Some treatments for a production



Some treatments for a production

of

Weill/Brecht's

The Threepenny Opera

by

John Mucci

March 6, 1999

Intermusical Commentary

**** Version 1 ****

[This is a very short, tongue-in-cheek program written by me, which can be used as brief narratives between the songs, using the Blitzstein song-titles and lyrics, but is the same plot as Brecht's. Should be spoken by a separate narrator, or the conductor.]

1. This is an Opera for Beggars. Since something so grand needs to be priced right at the verge of being unaffordable, it was christened The Threepenny Opera.

[Overture]

2. You've seen the poor folk. Most of their stories end badly. Now and then there's one or two whose names live on, usually for the evil they do: characters with reputations such as Mack the Knife. [The Ballad of Mack the Knife]

3. Others are illustrious for the good they do. Here Mr J. J. Peachum rises in the morning, about to tend to business. This captain of industry has made a name for himself organizing a union—of panhandlers. [Morning Hymn]

4. The two stories tie together quickly. Peachum has a daughter: Polly. Polly has been out all night with her beau—Mack the Knife. As a father, you too would do what Mr Peachum does. He calls in the Missus. [Instead-of Song]

5. Polly has indeed been smitten by Mack. After her less than lengthy introduction to him, she proceeds to the next step in getting to know him. She marries him. Mack's gang gathers to sing at their wedding, in the only respectable hall available on short notice: a stable. [Wedding Song]

6. And now: a bridal fantasy. Polly rises and sings an appropriate song, about love and laughter, and pirates, and bloody revenge... [Pirate-Jenny]

7. Now a surprise guest! Who better to attend a wedding of thieves and cutthroats? Mackie's friend from Army days: Chief of Police, Tiger Brown. They reminisce. [Cannon Song]

8. End of the festivities. Mack and Polly retire. And after plighting their troth, discover... that it's only the first plight they're in. [Love Song]

9. Now Polly displays her true mettle. After marrying the gangster Mack the Knife, she discovers she forgot to pack—and goes home to do so. There, she happens to run into the two people she used to live with. She has a little explaining to do. [Barbara Song]

10. So how to bring this matter to closure? Papa Peachum uses a technique with Polly ——old as the hills and sure-fire effective. He lectures her. [The World is Mean]

11. The plot thickens. Mr Peachum all but blackmails Tiger Brown to arrest Mac the Knife, his new son-in-law. Mackie flees—and puts Polly in charge of his gang. With her responsibilities in mind she bids Mack a tender farewell. [Melodrama & Polly's Song]

12. Ah, but police notwithstanding, Mrs Peachum knows where to find Mack. Her intuition and her woman's touch are cleverly brought into play. After all, who'd be most likely to see Mackie next? His old friend Jenny, who resides in the local whorehouse. [The Ballad of Dependency]

13. And like magic, Mackie appears for his regular Thursday appointment. In the parlor of the bordello, he and Jenny renew their acquaintance. They reminisce. [Tango Ballad]

14. You know the old adage: those who live by the whore, die by the whore. Jenny dances Mack out a window, toppling him into the ample waiting arms of Mrs Peachum and the police. From his cell, Mack thinks back on the quality of life he's enjoyed. [Ballad of the Easy Life]

15. But who should come on the scene other than Polly—Mack's devoted wife—as well as someone new: Tiger Brown's daughter, Lucy. Who, as it turns out, is also Mack's devoted wife—from, oh, about six to seven months ago, by the look of her. The two ladies meet and exchange points of view. [Jealousy Duet]

16. And, as any man would do in a situation like this, Mack takes matters in hand. He breaks out of jail and heads for the hills. The police are after him. The Peachums are after him. Polly is after him. Lucy is after him. At this crucial juncture in the story, Mackie and Mrs Peachum stop, and step before the curtain to sing about the beliefs they share. [How To Survive]

17. The Queen's coronation is coming up, and Mr Peachum is determined to create a spectacle of his beggars. Misery on a scale of Grand Opera. Feeling good about this plan, Peachum is in fine spirits. [Useless Song]

18. Left to her own devices, Lucy Brown has other plans. Carefully removing the bulging pillow from her belly, she sits at a table and reflects on her fate, as she unwraps a parcel of rat-poison. [Lucy's Aria]

19. Mack is still on the lam. But every beggar knows the saying, fool me once, shame on you... et cetera. The police didn't have very long to wait for Mack to show up and be arrested. Again. Thursday afternoon, same bordello, same Jenny. [Solomon Song]

20. Now the scene is a death cell at Newgate. Having half an hour to live, Mack the Knife changes his tune. [Call from the Grave].

21. His friends and relations all arrive to wish him well into the afterlife. In fact, some of them say they'll forego the coronation just to see him hanged. Mack is appreciative. He says he is a vanishing member of a vanishing class. [Death Message]

22. Mack bravely mounts the gallows. And although he puts his head in the noose, and is willing to die in style, it's all spoiled by Mr Peachum, who arrives with very strange news. [Finale: The Mounted Messenger].

Some questions which are asked on basis of which version is being used:

- which plot will be followed? Brecht/Blitzstein?

- which character will sing The Barbara Song? Jenny/Polly?

- and in which scene? I-ii/II-i?

- which character will sing the Pirate Jenny Song? Jenny/Lucy?

- and in which scene?

- Macheath sings his End of Act 2 with whom? Jenny/Mrs Peachum?

- who will sing the "Useless Song?" Street Singer/Mr Peachum?

- Is Lucy's Aria going to be used?

- in which translation? Feingold/Mucci?

- in what orchestration? Weill piano/Mauceri/Mucci?

- where in the text? end of Act 2/Act 3 sc.2?

- Any additional "Moritat" verses? [Brecht wrote many more]

**** Version 2 ****

[This is the version written by Marc Blitzstein, abridged from his notes to the 1954 production at Brandeis. This can be used as spoken narration, or program notes in summary of the musical numbers.]

1. Overture.

2. "In the 1800's, Soho was the slum & underworld quarter of London. It was here one early spring evening that one could hear a street singer recounting the exploits of one Macheath, head of a notorious gang, and our hero. Macheath was known to all who feared him as Mack the Knife." [Ballad of Mack the Knife]

3. "Mr Jonathan Jerimiah Peachum runs a 'Beggars Outfit Shop' in Soho, where he guarantees to make a beggar so pitiful looking, by means of putty, makeup, costume, artificial legs, and theatrical welts and bruises, that passers-by will actually be willing to part with money. It is morning, and Peachum is opening his shop. One of his first duties is to clear the store of sleeping panhandlers." [Morning Anthem]

4. "Mrs Peachum appears & is informed by Peachum that the dapper anonymous stranger their daughter Polly has been meeting is none other than Mack the Knife. This must be stopped! Mr and Mrs Peachum comment on the antics of the young." [Instead-of Song]

5. "They are quite correct in their suspicions. Mack the Knife is about to marry Polly and he has picked a deserted stable for the wedding ceremony. Macheath's gang start to unload a wagon filled with assorted stolen furnishings. Soon the stable is transformed into a rather over-ornate drawing room. But Polly still isn't happy being married in a stable. The gang try to comfort her with a song." [Wedding Song]

6. "Meanwhile, in the Wapping district of London, Jenny, Macheath's old flame who will later betray him to the Police, gazes out at the fog from the window of macheath's favorite bordello. Jenny is different from other girls. She has bitter dreams..."

[Pirate Jenny]

7. "Back at the Stable, Macheath keeps waiting for a new arrival; he arrives: of all people——Tiger Brown, commissioner of Police. It seems that he and Macheath were buddies in the army and these days the Commissioner takes a cut from Macheath's loot. Mack and Brown remind each other off their fun together in the old days." [Army Song]

8. "The wedding takes place and the gang leaves. Macheath and Polly are alone."

[Love Song]

9. "Mr and Mrs Peachum are outraged at discovering that Polly has actually married Macheath. They concoct a plan to dissolve the marriage. Mrs. Peachum will pay Jenny to inform the police where Macheath can be found. Before journeying to Wapping, Mrs Peachum muses on the victimization of men—in the throes of love." [Ballad of Dependency]

10. "Mrs Peachum makes the necessary arrangements with Jenny. Tiger Brown sends a warning through Polly to Macheath to get out of London. Macheath instructs Polly on how to keep the business going in his absence, and kisses her goodbye." [Melodrama and Polly's Song]

11. "Alone, Macheath sums up a little theory of life." [Ballad of the Easy Life]

12. "Polly returns to her home. Peachum and his wife restate some of the facts of life to her. But Polly defends her right to marry Macheath." [The World is Mean]

13. "Macheath's interest apparently travel in several directions. One of these directions is named Lucy. Lucy, daughter of Tiger Brown and the mistress of Newgate Prison, reminisces on what it was like to fall in love with Macheath." [Barbara Song]

14. "At the bordello in Wapping, the girls discuss Macheath. They are sure that he is on the outskirts of town by this time. But it is his regular Thursday - and he never misses Thursday. Besides, it is raining. He arrives, yelling for his customary coffee. Macheath recalls his old life with Jenny. As he sings, Jenny herself appears in the rear doorway with a constable. She points out Macheath. The constable stays in the doorway and watches. Jenny joins Macheath in his tale and they perform a little dance." [Tango Ballad]

15. "The constable decides enough is enough and seizes Macheath. Soon he is locked in a cell in Newgate. The capture has brought him close to Lucy. When his bride Polly comes to visit him, a little incident takes place between Lucy and Polly."

[Jealousy Duet]

16. "Lucy knows her way about the jail, so Macheath, caught in a conflict between his two wives, chooses Lucy. The weeping Polly is dragged off by her mother. Lucy steals the key to the cell and Macheath is away in a flash. Now, out of context, Macheath and Mrs Peachum step before the curtain. It seems they have a few thoughts in common." [How to Survive]

17. "It is just before dawn on the day of Queen Victoria's coronation, a red-letter day for Peachum's begging business. In his shop, Peachum is in fine spirits."

[Useless Song]

18. "Macheath is recaptured. And so the beggars, on their way to the coronation, will stop to witness an even more interesting ceremony: the hanging of Mack the Knife. While we wait for the hanging, Jenny has a comment to make, to the accompaniment of a barrel-organ..." [Solomon Song]

19. "The scene is a death cell at Newgate. It is now 5:30 AM. Macheath will be dead by six. He is desperate and calls for help." [Call from the Grave].

20. "But it is all up with Macheath. And now it is time." [Death Message]

21. "As Macheath mounts the steps to the gallows, Peachum stops the proceedings and announces a sudden 'happy ending' and the arrival of a messenger from the Queen [Finale: The Mounted Messenger].

***** Version 3 ******

[This is taken from the translation by Manheim, somewhat from Brecht, spoken by a narrator (The Street Singer), unless otherwise noted.]

1. Tonight you will see an opera for beggars. Because this opera was conceived with a splendor which only beggars can dream, yet had to be so cheap that beggars could afford, its title is the Three Penny Opera. [Overture]

2. Fair in Soho. The Ballad of Mac The Knife. [Ballad of Mac the Knife]

3. To combat the increasing callousness of mankind, Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, a man of business, has opened a shop where the poorest of the poor can acquire an exterior that will touch the hardest of hearts. Peachum's Morning Hymn. [Peachum's Morning Hymn]

4. MR PEACHUM: Mrs Peachum: where is our daughter? MRS PEACHUM: Polly hasn't come home! Her bed hasn't been slept in! [No-they-can't Song]

5. Deep in the heart of Soho, the bandit Macheath is celebrating his marriage to Polly Peachum. [Wedding Song]

6. POLLY: Gentlemen, if none of you wishes to perform, I will sing a little song: it 's an imitation of a girl I saw once in some two-penny halfpenny dive in Soho. [Pirate Jenny]

7. MAC: The sheriff, in person! Pillar of Old Bailey, who will now enter Captain Macheath's humble abode/ Ah, Jackie, do you remember how we served in India together, soldiers, both of us? Ah, jackie, let us sing the Cannon Song right now!

[Cannon Song]

8. Love Song. [Love Song]

9. MRS PEACHUM: Married? First you rig her fore and aft in dresses and hats and gloves and parasols, and when she's cost as much as a sailing ship, she throws herself in the garbage like a rotten pickle. [Barbara Song]

10. First Threepenny Finale. [First Threepenny Finale]

11. Act Two: Mac the Knife takes leave of his wife and flees from his father-in-law to the heaths of Highgate. [Melodrama and Polly's Song]

12. Before the Coronation bells had died away, mac the Knife was sitting with the whores of Turnbridge. [Ballad of Sexual Obsession]

13. MACHEATH: Ladies, long before my star rose over this city, I lived in the most impecunious circumstances with one of you dear ladies: Jenny, whom I loved best of all! [Ballad of Immoral Earnings]

14. The whores betray Mac the Knife. [Pirate Jenny and Ballad of Good Living]

15. Macheath is freed from prison by the love of yet another woman. LUCY: You dirty dog - So you think I haven't heard about your goings-on with Miss Peachum! POLLY: Where is my dear husband? LUCY: What have you gone and picked up now? [Jealousy Duet and Lucy's Aria]

16. Mac has escaped. Peachum prepares his campaign. He plans to disrupt the Coronation procession by a demonstration of human misery. Second Threepenny Finale [Second Finale]

17. Act Three. TIGER BROWN: I'll simply smoke out your whole nest. And lock up the lot of you for begging in the street. What's that music? PEACHUM: The Song of Insufficiency. Think about it. [Song of Insufficiency of Human Endeavor]

18. Mac The Knife, who has been with the whores again, has again been betrayed by whores. [Solomon Song]

19. Call from the Grave. [Call from the Grave]

20. Ballad in which Macheath begs all men for forgiveness. [Epitaph and Procession to the Gallows]

21. Third and last Threepenny Finale. [3rd Threepenny Finale]

Some program notes

On the polygraph of world theatrical events, the appearance of Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928 created a spike of unexpected force. Because it addressed poverty and justice from such a slanted perspective, graced with some of the most captivating and energizing music of the day, its influence spread almost immediately. Because of the Nazi's insistence on it being degenerate art and its subsequent suppression in the '30's and '40's, some mystery was cast about it, and because of the explosive 1956 revival from the Theatre de Lys, with Lotte Lenya in the role of Jenny, _Threepenny Opera_ has never left the purview of the world's repertoire of musical theatre.

So many stones have been overturned writing about this extraordinary work's genesis that one walks on a peculiarly trammeled beach, searching for not only new territory, but trying to assess what the terrain looked like before. There looms largely the two dynamos who created it, Kurt Weill the composer, and Bertolt Brecht, the author. One had best leave it at that, before we hear stories about Brecht's magpie-like borrowings from divergent sources such as François Villon, Rudyard Kipling, and his brilliant assistant Elisabeth Hauptmann. Worse yet, we hear that Brecht wrote the music (borrowing the tunes also) and Weill only transcribed it--which is certainly not true. The effect is one which leads to a feeling that creating this masterpiece was as chaotic as the tottering Weimar Republic under which its creators worked. The creation of _Threepenny Opera_ sprang from an amalgam of talents, smelted white-hot into whatever mold seemed appropriate, and as in the best of collaborations, left a mass of contradictions in its wake. Audiences have proved the indominability of the work as it is: the rest is infinite subtlety, to be savored by those who are further entertained by research.

One sure sign that it is a work for all time is that no one seems to leave it alone. During the authors' lifetimes changes and little adaptations abounded. Even Weill, who was so opposed to updating either score or text, wrote new numbers for the Paris production, in a style which was wholly appropriate to only a a production in France. As in all good theatre, each country makes the piece its own, in this case down to the title. The English "Threepenny Opera" is an honest translation from the German, but in France it is known as the Opéra de Quat'sous," and in Mexico of "dos centavos" (Italy has left it at "tre soldi"). Written at a time when Germans were just recovering from a Mark so inflated that bushels of them were baled and never untied, carried in barrows to make a simple transaction, -- when butter was the steadiest measure of value, and when the post office overprinted stamps again and again--into the billions of marks to keep up with an economy completely out of control, this Beggar's Opera was indeed thoughtful entertainment for the modern Everyman. Brecht said that it "dealt with bourgeois conceptions in a bourgeois manner," and is certainly at once an indictment of modern life and a celebration of its common experiences.

Its history began as a parody of Handel, when John Gay and Johann Pepeusch wrote The Beggar's Opera in 1728. It was enormously popular, and proved so even in the early 1920's when it was revived in London. It was this production which piqued the curiosity of Elisabeth Hauptmann, who translated it and showed it to Brecht, who noodled with it a while. When a young producer approached Brecht for a new piece to re-open the old Schiffbauerdamm Theatre in Berlin, the author impulsively offered half-hearted sketches derived from Gay, which were accepted, to his surprise.

The story is as brilliant as it is simple. J. J. Peachum operates a coalition of beggars as efficiently as though he were organizing a union. He gives them costumes, makeup, prosthetics, full corporate support in exchange for fealty. He heads an otherwise commonplace bourgeois family, with his wife and his daughter, Polly. Apposite to him is the dapper, notorious gang leader Macheath, known as Mack the Knife, who, having his eye on Polly, "marries" her. Enraged at his daughter's submission, Peachum wants Macheath arrested, and engages Police Chief Tiger Brown to do so, although Macheath and Brown are old army buddies. Macheath is indeed arrested, being found at his usual time in the usual brothel. He escapes from jail, is rearrested (same time, same brothel), and is only saved from hanging through a purposefully absurd reprieve from the Queen--which might well satisfy a beggar's idea of a happy ending, since so few beggar's lives could end up so happily in reality.

Although Weill's musical forms in Threepenny Opera are varied - chorale, tango, fugue, foxtrot, the "Boston", shimmy, hymn --its melodies engage both heart and brain, where nothing is as simple as it sounds, and where the musical complexities break down to very simple elements, conceived and arranged by a master of composition.

There is no string section in the orchestra tonight: this is an opera accompanied by a jazz band. As such, it is probably the first musical play to use both a steel guitar and a banjo seriously, a fact opening night critics pounced upon--some with enthusiasm, others with acrimony.

Although the play and lyrics have the trademark borrowings Brecht loved, it is full of poetry and original touches. It is probably the only opera which makes a statement about character through rhyme scheme. Listen for Macheath's ballads (the words of which are derived from Villon), the lines of which have the rhymes a-b-b-a:

"[insert quote from Ballad of the Easy Life]"

This is not a usual scheme for songs in general, nonetheless a "Shimmy," to displace an initial rhyme for three lines. Yet when the a-b-b-a rhymes appear again, as Macheath faces the gallows, his former paean to life is transformed into his cynical outlook on death:

"[quote from Call from the Grave]"

It is a touch which never was heard before, and never fails to move the listener today.

Perhaps "Mack the Knife" has been heard too much lately: recently it was assessed by a magazine as _the_ lounge song that all singers must learn because everyone in the audience knows the melody--even though they aver no one remembers the words. Weill said the principal melody came to him while listening to the traffic of Berlin from atop a double decker bus. It's been heard in every reincarnation from Bobby Darrin to the commercial for Big Macs, on television.

It does not diminish, however, the power of the score, as a whole.

One of the most haunting Brecht/Weill numbers, the quintessential "Pirate Jenny," is also one with an odd history. In the context of the play, this song, with its imagery of washing glasses and being a mistress to a bloodthirsty pirate--seems out of place. In the original play, it was meant to be sung at the wedding by Polly, but was taken over by Lotte Lenya, sung in the bordello scene. It helped to catapult her to world fame as a chanteuse, but caused endless conflict with the script. In neither position in the story does it illuminate the plot: it certainly alienates the audience in the manner Brecht advocated. "Pirate Jenny" is, at heart, an expression of power--fulfilled only in fantasy--by one who feels utterly powerless. It is a song which adumbrated the helpless feelings of just about everyone sitting in the Schiffbauerdamm theatre in 1928.

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