THE ART OF TAKING WEIGHTY MATTERS LIGHTLY 

Director Barrie Kosky on his interpretation of The Threepenny Opera and the ambiguous mystery of the score: 

Kurt Weill, this really must be said clearly, is as important for the history of music theater as Wagner. And his songs should be put on the same level as those of Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, and Richard Strauss. But instead of writing about the loneliness of the German forest, Weill wrote about the loneliness of the German city. 

Like Brecht, he plays with genres and theater forms, but yet his compositions are completely new, distinctive. After three bars, you immediately recognize that this music is by Kurt Weill. He doesn’t take a piece by Bach and add something Kurt Weill to it. He plays with the idea of Bach. 

Of course, by doing this he makes the idea of epic music theater, in other words the idea that the mechanisms of the music in The Threepenny Opera are demonstrated, a little more complicated, because the effect isn’t just demonstrated, it also has an effect! 

In Brecht’s texts, it’s clearer to me when he’s quoting or demonstrating something: a sentimental or melodramatic farewell dialogue between Mackie and Polly, old-fashioned expressions that are intended to parody the elevated language of the theater and mask the antisocial behavior of the characters. In contrast, prosaic and coarse speech. Here you have to decide with the actors to what extent you want to emphasize this, show it, exaggerate it or not. But the way that Weill handles the music, the way he keeps things open, makes it much more difficult to decide how to do it. 

In my view, we’re dealing with a composer here who combined 5,000 years of the Jewish tonal tradition with the highpoint of German protestant church music and the jazz of the modern city. This can only be found in Kurt Weill’s music and means a total break with the whole Wagner tradition, which had dominated up till then. … It’s about people, about their feelings and the issues that matter to them. The way I see it, Weill’s music combines the exile of the desert with the exile of the 20th century and the loneliness of the big city. 

The Threepenny Opera is also always about the drama that happens in the theater and the drama that we seem to so enjoy creating in our own lives, too. 

For me, the desire for connection and commitment is just as inherent to the music as the loneliness and sense of being lost in a world through whose set of rules people have to find their way, and where as an individual they’re forced to watch out for themselves, left alone with their own interests and needs. Peachum sings: “Man’s right to happiness on this earth is fundamental, for he lives only a short time.” The characters in the play don’t manage to achieve this happiness, or each of them only do for a short while. The only couple that has a lasting relationship are Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, who have a set-up where they do business by exploiting pity. 

A viable community that acts in the best interests of everyone is never established in the play. Although the characters might be united temporarily in a gesture of compassion, it leaves a flat feeling behind, lots of solitary people and an unjust system. 

I’m interested in the art of taking weighty matters lightly. I hear echoes of Karl Valentin here, who was extremely important to Brecht, or Chaplin, whom he admired. I believe that there is also an element of freedom in comedy, which characters and authors use to resist being appropriated by others. By whomever is trying to appropriate them.  

“WE WOULD BE GOOD, INSTEAD OF BASE, BUT THIS OLD WORLD IS NOT THAT KIND OF PLACE!”
 

The discussion about what The Threepenny Opera is seems about as old as The Threepenny Opera itself: a play with music or a musical piece with a few bits of dialogue? In the program for the world premiere at the Berliner Ensemble in 1928, the play is given the following subtitle: a play based on The Beggar’s Opera, a ballad opera from 1729 by John Gay. Elisabeth Hauptmann discovered the original, suggested it to Brecht, translated it, and worked together with him on the script. Brecht himself was only listed in second position under “adapted by,” followed by “music: Kurt Weill.” And it was Lion Feuchtwanger who came up with the title. Thus, many people had their hand in helping to create this surprise theatrical coup, which achieved worldwide fame almost overnight—not least the actors. The door to The Threepenny Opera’s journey all over the world was opened by the fantastic music by Kurt Weill and the superficially trivial story of love, betrayal, morality, and business—and of course the cleverly subversive, socially critical adaptation by Brecht. 

Brecht gave the original by John Gay its very own new character, and in doing so wrote a completely different play. The Brecht researcher Werner Hecht sums up the difference succinctly by saying that The Beggar’s Opera of 1728 was a “disguised critique of open social problems,” while The Threepenny Opera of 1928 was an “open critique of disguised social problems.” 

There is no real criminal milieu at the centre of The Threepenny Opera, but rather a “normal, bourgeois, capitalist” way of life (Erich Engel). For some members of society, this fulfils its promise of prosperity to a certain degree, while at the same time trying to mask the antisocial parts of this way of working and living with feigned sophistication and false theatrics. The play depicts characters who are first and foremost interested in their own mainly material advantage—and have to be, because they live in a cold, alienated world. It requires a considerable theatrical effort to pursue their interests, while at the same time disguising or glossing over exactly that. After all: who doesn’t want to be good? However, in Brecht it is not an individual lack of virtue that causes social injustices; rather, it is the other way round. The idea that they should therefore work together to change social circumstances does not occur to the characters. They are much too busy putting on a performance for others and themselves. Thus, they themselves keep contributing to their own alienation and to a world where everything, including feelings and ultimately also art, becomes a commodity.  

Weill, like many other young composers at the time, was opposed to Richard Wagner’s music and its narcotic, opiatic effect, which Weill countered with the rhythm of the big city. Just as Brecht did on a literary level, Weill played with different musical genres from completely different contexts—ranging from influences from Jewish synagogue music to Bach, Mozart and operetta, jazz and popular dance music—and thus created something completely idiosyncratic and new. 

A MISUNDERSTANDING?  

To Brecht’s disappointment, the audience at the world premiere left the theater apparently rather less educated in matters of social criticism, and instead very well entertained. The reason for this, in his opinion, was the music. This is an argument first put forward by Adorno in 1929, according to which The Threepenny Opera’s success was due to a misunderstanding on the part of the audience. The play should therefore be protected from its own success. Adorno’s defense of it, however, was not due to the obvious social criticism. The audience quickly understood that social circumstances were generally bad as they watched the play. His defense of it was rather due to the subversive, critical potential that was bubbling under its glamorous surface. Both in the text and in the music: in the compositional surface of the magnificent opera and operetta form, the composer Kurt Weill skilfully allows the disconnectedness, the meaninglessness of worn-out soundscapes and worlds of imagination to shine through. On the level of the characters, Weill thus manages to capture both the unfulfilled need for security and intimacy, and their failure due to a world full of façade and the false consciousness in which this reliability is sought. 

Brecht’s work on The Threepenny Opera did not end with the world premiere in 1928. The play was published in January 1932 with some additions to the text and notes. The present version of the play keeps most of Brecht’s additions. Musically, it is based on the score from 1928 and also includes “Arie der Lucy” (Lucy’s Aria), which was cut for the world premiere and “Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit” (Ballad of Sexual Dependency), which was only reintroduced in 1932, so that Weill’s composition can be heard in its entirety.  

FALSE APPEARANCES 

In The Threepenny Opera’s world, values such as compassion, loyalty, charity, and the importance of family apply on the surface, yet hidden behind the operetta humor there is a machinery at work that proves to be deeply antisocial to its core. The contradiction between the need to be good and be loved and asocial behaviour is rooted in the sociopolitical conditions that Peachum expresses with his famous words: “We would be good, instead of base, but this old world is not that kind of place!” “My position in the world is one of self-defense” is therefore the principle Peachum uses to justify his immoral actions. 

The fear of financial ruin is always lurking within the system and although anyone who is wealthy enough lives a comfortable life, they are still a long way from being good—and individual goodness is also no guarantee of social conditions that could be viewed as fair in terms of the distribution of rights, opportunities and resources. 

Neither Macheath, who almost falls prey to Peachum’s perfidious life-and-death scheme, nor anyone else in the play comes to the conclusion suggested by these facts: namely, that the underlying social conditions need to be changed; instead, they serve to justify the way things are. “The world is poor and men are bad, there is of course no more to add!” The actual crime, according to Brecht, is inherent to this view of the world.    

POLLY: “BUT LOVE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD”  

“Love for Sale” is the name of a famous jazz standard by Cole Porter and the first working assumption that director Barrie Kosky used to approach The Threepenny Opera. The title plays with the agreement that is made in prostitution and other theaters of emotion, is acted out on stage and sometimes in life, that what is taking place is an illusion that tries to make us forget it is one.  

Polly vehemently claims to oppose her parents’ economic thinking with something different: love. She pursues the idea of the romantic relationship between two people as if it were unquestionable.  Such a relationship lives off the promise of mending the cracks that the brutal conditions tear in the social fabric. At the same time, it also linked to claims to possession. It only takes five days after they first meet before Mac and Polly celebrate their wedding, the “most beautiful day of their lives,” knowing full well what practical self-interests also played a role in this decision. In the eyes of the city, it is “the boldest move” that Macheath has made in his competition with Peachum’s empire to date. And by marrying her father’s biggest competitor, Polly can free herself from her dependency on her family. Not only Polly, but all of the other characters in Brecht become calculable objects and also behave that way—calculatingly. “All the fuss of tearfulness, emotion, eroticism and mood ultimately serves only to veil this fact” (Jan Knopf), no matter how seriously the desire for social warmth is meant. While the first two acts of the play are mainly focused on the hasty marriage of Polly and Macheath, on real and feigned feelings, on competition and Peachum’s murderous plot, accounts are settled in the last third of the play: relationships turn out to be unreliable as soon as the market value of one of the parties involved drops. In this sense, The Threepenny Opera shows the “thorough capitalisation of all human relationships,” as the director of the world premiere, Erich Engel, summarised the essence of the play.  

MACHEATH: “NOW HEAR THE VOICE WHICH CRIES OUT FOR PITY”  

What role does compassion play in this distorting mirror of total capitalism? It has two faces, like most things in Brecht. Thus, The Threepenny Opera on the one hand puts an anachronistic figure of 19th-century capitalism on the stage in the character of the businessman Peachum, making it literally look old. On the other hand, its portrayal of capitalism is modern and exemplary in terms of its elaborately styled façades. It shows us the characters’ ability to theatrically perform themselves, which allows them to exploit the other characters’ outdated patterns of emotion. When at the beginning Peachum explains how he uses theatrical means in a precisely calculated way in his factory of lies to generate pity in people in order to run a successful business, he is not only revealing the business secrets of his company “The Beggar’s Friend,” but also the structuring principle of the play itself. Ultimately one of the questions this begs is: to what extent do pity and charity lead to the reduction of structural injustices and suffering, and to what extent do they maintain them? Is pity the essential prerequisite to fighting injustice? And in the case of Macheath, where is the injustice in the end? Not only is Macheath saved from the death penalty, he is also awarded privileges that enable him to live a bourgeois life and pursue a profitable business as a respected banker—business that merely supports a different form of exploitation than the crimes Macheath was committing before. The injustice continues and is merely dressed in a façade of pity. Behind this lies a narcissistic identification with a form of violence that views the world as its property and at the same time demands love. Macheath celebrates his salvation and with good reason presents himself as the victim of Peachum’s perfidious scheme, while at the same time is hatching new plans for how he can exploit his success as the public’s darling in order to make even more money at the expense of others. This emotional game, as Brecht and Weill make us experience viscerally in the theater, makes objectively examining and fighting social injustices impossible. Or have you not thoroughly enjoyed yourself? 

TEXT CREDIT 

The introductory essay by Sibylle Baschung was first published for the premiere of the Dreigroschenoper at the Berliner Ensemble (January 13, 2021). The text has been shortened and edited.