mocked most aptly and effectively. [...] It was not an opera, nor was it what it had originally been, a mockery of opera; it was, the only genuine thing about it, an operetta." For Brecht, it was the "most successful demonstration of epic theater," which was intended to encourage the audience to think critically rather than empathize. With this retrospective assessment from 1935, Brecht now added The Threepenny Opera to his series of efforts toward "epic theater," despite his disappointment with the ineffectiveness of the performance two years earlier. Brecht's work on The Threepenny Opera did not end with the premiere in 1928. The play appeared in January 1932 with some textual additions and annotations in issue 3 of the series Versuche. The present stage version incorporates Brecht's additions in large parts, such as the five basic types of misery played out by Peachum, the jealousy scene between Lucy and Polly entitled Kampf um das Eigentum (Struggle for Property), and much more. Musically, it is based on the 1928 score and also includes Lucy's aria, which was cut from the premiere, and the ballad of sexual servitude, which was only reinserted in 1932, so that Weill's entire composition can be heard.

THE FALSE APPEARANCE

In the world of The Threepenny Opera, values such as compassion, loyalty, charity, and family spirit are superficially accepted, while behind the operetta-like comedy, a machinery is at work that proves to be deeply antisocial at its core: "The machinery of everyday competition, the coldness of monetary relationships, utility, profit, and exploitation as the rule and criterion of everyday behavior. Everything here depends on (false) appearances. The values invoked remain words. But if the separation were so easy to achieve, the problems would have been solved long ago." (Hans-Thies Lehmann) The contradiction between the need to be good and to be loved and antisocial behavior is rooted in the socio-political framework, as Peachum notes in the first Threepenny finale with the famous words: "We would be good instead of so crude, but the circumstances are not like that!" "I am in self-defense in this world" is Peachum's principle, with which he justifies his immoral actions. The question remains as to what extent this statement is valid. Peachum, who for tactical reasons likes to claim that he is the poorest man in town, probably earns enough from his 1,432 employees dressed as beggars. It can be assumed that Brown, as police chief, has a comfortable salary. Jenny and Macheath lived in the most meager circumstances in a time that, according to their own statements, "is long past." While Jenny's current circumstances remain unclear, we learn about Macheath that the fortune he has amassed as London's top criminal will at least allow him to buy a house in the country soon.But regardless of who has capital and who does not, the fear of falling is lurking in the system, and those who live in prosperity may live comfortably, but they are far from being good—and individual goodness is no guarantee of social conditions that could be described as fair in terms of the relative distribution of rights, opportunities, and resources. Neither in the case of Macheath, who almost falls victim to Peachum's infamous life-and-death intrigue, nor anyone else in the play do these insights lead to the conclusion that the framework conditions need to be changed, but rather serve to justify the status quo: "The world is poor, man is bad, so unfortunately I'm right!" According to Brecht, the real crime lies in this worldview. "Almost banal," notes Salomé Balthus – philosopher, author, hetaera, activist, and much more – the idea that the core of our social order is a deeply "predatory" one may seem as hackneyed as the penny Polly compares to the moon over Soho—a symbol of soul and romance as well as change—and the economic contexts referred to as "circumstances" are neither examined nor controversially negotiated in The Threepenny Opera. Does that mean it has nothing more to say?

POLLY: "BUT LOVE IS THE HIGHEST THING IN THE WORLD"

Love for Sale is the title of a well-known jazz standard by Cole Porter and the first working thesis with which Barrie Kosky approached The Threepenny Opera. The title plays with the idea that both prostitution and other emotional theater, whether on stage or sometimes in life, are about creating an illusion that makes us forget that it is an illusion – or as Salomé Balthus writes: "People want to be deceived, and they help me do it." Because: "I'm not selling love, I'm selling sex!" Polly vehemently claims to oppose her parents' economic thinking with something else – love. As a matter of course, she follows the image of a romantic couple relationship that thrives on the promise of mending the cracks that raw conditions tear into the social fabric, but is also linked to claims of ownership. It took a whole five days after Mac and Polly first met for them to celebrate their wedding as the "happiest day of their lives," well aware of the pragmatic interests that also played a role in this decision. Not only is it, in some eyes in the city, "the boldest" thing Macheath has done to date in his rivalry with Peachum's empire, but Polly also comes one step closer to her goal of breaking free from her family's dependence. For the Peachums, their daughter is first and foremost the shining figurehead without whom their business would not flourish and who is therefore indispensable. Polly is allowed to do anything except marry a competitor, which would jeopardize the business – then all linguistic embellishments fall away and what is otherwise hidden becomes abundantly clear: "If I give away my daughter, who is my last source of support in my old age, my house will collapse and my last dog will run away." Not only Polly, but all the other characters become predictable objects and behave accordingly – calculating: "All the effort of tearfulness, emotion, eroticism, and mood ultimately serves to drape over this fact" (Jan Knopf), no matter how serious the desire for social warmth may be. While the first two acts of the play revolve primarily around Polly and Macheath's hasty marriage, real and feigned feelings, rivalry, and the Peachums' murderous intrigue, the last third of the play is all about reckoning: relationships prove unreliable as soon as the market value of one of the people involved declines. Polly successfully runs the business while Macheath is in prison. She comments on his surprising pardon by the queen, which restores and consolidates the old relationships, with a sung "I am so happy," followed, however, by three bars in which Weill musically reverses this statement.

MACHEATH: "NOW HEAR THE VOICE THAT CALLS FOR PITY"

The question of what role compassion plays within this order is somewhat less straightforward than the description of the "capitalization of all human relationships," as the director of the premiere, Erich Engel, summarizes the core content of The Threepenny Opera. What is the truth behind the distorted mirror of total capitalism in The Threepenny Opera, which embellishes the injustice that continues here at the end with a facade of compassion; which enables narcissistic identification with a form of violence that takes over the world and at the same time comes with the claim to love?One of the core questions about the nature of capitalism is whether the belief in profit corrodes the moral values of a society and whether, as Marx claimed, it actually destroys everything: tradition, community, family ties, and morality. This question remains open," says sociologist Eva Illouz. The destruction of traditional relationships can both serve regressive forces and unleash emancipatory potential, enabling new relationships. Another conception of capitalism even argues that "human love, compassion, and close connections arise from the fact that economic exchange with one another replaces mutual warfare."On the one hand, with the entrepreneur Peachum, The Threepenny Opera puts an anachronistic figure of 19th-century capitalism on stage and thus literally makes it look old; on the other hand, its views of capitalism, in terms of its superficiality, are "stylish, smooth, modern, and exemplary in their exploitation of old emotional patterns" (Günther Heeg).. When Peachum explains at the beginning how he uses theatrical means to generate pity in his lie factory in a precisely calculated manner in order to turn it into a successful business, this reveals both the trade secrets of his company "Bettlers Freund" (Beggar's Friend) and "the structural principle of the play" and the two sides of pity: To what extent do compassion and charity lead to a reduction in structural injustice and suffering, and to what extent do they perpetuate it? Is compassion an indispensable prerequisite for combating injustice? And in Macheath's case, what ultimately constitutes injustice? The uncomfortable irony of The Threepenny Opera lies in the consistency with which it does not exempt itself, and thus the theater, from the world it depicts; the consistency with which it shows a world that turns everything into a commodity, while "also proving itself to be a commodity whose value can rise or fall at any time and no longer has any substantial meaning. But this also applies to the apparent certainties with which a somewhat left-wing, politicized consciousness could still feel quite comfortable in 'Brecht theater'." (Patrick Primavesi)

BRECHT AND WEILL: SEPARATE PATHS

Kurt Weill's importance in the renewal of musical theater in Germany is in no way inferior to that of Brecht in spoken theater. Weill felt connected to the ideas of the "November Group," one of the most important artist groups of the Weimar Republic. One of their main goals was to popularize concepts of modern art and bring them closer to the masses. This was a goal that Weill had taken up since his time as a master student of Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin. The search for suitable librettists for Weill's project proved difficult until he stumbled upon Brecht's poetry collection Die Hauspostille, in which he found the five Mahagonny songs, from which he first created a song cycle and then, together with Brecht, the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The opera, planned since April 1927, remained Weill's main undertaking in his collaboration with Brecht, while Brecht, after his experiences with The Threepenny Opera, no longer believed in the reformability of opera and turned his attention increasingly to his interest in didactic plays and other projects.One of Weill's ideas was to liberate the music from the plot to such an extent that it was no longer the drama but the musical form that determined the principle of composition. In concrete terms, this meant that the libretto had to conform to the composer's ideas; it was part of the composition. The rift between Brecht and Weill during a rehearsal of Mahagonny in Berlin in 1931 was inevitable. The opera presents a grotesque reflection of capitalism with musically sophisticated and newly composed clichés of a worn-out bourgeois musical tradition – and is thus closely related to The Threepenny Opera, albeit with a more pronounced critical thrust. The work was revolutionary for the opera stage, but the artistic alliance between Weill and Brecht began to crack. In the early 1930s, the Nazis began to disrupt performances of Brecht and Weill's works, theater directors shied away from staging The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and the Berlin Requiem was not broadcast by some radio stations due to political reservations. After the Reichstag elections in March 1933, Kurt Weill fled to France. Bertolt Brecht had already left the country in February, one day after the Reichstag fire. Their works were publicly burned in May 1933.The unique position that Weill had achieved in German musical theater during the Weimar Republic was bitterly repaid to him, the son of a Jewish cantor, both before and after the Nazis came to power. His works were banned by the Nazis, and those who admired him saw his later work on Broadway as a kind of cultural or even ideological betrayal. "That's particularly bitter," sums up Barrie Kosky. "It's as if he had simply been written off as an artist from the perspective of German culture. Which I find problematic, because what he developed on Broadway is just as radical as what he had started in Germany."

Sibylle Baschung