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The Pabst film The Threepenny Opera was shown in its French version in 1931. In 1937 there was a production by Ernst Josef Aufricht at the Théâtre de l'Étoile which failed, though Brecht himself had attended rehearsals. The work was not revived in France until after World War II. [22]
The Threepenny Opera, musical drama in three acts written by Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, produced in German as Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928 and published the following year. The play was adapted by Elisabeth Hauptmann from John Gay ’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Antihero gangster Macheath (“Mackie”) marries ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Threepenny Opera, the first major product of his work with Weill, was written and premiered in 1928. It occupies a central position in this phase in Brecht’s career, a phase of particular importance in Brecht’s shift to Marxism. Accordingly, The Threepenny Opera has tended to be seen as a transitional work, not only in terms of Brecht ...
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Born Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht on February 10, 1898, in Augsburg, Germany, Bertold Brecht is regarded as a founding father of modern theater and one of its most incisive voices. His innovative ideas would prove to have a profound effect on many genres of modern narrative, not the least of which are novels, short stories, and cinema. Brecht is ...
Act I
The Prologue of The Threepenny Operapresents Fair Day in Soho (a suburb of London), where beggars, thieves, and whores ply their trades. A ballad singer steps forward to sing a macabre ditty about Mac the Knife. Peachum, proprietor of “The Beggar’s Friend Ltd.” strolls back and forth across the stage with his wife and daughter. At the close of the song, Low-dive Jenny says that she sees Mac the Knife, who disappears into the crowd. In Scene One, it is morning in the Peachum business emporium,...
Act Two
Scene Four (the scenes are numbered sequentially through the whole play) takes place in the stable, now Polly and Macheath’s home. Polly begs Macheath to flee, because she has witnessed Brown succumbing to her father’s threats; Macheath will be arrested. Macheath puts Polly in charge of the accounts and preps the gang for the upcoming coronation, a huge business opportunity for thieves and beggars. Macheath departs. In an Interlude, Mrs. Peachum and Low-Dive Jenny step in front of the curtain...
Act Three
Scene Seven opens on the Peachum Emporium in preparation for their grand plan of disrupting the coronation ceremony with “a demonstration of human misery.” This is a massive campaign: nearly fifteen-hundred men are preparing signs. The whores traipse in for their payoff, which Mrs. Peachum refuses to pay because Macheath has escaped. Jenny lets it slip that Macheath is with the whore Suky Tawdry, so Peachum sends word to the constables. Mrs. Peachum sings a stanza from “The Ballad of Sexual O...
Ballad Singer
The unnamed Ballad Singer serves as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting and explaining the play’s action as it unfolds. He opens the story with a grotesquely playful tale of Mac the Knife, an actual historical character who murdered prostitutes in London. Although John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (the source material for Brecht’s work) included ballads about the thieves in his dramatic world, the songs were not as outrageous as those sung by Brecht’s narrator—a credit to the musical talents of Brecht...
Sheriff Jackie Brown
Brown is the crooked High Sheriff who takes a portion of the beggars’ earnings in return for tip-offs about planned police raids. He is a long-time friend of Macheath, having served with him as a soldier in India. Brown attends Polly and Mac’s wedding and is taken aback by the wealth that surrounds his friend. When cornered by Peachum, who cites a list of Macheath’s crimes, Brown is forced to send Constable Smith out to arrest his former pal. He is a weak-willed and greedy man who expresses s...
Lucy Brown
Lucy is the Tiger Brown’s daughter. Mac has been having an affair with Lucy, deceiving both his friend and Polly. Lucy appears to be pregnant—the father presumably Macheath—but she reveals to Polly that she has faked her pregnancy by stuffing a pillow under her dress. Lucy at first treats Polly with haughtiness but later agrees with Polly’s assertion that Macheath loves her more. Lucy finally befriends her lover’s wife.
Betrayal and Moral Corruption
Like the “greatest story ever told,” the story of Jesus, the protagonist of The Threepenny Operais betrayed by a former intimate. But there the similarity ends, or rather, diverts to mirrored opposites. Macheath is not a savior like Christ but a moral corrupter, not a paragon of virtue but a fountainhead of sin, not the archetypal human ideal but a base man of bestial instinct. In contrast to Jesus, he marries the woman with whom he has been sleeping in a stable rather than being born of a ch...
Art and Experience
The purpose of Brecht’s plays (as they were originally staged by the author) was to create an experience that would force audiences out of their common perceptions of bourgeois theater (as merely a means of entertainment). His plays sought to instill a willingness to work for social change. Thus, ultimately, Brecht’s plays were designed as tools of moral and social propaganda, yet they strangely lack what most propaganda, by definition, carries with it: a design for a utopian social paradise...
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Compare the plot of The Threepenny Opera with the plot of John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera. Macheath is more villainous in Brecht’s version, and Lockit (a Newgate prison chief in Gay’s play) has transformed into Jackie Brown, a corrupt sheriff and old army buddy of Macheath’s. Consider also the differences in language and staging. What is the significance of the changes Brecht made to Gay’s work? 2. The “alienating effects” of Brecht’s staging have become standard fare in modern drama. D...
Opera or Musical?
An opera is a play that contains music (instrumental and/or vocal) as well as dialogue, and the music is just as important to the piece as is the action and spoken words of the characters. The style of singing is known as recitative, which means that the sung words are slightly modified from normal speech, just enough to make them melodic. In operas, the characters sing in the recitative mode during the action of the drama, occasionally launching into a more definitive song, during which the...
Epic Theater
Epic theater (sometimes called “open” theater) was the unique invention of Brecht. He designed epic theater as a “dialectical” (educational) experience: to deviate from the theater’s base goal of entertainment to turn the spectator into a judge. Brecht’s drama is designed to stir the audience into action. He attempts to accomplish this by disrupting the viewer’s passive stance toward the play in order to generate a mode of “complex seeing,” wherein the viewer follows the action, but also thin...
Germany After World War I
Just prior to World War I, Germany, more dramatically than any other country in Europe was undergoing a transformation from an agrarian economy to an urban, industrial economy. An abundance of wealth, generated by a more productive work force, contributed to a growing sense of national power. Thus Germany magnanimously offered unlimited aid to Austria-Hungary when it came into conflict with the Balkans, portions of which it was attempting to overtake. Out of this conflict arose World War I. G...
German Decadence
Out of the increasing hedonism that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I sprung the cabaret culture, a nightclub scene that came to personify German decadence. Adopting a nihilist philosophy (one that posits that life is ultimately meaningless), young Germans would indulge in excessive drinking, carousing, and sex. Believing that an individual’s actions made little difference whether a temperate or libertine lifestyle was followed, they indulged their every whimsy. Both in accordance with...
COMPARE & CONTRAST
1. 1920s: Germany transforms from pre-war optimism to a state of cynicism and violent class conflict in a matter of less than ten years. Political, economic, and social turmoil plunges Germans into a state of psychological shock, as evidenced in “Black Expressionist” art and in plays and literature expressing similar feelings of pessimism and bitterness. Today: The 1990 tumbling of the Berlin Wall (erected in 1961 to further defend the political demarcation between East Germany and West Germa...
A study of the critical reception of Brecht’s plays must include references to his political and aesthetic ideology. More so than with most playwrights, it was Brecht’s dynamic personality that generated his reputation. His charisma as a director and thinker made him the leader of a faithful group of artists and intellectuals. Brecht had three oppo...
Carole Hamilton
Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay she examines the social constructs of Brecht’s revisions to The Beggar’s Opera and how these revisions played into his political ideals. When a writer revises and adapts an earlier work, as Bertolt Brecht did with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), they make revisions that are consistent with a particular aesthetic and ideology. These shifts are part and parcel of the thinkin...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. John Gay’s 1728 comic opera, The Beggar’s Operawas Brecht’s source material and offers a good source for comparison. The differences between the two works illustrate the ideologies of the authors who produced them. 2. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trialgive an imaginative sense of the futility and nameless anxiety of the pre-World War I years in Europe. For a British perspective, T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922) expresses a sense of spiritual vacuity, with imagery recal...
Bernard F. Dukore
Dukore points out several Biblical references in The Threepenny Opera, citing both obvious allusions and ones that are cloaked in metaphoric language. Of the latter, Dukore argues that there are numerous examples that compare the character Macheath to Jesus Christ. Several critics have quoted Brecht’s statement that the work which made the greatest impression on him was the Bible. Although Martin Esslin discusses the biblical quality of Brecht’s language, and although Von Thomas O. Brandt cit...
Bartram, Graham, and Anthony Waine. Brecht in Perspective, Longman, 1982. Bentley, Eric. The Brecht Commentaries, Grove, 1981. Cook, Bruce. Brecht in Exile, Holt, 1983. Esslin, Martin. Brecht: The Man and His Work, Anchor Books, 1960. Esslin, Martin. Bertold Brecht, Columbia UniversityPress, 1969. “KURT WEILL’S AND BERT BRECHT’S THE THREEPENNY OPER...
Bentley, Eric. The Brecht Memoir, PAJ Publications, 1985. Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to Modem Drama, Little, Brown, 1962. Esslin, Martin. Brecht: A Choice of Evils, Methuen, 1985.
Marc Blitzstein revived The Threepenny Opera in the 1950s, and his version of the song "Mack the Knife" became a global sensation thanks to singer Bobby Darin. In 1989, Columbia released a film ...
Oct 19, 2018 · The joy of this production is that it offers a vigorous new take on Brecht’s musical with sharply defined performances and a vibrant on-stage band. Though the play is prefaced with a warning that “there will be no moralising tonight”, SLAM’s revival of The Threepenny Opera speaks to social problems of abuse and poverty, offering a ...
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Jun 8, 2016 · The Threepenny Opera Review. The National have previously staged The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's folk opera from 1728 that was one of the first British musicals, back in 1982. Then in 2000 it staged a contemporary rewrite The Villain's Opera. Now they finally tackle the scattergun but powerful Brecht/Weill version, inspired by the same story ...
