* * *
The great difference between The Threepenny Opera and either Mahagonny or Happy End was its enormous success, which kept it running in different parts of Germany until the Nazis took over and in other countries longer still. This did not immediately tempt Brecht to tinker with the text of the play (as he continued to do with Man equals Man), but when Warner Brothers and Tobis, acting through producers called Nero-Film, contracted in May 1930 to make a film version he started looking at it with changed – and changing – eyes. Though sound film was then in its infancy, the prospects seemed good: G. W. Pabst was to be the director, Lania (of Piscator’s old collective) to write the script; Carola Neher would play Polly, Lenya Jenny; while Brecht and Weill were given a say respectively in the script and the music. Two parallel versions would be made, one German and one French. That summer, accordingly, Brecht wrote Lania the treatment called ‘Die Beule’, ‘The Bruise’, which in effect ignores all that had remained of The Beggar’s Opera and uses the characters and the Victorian London setting to point a radically changed moral. Everything now is on a larger scale – the gang is 120 strong, Peachum heads a Begging Trust – and a higher social level, with peers, a general and a magistrate at Macheath’s wedding in the ducal manège. The gang and the beggars this time are engaged in a war whose symbol is the bruise inflicted by the former on a beggar called Sam. Peachum accordingly uses the beggars to disfigure the smartly repainted slum streets through which the Queen is to pass; he interviews Brown with seven lawyers behind him, and secures Macheath’s arrest after a bucolic picnic and a chase in which a car full of policemen pursues a car full of whores. There is no escape and no second arrest. Under Polly’s direction the gang has simply taken over the National Deposit Bank and converted itself into a group of solemn financiers. Both they and Mrs Peachum now become uneasy about the dangers of unleashing the poor; while Brown has a terrible dream, in which thousands of poor people emerge from under one of the Thames bridges as a great flood, sweeping through the streets and public buildings. So the ‘mounted Messengers’ this time are the bankers who arrive to bail Macheath out; and rather than disappoint the crowds Peachum hands over Sam to be hanged instead. The social façades are maintained as Macheath joins the reunited bourgeoisie awaiting the arrival of their Queen.
This scheme, on which Neher and the Bulgarian director Slatan Dudow also collaborated, was plainly unwelcome to the producers, and the fact that Brecht only met the agreed August deadline by communicating it to Lania orally did not improve matters. Though Lania needed him to continue working the Nero firm chose to dismiss Brecht at this stage, and brought in the Communist film critic Béla Balázs to help complete the script. A lawsuit followed, which Brecht lost, and thereafter he had no words too bad for Pabst’s film, which meanwhile went obstinately ahead, to be shown in Berlin on 19 February 1931. Though the long theoretical essay which Brecht thereafter wrote on the ‘Threepenny Lawsuit’, as he termed it, is an illuminating work, not least for its links with the ideas of his new friend Walter Benjamin, the modern reader should not allow its downright condemnation to put him off the film. For in fact not only did the latter capture aspects of the original (for instance Carola Neher’s interpretation of Polly) that necessarily elude any modern production, but it also incorporates a surprising proportion of Brecht’s changes to the story. These, however, continued to itch Brecht, so that while leaving the play itself as it had been in the 1928 production (with all its last-minute decisions and improvisations) he was soon planning its further development in The Threepenny Novel, his one substantial work of fiction, which he was to hand in to its Dutch publisher some months after leaving Germany in 1933. Engel, when he came again to direct the play at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm for the Berliner Ensemble in 1960, after Brecht’s death, wondered at first if he could not incorporate some of the ideas from ‘The Bruise’ and the novel, but soon decided that they were too divergent from the play. Brecht for his part wrote some topical versions of the songs (p. 305 ff.) for other directors in the immediate post-war years, but it is not clear if and when they were used, and certainly he never made them a permanent part of the text; indeed they hardly merit it. All the same, his discussions in connection with Giorgio Strehler’s Milan production in the last year of his life (pp. 320-5) show that he regarded The Threepenny Opera as no inviolable museum piece. For he envisaged a new framework, and welcomed Strehler’s updating of the story to the era of the Keystone Kops.
* * *
Like Man equals Man, The Threepenny Opera presents a problem to earnest-minded interpreters, since it is hard to reconcile its flippancies with Brecht’s status as a Communist playwright, while its repeated successes in the commercial theatres of bourgeois society – from Berlin of the 1920s to New York of the 1970s – take some explaining away. The trouble here is not only that when Brecht actually wrote his share of this play he was only beginning to explore Marxism and had barely begun to relate to the class struggle (as the leading Communist Party critic Alfred Kemény pointed out), but that the issue was subsequently confused by Brecht’s writing all his own notes and interpretations after adopting a more committed position in 1929. His remarks moreover are too easily taken out of context and at their face value: his insistence, for instance, that the play is a critique of bourgeois society and not merely of the Lumpenproletariat was only a retort – quite unsubstantiated – to that ill-disposed critic in the party’s daily Die Rote Fahne who had accused him of the contrary, referred to him as ‘the Bohemian Bert Brecht’ and dismissed the whole work as a money-spinner containing ‘Not a vestige of modern social or political satire’. Just like Piscator’s productions of the previous season The Threepenny Opera undoubtedly appealed to the fashionable Berlin public and subsequently to the middle classes throughout Germany, and if it gave them an increasingly cynical view of their own institutions it does not seem to have prompted either them or any other section of society to try to change these for the better. The fact was simply that ‘one has to have seen it’, as the elegant and cosmopolitan Count Kessler noted in his diary after doing so with a party that included an ambassador and a director of the Dresdner Bank.
Brecht himself had far too much affection for this work to admit the ineffectiveness of its message, even after he had tacitly confirmed such accusations by going over to austerer, explicitly didactic forms. Even years later he could still view it through something of a pink cloud, as indicated by his wishful replies to Giorgio Strehler on p. 322. Yet the most favourable criticisms at the time were concerned less with its attack on ‘bourgeois morality’ and capitalist property rights as being based on theft than with its establishment of a highly original new theatrical genre. Thus Herbert Ihering, who from the first had been Brecht’s leading supporter among the Berlin critics, while welcoming this ‘new form, open to every possibility, every kind of content’, pointed out that ‘this content, however, has still to come’. Part of the common over-estimation of the play’s social purpose and impact is due most probably to the intense dislike felt for it by the German nationalist reaction which began gaining ground within a year of the première and was soon to bring the Nazis their first great electoral successes. It was a time of growing polarisation in German political and cultural life, and if the Berlin theatre continued to move leftwards, dragging part of the cinema with it, there was now much less hesitation on the part of the authorities and the great middlebrow public to voice their dislike of anything ‘alien’ and ‘decadent’ in the arts. Not only was Weill a leading target for such campaigns, largely on racialist grounds, but the brothel scene and the cynicism of the songs were certainly enough to qualify Brecht too, whether or not he represented any kind of serious threat. A great wave of irrational feeling was building up, and in so far as it was directed against The Threepenny Opera its political aspects were quite deceptive. Thus that shrewd observer Kurt Tucholsky could write in spring 1930 that the battle was a sham one because the work itself was unrealistic. ‘This writer can be co
mpared to a man cooking soup on a burning house. It isn’t he who caused the fire.’
Yet if its political significance is often overrated today The Threepenny Opera remains revolutionary in a less obvious but equally disturbing sense. For, like The Little Mahagonny before it, it struck almost instinctively at the whole hierarchical order of the arts, with opera on its Wagnerian pinnacle at the top, and reshuffled highbrow and lowbrow elements to form a new kind of musical theatre which would upset every accepted notion of what was socially and culturally proper. This was what the best critics immediately recognised, Ihering writing that the success of The Threepenny Opera was of immense importance:
A theatre that is not smart, not geared to ‘society’, has broken through to the audience.
Far more so the musicians; thus Klemperer included the wind suite from the music in his concerts and is reported to have seen the 1928 production ten times, while Heinrich Strobel compared it with The Soldier’s Tale as ‘showing the way’ and Theodor Adorno judged it the most important event since Berg’s Wozzeck. In many ways the change of values which it implied has proved harder for later societies to assimilate than have the somewhat random gibes at business, religious hypocrisy, individual charity, romantic marriage and the judicial system which make up the political content of the text. Particularly when seen in conjunction with Brecht’s and Walter Benjamin’s current thinking about the ‘apparatus’ of the arts, it suggested a complete cultural and sociological re-evaluation which would alter all the existing categories, starting with those of opera and operetta (for it was neither), as well as the corresponding techniques of acting, singing and so forth. Today, though certainly poverty, slums, corrupt business practices and biassed justice continue to exist in our most prosperous societies, we no longer feel that The Threepenny Opera has anything all that acute to say about them. But the implications of the new form for singers, musicians, voice teachers and above all for institutionalised opera are still far from fully digested. And because Brecht and his friends did not yet manage to capture the ‘apparatus’ of which they spoke this held good for Communist as well as for capitalist society.
* * *
If the problem with The Threepenny Opera is that its interpreters tend to take the social criticisms too seriously, those of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny may fail to take its content seriously enough. This is partly due to the fact that the translation by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, for all its verbal felicities, needs to be treated with some reservation. A few minor misunderstandings have been corrected, but they also made a dubious decision to return to a modified form of the original ‘American’ names as found in the piano score which they used. For while it is true that an American audience hearing them for the first time might find that they help make the text more relevant to its own society, to everybody who knows that the work emanated from the Berlin of the 1920s – i.e., for almost anyone directing or conducting it – they conjure up just that modish Amerikanismus which Brecht and Weill wanted to discard. Of course the collaborators themselves had somewhat undermined this good intention by their deliberate return to the ‘American’ milieu in The Seven Deadly Sins, which the New York revival of 1958 further emphasised by consciously setting it in the 1920s. But there remains a considerable risk that if Mahagonny is staged in English in this spirit it will become dated, historical, fashionably nostalgic and that much easier for us to stomach.
The Seven Deadly Sins was a comparatively slight work that was written in exile in May 1933, some three months after Hitler came to power. It was commissioned by a short-lived Paris-based company called Les Ballets 1933 backed by the surrealist picture collector Edward James, with his Viennese wife Tilly Losch as its principal dancer; their choreographer was George Balanchine. Fairly clearly the commission was prompted by the success of Weill’s concert there the previous December, when Der Jasager and a very trimmed-down version of Mahagonny, with Lenya among the singers, were included in a series called ‘Concerts de la Sérénade’. So Brecht joined Weill in Paris that spring and supplied a libretto which was essentially a cycle of songs for Lenya in the old pseudo-American vein. As performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, with Lenya and Losch as the two Annas, this fell comparatively flat – Serge Lifar calling it ‘de la pourriture de ballet’ – though it made a great impression on Constant Lambert, who conducted the subsequent performance at the Savoy Theatre in London. To Brecht himself however this excursion into the past seems to have been of little interest, for he subsequently paid no attention to his script and made no attempt to get it published. He made just one amendment: the addition of the words ‘of the petty bourgeoisie’ to the title; the German phrase being des Kleinbürgers, the same words as he added to the title of the early one-act play The Wedding.
To return to Mahagonny, the unpleasant truth is that this work’s message, unlike that of The Threepenny Opera, remains as valid as ever in a society like our own. For we too live in a consumer civilisation: one that has been intensified, refurbished and in many ways enriched, but remains every bit as money-conscious as that of Brecht’s Suckerville, the ‘city of nets’. We too have our idealists who feel that once ‘Don’ts are not permitted here’ the Golden Age will return and all social and economic problems fade into the background. We too are just as loud in our protests against just as muddled a list of things. And so the message must come direct to us, not altered through a blue and angelic ‘period’ haze.
The important thing, then, in staging this work is to forget all about the Berlin Cabarets on the one hand and the marching storm-troopers on the other, and treat it as simply and directly as its original conception. For Mahagonny is localised neither in Weimar Germany nor in a pseudo-America but in any society which lives in great cities and becomes obsessed with pleasure and the problem of how to pay for it. Its teaching is far closer to that of the great Bible-thumping revivalists than to the idiosyncratic attitudes of Mr Norris and Herr Issyvoo on which our present picture of pre-Hitler Berlin is so largely based; its choruses do not recall the husky voice of Marlene Dietrich so much as the Dies Irae. Its warnings therefore are likely to be relevant as long as such societies depend on commercialised distractions, vices and entertainments, where even their permissiveness remains subsidiary to the rule that everything must be paid for. The point is summed up in one of the inter-scene inscriptions which Auden and Kallman for some reason failed to translate: ‘SO GREAT IS THE REGARD FOR MONEY IN OUR TIME.’ Only when this no longer applies will Mahagonny be truly a ‘period’ work. To present it as such today is an evasion.
THE EDITORS
This introduction is based on the three separate introductions to those plays in the Methuen hardback edition of the Collected Plays. Among further developments worth noting are some that concern the role of Brecht’s collaborators Kurt Weill and Caspar Neher. Basing itself on the bowdlerised version of the original Threepenny Opera libretto which Weill’s publishers issued in the autumn of 1928, the Kurt Weill Foundation has more than once tried to insist on the exclusion from English-language productions of lines 10-17 on p. 166 (starting ‘You see before you’) in Macheath’s last speech on the gallows, on the grounds that they were a slightly later addition by Brecht. They are however part of the spoken dialogue to a ‘play with music’; there is no musical pretext for excising them; we have no evidence that Weill himself ever argued for their removal; and their alleged ‘Marxism’ is hardly the business of a US-based charitable foundation.
Neher’s designs shown by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1986 indicate that the projection screens right and left of the stage for the same play were not meant for titles and inscriptions as seen in photographs of the original production, but for coloured drawings with handwritten comments and quotations. For the 1931 production of Man equals Man Neher drew giant soldiers – hence perhaps Brecht’s notion of putting two of them on stilts – and once or twice gave Galy Gay a brown skin. This suggests the possibility of making him an Indian rather t
han the ‘Irishman’ of our text.
JOHN WILLETT, 1994
Chronology
1898
10 February: Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht born in Augsburg.
1917
Autumn: Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Brecht to Munich university.
1918
Work on his first play, Baal. In Augsburg Brecht is called up as medical orderly till end of year. Elected to Soldiers’ Council as Independent Socialist (USPD) following Armistice.
1919
Brecht writing second play Drums in the Night. In January Spartacist Rising in Berlin. Rosa Luxemburg murdered. April-May: Bavarian Soviet. Summer: Weimer Republic constituted. Birth of Brecht’s illegitimate son Frank Banholzer.
1920
May: death of Brecht’s mother in Augsburg.
1921
Brecht leaves university without a degree. Reads Rimbaud.
1922
A turning point in the arts. End of utopian Expressionism; new concern with technology. Brecht’s first visit to Berlin, seeing theatres, actors, publishers and cabaret. He writes ‘Of Poor BB’ on the return journey. Autumn: becomes a dramaturg in Munich. Première of Drums in the Night, a prize-winning national success. Marries Marianne Zoff, an opera singer.