The Threepenny Opera

The subtractive test finds a play assembled in part. Its plot is Gay’s, taken over nearly whole: the highwayman marries the fence’s daughter, is betrayed by the whores, escapes through the jailer’s daughter, is retaken and is reprieved at the gallows. Brecht thins Gay’s intrigue rather than thickening it, and the numbers sit beside the scenes rather than growing from them. Several are movable and were moved between versions, the Salomon-Song and the Ballade vom angenehmen Leben among them; Lucy’s aria in the third act is cut in practice without loss; the Jealousy Duet is a turn. What is required is the frame of three finales and the business plot that runs under the love plot: Peachum’s trade in pity, Brown’s partnership with Macheath, Macheath’s plan to go into banking. Those parts could not go. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the shuffling itself: a work whose numbers can change places between versions clears the cap by a narrow margin.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and much of it holds: the bourgeois and the criminal are one business at two scales, charity is an industry that manufactures the misery it sells, and morality is a cost only the fed can afford. Peachum’s shop, where beggars are fitted with the five standard types of affliction that move the human heart, is the sharpest finding: pity made a commodity, compassion a market with its own wear. The second finale says it outright, “Erst kommt das Fressen”
(first comes feeding), and morality after. Macheath’s last speech asks what a picklock is against a share certificate. Held below the gate because the disclosure is stated more than enacted: the persons are counters in it rather than lives that test it, and the cynicism is general enough that the Berlin bourgeoisie it indicts took it as flattery, which the play did not foresee and cannot answer.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation here is cold, and it comes in the songs. Pirate Jenny is the height: a scullery maid in a cheap hotel sees a ship with eight sails and “fünfzig Kanonen”
(fifty cannons) come into harbour and the town shot to pieces, and when she is asked which heads shall fall she answers “Alle!” (all of them), and then “Hoppla”. It is dread and transport at once, the revenge fantasy of the dispossessed raised to apocalypse. The Moritat’s shark, with his teeth in his face, and the knife no one sees, is a second height, menace made into a street song. The Cannon Song, the Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and Macheath’s call from the grave and his epitaph after Villon rise again. The spoken scenes do not rise and are not meant to. High and frequent in the numbers, flat between them, and much of the lift is Weill’s setting.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Myth is evoked more than built, but one myth is built. Macheath is the old figure of the gallant thief and the gallows ballad’s hero, and the Moritat makes him a modern one: the predator in a clean suit whose violence is never seen, a shape the century went on to find in its own streets and boardrooms. Peachum is the beggar-king of the Elizabethan cant books moved into a counting house. The load-bearing structure is the inversion of comedy’s providence: the mounted messenger who reaches the scaffold with a pardon, a title, a castle and a pension, so that the happy ending is exposed as the arrival of power, and the reprieve comedy offers as grace is shown to be patronage. That is built, and it governs the end. Much of the rest, the wedding in the stable and the parody chorale, evokes the deep pattern in order to cancel it, and that holds the axis below the gate.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The plot is inherited, and so is the form of the ballad opera; the swerve is in what the songs do. Brecht and Weill made the number step out of the action: the lights change, a board names the song, the singer addresses the house, and the song comments on the scene rather than expressing a feeling inside it. It is the first popular working of what Brecht would call epic theatre, set in the idiom of dance band and cabaret against the operatic and the naturalist inheritance at once, and placed in a commercial house that needed a success. The stake was real: rehearsals by every account were near collapse, and a work that sang its contempt at the audience paying for it had no reason to succeed. It succeeded, and the success was a cost Brecht spent years trying to reverse in his revisions and his Notes. The inherited plot keeps the departure below the top.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. Played as a straight drama of thieves and police it would be a crime comedy; played as an opera, the feeling would carry the audience over to the lovers’ side. The form of numbers split from scenes, sung to the house and announced by boards, is the instrument of its knowledge: it holds the audience out of sympathy long enough for the economics to show. The three finales are opera’s form of resolution turned to argument, and the third is the knowledge itself, the happy ending staged as an ending, so that the audience sees the convention it wanted. What holds the axis is that the instrument is unevenly applied: the love duets ask for the feeling the form is built to withhold, and the spoken scenes are often conventional comedy. The form governs the numbers more than the whole.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over ninety-eight years. Few plays have been reread so often by their own author: Brecht revised the text for print, wrote the Notes, made the material into a film treatment that went to court, recorded in Der Dreigroschenprozess, and into the Dreigroschenroman of 1934, each a reinterpretation toward a harder economics. Productions and versions keep finding new ground in it, from Blitzstein’s English adaptation of 1954 to Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi; Adorno is among those who wrote on the music, and the irony of its bourgeois success is a standing topic. That is a real yield. Within the play the semantic depth is narrower: the cynicism is legible on first hearing and does not deepen on return as the persons of a deeper play deepen. Formal depth, in the songs’ relation to the scenes, yields more than the meaning does.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is the German theatre of the 1920s and, beyond it, the musical stage of the century. The force: the work showed that a play with music could argue rather than charm, that song could interrupt rather than express, and that the popular idiom could carry a political critique into a commercial theatre. A large share of the reach is Weill’s music, which the unit includes and which is weighed here rather than credited whole to the text; the reach into dramatic writing proper is Brecht’s and is large. The fame of the Moritat as a popular song is presence, not reach, and counts only under The Imperishable. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the great theatrical success of the Weimar years; it led directly to Mahagonny and to Brecht’s later epic practice; the Brechtian song entered the musical through Blitzstein, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (1966) and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979); and the play was rewritten by Havel as Žebrácká opera (1975) and by Soyinka as Opera Wonyosi (1977).

Score: 8.8 / 10

Ninety-eight years since the premiere. The text survives whole, in Brecht’s own revisions, which are versions of one work and not loss. Presence is continuous and wide: in the repertory of the German theatre without break since 1945, performed across the world in translation, studied wherever drama is taught. Banned under the Nazis from 1933, it was absent from its home country for twelve years, though played abroad. The song of its prologue is among the most recorded of the century; that is presence, worth at most a tenth, and the tenth is given. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the jazz idiom of 1928 and a satire aimed at the Weimar audience, but the Victorian London was already a mask, and the satire of money and charity has outlived the conditions that made it. The twelve years’ gap and the period surface hold it a tenth below the widest presence its span allows.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Brecht’s German. The verse of the songs is the command: the balladeer’s diction of the Moritat, the plain ruthless rhyme of the Cannon Song, the refrains that turn on one word, and the borrowings from K. L. Ammer’s German Villon and from Kipling made over into a German street voice that is Brecht’s own. The second finale’s question and answer, sung by Macheath and Jenny, is as well made as political verse gets. The spoken dialogue is quick, dry and aphoristic, and Peachum’s speeches are sharp. What holds the axis below the high band is the dramaturgy: the scenes are perfunctory joinery between numbers, the third act’s machinery (the coronation procession, the beggars’ threat, Jenny’s second betrayal) is mechanical, and the persons are drawn in a single line. The making is load-bearing in the songs and serviceable elsewhere.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs: every relation is a transaction, the sentimental included. Take the two most distant elements, Peachum’s morning chorale over his ledgers in the first scene and the mounted messenger’s pardon at the gallows. They obey the same law, since the beggar’s trade and the crown’s mercy are both business in the form of piety. Between them the wedding in a stolen stable, the police chief’s barrack-room friendship with the man he must hang, and the whores who sell Macheath for money as he sold them all hold to it. The law strains in two places. The love songs between Macheath and Polly sing a feeling the law has no room for, and the play does not decide whether they are parody. The Victorian setting and the Weimar target sit together by convention rather than by law. The range is real and mostly governed.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held are many: commerce and capital; the police and the law, with the court and the gallows; poverty and the charity trade; marriage and sexuality, in Polly’s wedding and Macheath’s dependence on the brothel; religion, in Peachum’s Bible texts and the parody chorale; the crown, in the coronation and the pardon; war, in the Cannon Song’s colonial army. They are joined by the one law of the transaction. What is not held is consciousness: no person in the play has an inner life the play attends to, and the family is a joke at the family’s expense. A single evening of three acts is not charged for its length. The figure records the choice of the form: what the play encompasses it holds as a diagram of a society, broad and without interior.

Score: 7.8 / 10