Review of the G.W. Pabst Film of the “Three Penny Opera”

Will the Shark Bite?

G. W. Pabst and The Threepenny Opera

“Macheath: I’m not asking you to put on an opera.”
— Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, Act 1, scene 2

By Gordon Thomas

Down the crooked lanes of London, gangster Mackie Messer stalks a new inamorata, Polly Peachum, and Pabst’s camera strolls along with him. Encountering the hurdy-gurdy strains of the “Moritat,” or, “Ballad of Mack the Knife,” Mackie insinuates himself into the crowd, next to Polly, and listens to the promulgation of his own myth. Against the background of the street singer cataloging his misdeeds — most of them involving the rape and/or murder of women — Polly’s seduction begins.

Fusing music and image, it’s a virtuosic display, and Pabst’s not done. When Mackie offers drinks to Polly and Frau Peachum at a nearby dance hall, they enter a dingy den of vice full of smoke and the pounding rhythms of piano and drums, to which the dancing patrons add the percussion of shoes and boot heels. The honky-tonk music is all by Kurt Weill, taken from tunes that were sung in the original stage version of Threepenny Opera of 1928. The smoky, drunken ambience combined with the din of the dancing — an unusually visceral use of sound for an early talkie — is a feast for the senses.

Unveiled by Criterion’s splendid new DVD edition, these opening minutes of Pabst’s film are so exhilaratingly good, I wondered why, as the film proceeded and came to an end, I felt unsatisfied.

Turns out, less than half of Weill’s score is heard in Pabst’s 1931 film. Some important songs are relegated to source music as in the example above, where the bar’s patrons dance to the tune “The Song About Inadequacy,” which is never heard in its vocal form. Many songs are heard not at all, and this is part of the rub. ¹ The Brecht/Weill conception contained a lot of music, which, separated from Brecht’s (right) dialog, runs a little over an hour. Pabst apparently was wild to obtain the rights to Threepenny Opera, but he must have known all along that he’d have to jettison a lot of its music, and, to make the movie he wanted, reimagine the entire piece. Narrative films, including Pabst’s, most often beg to be mistaken for reality; the Brecht/Weill show does not.²

More an extended cabaret act than a cohesive narrative, the original theatrical Threepenny Opera wears its artificiality on a tattered sleeve. There is a plot, based very loosely on John Gay’s 18th-century satire The Beggar’s Opera, but it’s kept rather sketchy and coarse, because every few minutes Brecht/Weill stops the action cold with another song. This unbuttoned structure, combined with the salaciousness and half-written quality of the dialog, is a purposed affront to the European operatic tradition then in place, exemplified in Germany by Wagner.³ On the stage, Threepenny Opera flips the bird at the unities of the god/genius’ sublime music dramas.

The whole show hangs together not by action or dialog, but by the harmonic and thematic glue supplied by the score, which is anything but haphazard. Weill even supplies a leitmotif in the form of the recurring tune of the “Moritat”⁴ that has the perhaps unintentional effect of mocking Wagner further. More importantly, all of the songs share a unique Threepenny “tint” both in their harmonic language and in their pit band, early jazz orchestrations. One of the commentators on Criterion’s new documentary, Brecht vs. Pabst, guesses that the Weimar audience came to the stage version of Threepenny Opera for the songs; furthermore, I’m betting, they ate up the sometimes naughty ironies supplied by the book’s cynicism without buying into Brecht’s angry cry for social justice.

The songs of Threepenny Opera aren’t meant to advance the show’s plot or to dramatize its characters, which, as adapted from Gay’s scenario,⁵ are little more than signifiers; while singing, the stage performers project “attitudes.”⁶ When a tune begins, a spotlight or lamp appears, the actor steps into its light, does the number, then steps back to resume dialog — spotlight out. Song lyrics are “frequently in quotation marks.”⁷ In the original stage version, this way of framing the songs, which are often in archly orchestrated pop styles, creates an ironic disjoint, much like the kind Dennis Potter strives for when his characters in Pennies From Heaven, caught in degrading or deceitful poses, suddenly start lip-synching to the shallow optimism or maudlin balladry of a popular song. The film manages only a whiff of these ironies, localized mostly in the faux romance of Macheath and Polly that’s set to the flavorings of mock Viennese operetta. Like Gustav Mahler before him, Weill understood the power of schmaltz.

For his adaptation, it seems Pabst couldn’t find a dramatic alternative to the stage work’s juiced-up blend of cynical, nearly throwaway text and ebullient (but rather mournful) music.⁸ After a while, with just a song here and there, the film loses steam. Within his readjusted and tightly controlled narrative, Pabst pushes a more specific Marxist polemic than the theater piece, and none of the performances — with one glorious exception — seems able to step out from behind this moralizing scrim and truly evolve as a character.

Still, Rudolf Forster brings a menacing heft to his Macheath, and Ernst Busch is perfection as the Street Singer (right). Listen to the way Busch rolls his “r’s” in the “Moritat,” and you know it’s a long way to Bobby Darin. Busch’s stylized way with the song gives us the tart idiomatic flavor of the original show.

Tony Rayns, in his detailed essay in Criterion’s booklet, cites Busch and Lotte Lenya as the only two members of the original theatrical cast to make it into the movie; but there is a third, Carola Neher, who plays Polly. Fine-boned and very pretty, Neher was chosen and rehearsed to create Polly in 1928, but dropped out before the show’s premiere for personal reasons; she rejoined the cast in time for the show’s “second en suite” run in 1929.⁹ Yet Neher’s unfocused presence as an actress seems inadequate to Polly’s new prominence in the film version, and her high, thin soprano voice is not winningly captured by the early recording technology.

Then we have Lotte Lenya. With a large nose and the mother of all overbites, Lenya was not a pretty or glamorous woman, but it’s her presence, in a supporting role, that lifts the film for moments at a time into another realm. The best of these moments is her performance of “Pirate Jenny,” a number that was originally assigned to Polly Peachum. Pabst’s reassignment of the song proves dramatically apt. In a pivotal scene, Jenny is about to betray Macheath because she’s weary of being relegated to the position of spare cunt. In this context, the song, with its violent imagery, is no longer “dreams of a kitchen maid,” but a prostitute’s dream of revenge.¹⁰ With no visible technique, Lenya projects the anger of the socially downcast better than anything in the film. Jenny is tired, used up, but, carrying a spark of defiance in her big, dark eyes, fully alive. Lenya, the wife/collaborator of composer Weill, was intelligent, large in spirit, and knew how to sell a song. She was also uncommonly sexy.

In his entry for Pabst in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, film writer David Thomson suggests that, in order to create truly great films, this filmmaker needed a collaborator, and that, sadly, he found only one, Louise Brooks. Thomson quotes Lotte Eisner’s view that Brooks had “succeeded in stimulating an otherwise unequal director’s talent to the extreme.” ¹¹ He and Brooks made just two films together, but I think Pabst could have found yet another such collaborator in Lotte Lenya (right). It was probably too late anyway; Lenya fled Germany in 1933.

When Lenya is not present in the 1931 film, what’s left to savor is some low comedy from Mackie’s stumblebum gang of thieves (Huntz Hall would not be out of place here), a nicely filmed sequence where Macheath narrowly avoids the police while dallying at the Turnbridge whorehouse, and a neat, rather dry denouement (taken from Brecht’s treatment). In these scenes we feel less the bite of Mackie’s shark teeth than the smooth texture of his white kid gloves — although Pabst’s final image, matched to a potent line from the “Moritat,”¹² is haunting in much the same way as the closing of Pandora’s Box, where a clueless character follows the poor and homeless as they march into social oblivion with a Salvation Army band. In Threepenny Opera, however, the image of the poor being swallowed up by darkness has a traditional narrative’s closure about it and a literal, albeit quite moving, visual translation of Brecht’s more figurative text.¹³ By making his movie in a linear and closed form, Pabst has allied himself with those very same operatic/narrative unities that Brecht/Weill chose to disrupt, but to me there’s nothing sacred to the avant-gardism (turned commercially successful) of the Brecht/Weill vision, a unique frisson that most likely must forever be bound to its theatrical anti-theatricalism.

Yet one of the film’s glories is its inclusion of three of the original members of that original stage show, and Criterion’s improved audio brings their forgotten vocal styles closer to us. Criterion’s new high-definition transfer,¹⁴ from a restored element in the German Bundesarchiv, is a window wiped clean, its clarity wondrous, its range of blacks and middle values simply gorgeous. Pabst’s skill and craftsmanship in filmmaking is fully revealed: in sets and lighting design, his creation of a Victorian London is at once realistic and fantastical, rendered in some of the richest chiaroscuro of the director’s career. Some have said this pictorial lushness dulls the edge of Brecht/Weill’s conception even further, but the eye revels in it.

I just miss the songs.

Notes

1. To hear the score approximately as the 1928 audience did, you can turn to a 1958 recording of the New York revival of the original show, supervised by Lotte Lenya, who in turn sang Jenny. Interestingly, the recording, unlike the show’s book, has the Street Singer introduce each song, which creates a new, unified piece out of the isolated songs, a kind of jazz oratorio. As far as I know this recording is still available as a single disc CD issue from Sony.

2. All films, of course, vary the level at which they want to trick the audience with their illusions. Pabst ventures outside his narrative frame with one very effective theatrical device: several times he has the Street Singer address the audience with comments on the action. It’s a bold transgression and prefigures everything from Albert Finney’s asides to the audience in Tom Jones (1963) to Joel Grey’s turn as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret (1972) (see also note 8, below).

3. Hinton, Stephen (editor). Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 140.

4. Ibid. p. 168.

5. The Beggar’s Opera’s satirical target was the aristocracy; Brecht made his the bourgeoisie.

6. Hinton, Stephen, p 5.

7. Ibid. p. 6.

8. Bob Fosse, with his film adaptation of the stage musical Cabaret, faced a similar dilemma: how to cinematically open up a theatrical conception where many of the songs do not forward characterizations or plot. Fosse merely kept these “commentary” songs and excised the rest. He presents the remaining songs, which play against the characters’ personal dilemmas within the emergence of National Socialism, in the artificial space of the Kit Kat Klub. From here he can skillfully toggle back and forth to the film’s linear story line in its real space

9.. Ibid. pp. 52, 57.

10. Like all of Weimar Berlin, Pabst can seem obsessed with whoredom. Images of prostitutes were everywhere in twenties’ German culture, high or low, in films, paintings, novels, stage works, and nudie shows — and of course, most of all, on the streets. Pabst’s possible distinction was his compassion for them and their plight, but something in a whore’s victimhood probably turned him on, too.

11. Thomson, David. New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Little Brown and Co., London, 2003, pp. 660-661.

12. Brecht added this stanza of the “Moritat” in his rejected film treatment (Brecht, Bertolt. The Theepenny Opera, Arcade, New York, NY, 1994. Translated and edited by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, p. 84 (notes and variations).

13. For the ones they are in darkness/And the others are in light/And you see the ones in brightness/Those in darkness drop out of sight. (Translated by Guy Stern)

14. The entire French version of Threepenny Opera (right), filmed in tandem, scene by scene, with the German one, appears on a second disc, but its inclusion is perhaps the perennial Criterion overkill. The comparison documentary by Charles O’Brien on disc two ably demonstrates the differences between both versions, and that’s enough for this viewer. Other than the print being in lamentable shape, the French cast can’t cut the mustard: the Macheath, Robert Prejean, looks like he’s auditioning for the Louis Jourdan role in Gigi.

“Mack The Knife” by Louis Armstrong

This rendition of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mack The Knife” really helped to propel the popularity of the song.

“Mack The Knife” in Hebrew

This version of “Mack The Knife” slays me.

A Version of the Pimp’s Ballad

This version was performed at the 2006 Tony Awards. Something about this translation seems really strange to me though.

Bertolt Brecht

BERTOLT BRECHT (1898-1956)

one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century theatre, Bertolt Brecht (Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht) was born in Augsburg, Bavaria on February 10, 1898. He drifted towards the literary arts at an early age, writing poetry as a boy and even had a few poems published in 1914. He was an indifferent student, however, and was very nearly expelled from Augsburg Grammar School for taking a dismissive, anti-patriotic tone when given an assignment to write an essay with the title “It is a sweet and honourable thing to die for one’s country.”

In 1917 Brecht enrolled as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he would attend Arthur Kutscher’s theatre seminar. Although Kutscher had a reputation as something of a theatrical guru, Brecht was unimpressed. He went so far as to harshly criticize one of the instructor’s favorite plays, Hanns Johst’s The Lonely One, a biographical drama about the life of nineteenth century dramatist C.D. Grabbe. The impetuous young Brecht suggested that he himself could write a better play on the same subject. The result was Brecht’s first play, Baal, an effort that Kutscher considered vile and nauseating.

In 1918, Brecht’s studies were temporarily interrupted when he was conscripted and had to serve as a medical orderly in World War I. During this period, he wrote his second play, Drums in the Night, which tells the story of a soldier who returns home from the war to find his fiancée engaged to a war profiteer. This was the first of Brecht’s plays to be performed, and his theatrical theories had, apparently, already begun to take shape, for he filled the auditorium with banners instructing the audience not to become too emotionally involved in the proceedings. Drums in the Night, which premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1922, drew rave reviews from Herbert Ihering, and even earned Brecht the Kleist Prize, Germany’s highest award for dramatic writing. Thus Brecht, from the very beginning, found himself in the spotlight. That same year, the promising young dramatist married the opera singer and actress Marianne Zoff. Their daughter, Hanne Hiob, born in 1923, would become a famous German actress.

The following year (1923) saw a production of Baal, the play Brecht had written for Arthur Kutscher’s theatre seminar. John Fuegi paints a picture of Brecht’s mindset during this early production: “Typical of Brecht’s working method in Leipzig, and indeed of what was to become a lifetime practice, were his individual sessions with actors outside the formal rehearsal period and his disregard for the original text of the play. Each day the text would be viewed afresh as Brecht the director denounced (half in jest but half seriously) Brecht the playwright. “How could anybody write such shit?” he would ask rhetorically, and would scribble new lines, new scenes, new acts and insist these be learned immediately. So changing would the chameleon be, that Brecht the theorist would openly fight with Brecht the director, Brecht the poet, Brecht the playwright and Brecht the blatant womanizer. No one could predict which Brecht would predominate at any given moment. But somehow, out of the cacophony of the Brechts arguing with one another would come a production that worked as a unified artistic whole as each contributed a valuable piece to the final mosaic” (Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan). He goes on to describe the overall atmosphere of the production, saying “At the first run through of Baal (and this would be the case in virtually all subsequent Brecht productions) chaos reigned. Totally swept up by the brutal Bohemian atmosphere of the play, the cast behaved as if they all were drunk. Many in fact were drunk and liquor bottles piled up in every corner backstage.”

In 1924, after receiving productions of The Jungle of Cities at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater and Edward II at the Prussian State Theatre, Brecht moved to Berlin, a move he deemed necessary to continue his dramatic career. During the next few years, Brecht produced a string of well-received plays, the most popular of which was probably The Threepenny Opera, which he adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera along with composer Kurt Weill. In fact, The Threepenny Opera would go on to become the biggest theatrical hit in Berlin during the 1920s and helped lead the way in a worldwide resurgence of the popularities of musicals in general. (It would also do much to fatten the playwright’s checkbook!) Brecht also published his first book of poems, Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary), which won a literary prize. However, even as his literary fame was soaring, Brecht found his interests shifting towards politics. In 1927, he had begun to study Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and by 1929 he had embraced Communism. His solidifying political beliefs would soon become evident in his plays as well. Another Brecht/Weill collaboration, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, caused an uproar when it premiered in Leipzig in 1930 with Nazis protesting in the audience.

In 1929, Brecht married Helene Weigel (he had divorced Marianne Zoff in 1927) who had already borne him a son, Stefan. The new couple also had a daughter, Barbara, who was born shortly after the wedding and who, like Brecht’s other daughter, would go on to become an actress (she would also inherit the copyrights to all of Brecht’s literary work). During this period, he also formed an influential writing collective which aspired to create a new theatre for participants rather than for passive audiences. In 1932 he worked on a script for a semi-documentary feature-length film about the suffering caused by the then-rampant mass unemployment that was plaguing Germany. This film, Kuhle Wampe was effective in its subversive humor and still provides a vivid insight into the final years of the Weimar Republic.

In February 1933, however, Bertolt Brecht’s career was suddenly and violently interrupted as the Nazis came to power in Germany. The night after the Reichstag (German parliament building) was burned down, Brecht wisely fled with his family to Prague. His books and plays were soon banned in Germany and those who dared stage his plays found their productions unpleasantly interrupted by the police.

The exiled dramatist bounced around from Prague to Vienna to Zurich to the island of Fyn to Finland, where he lived for a while in Villa Marlebäck as a guest of the Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki. There Brecht and Wuolijoki wrote the play Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (1940). During this period of exile, while Brecht awaited a pending visa to the United States, he also completed the plays Mother Courage and her Children (1939), The Good Person of Szechwan (1941), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uri (1941).

In May of 1941, Brecht finally received his U.S. visa and relocated to Santa Monica, California, where he attempted to become a Hollywood screenwriter, but his unusual concepts were mostly dismissed by Hollywood producers who couldn’t seem to comprehend his artistic visions (or, as a result, take him seriously). His only comparitively successful Hollywood film was Hangmen Also Die (1943), an apocryphal version of the assassination of Nazi leader and “Hangman” Reinhard Heydrich, who died from the bullets of unidentified resistance fighters. The money Brecht received from this film allowed him to write The Visions of Simone Marchand, Schwyk in the Second World War and his adaptation of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.

Unfortunately, Brecht’s stay in America would not be as successful or as lengthy as he might have hoped. In 1947, during the years of the “red scare,” the House Un-American Activities Committee called the playwright to account for his communist activities. Originally, Brecht was one of several witnesses who had refused to testify about their political affiliations. But on October 30, 1947, he appeared before the committee, wearing overalls, smoking a cigar, cracking jokes, and making constant references to the translators who transformed his German statements into English ones he could not comprehend. Although he outwitted his investigators with half-truths and skilful innuendo, Brecht feared the irrational political climate, and shortly after his testimony took a plane to Switzerland, not even waiting to see the opening of his play Galileo in New York.

On October 22, 1948, after 15 years of exile, Bertolt Brecht returned to Germany, settling in East Berlin where he was welcomed by the Communist cultural establishment and immediately given facilities to direct Mother Courage at the Deutsches Theater. The following year he founded his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and in 1954 he was rewarded with his own theatre–the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Brecht quickly discovered, however, that the German Democratic Republic was not quite his ideal brand of Communism, and he was often at odds with his East German hosts. He did not care to keep up appearances, and because of his scruffy, unshaven appearance, East German security guards once excluded him from a Berlin reception being held in his own honor.

Brecht wrote very few plays in his last years in Berlin, none of them as famous as his previous works, although he did make some attempts at a play following the careers of Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he was said to be contemplating a play in response to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the time of his death. In addition, he wrote some of his most famous poems during these last years, including the “Buckower Elegies.” In 1955, Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize. The following year, he contracted a lung inflammation and died of a coronary thrombosis (heart attack) on August 14, 1956.

As James K. Lyon points out in Brecht Unbound, “Brecht appears to have been someone whose death did more to advance his career than any single act of his life. Almost from the moment of his funeral, officials in East Germany began a process that rapidly transformed him from a troublemaker into an almost saintly literary classic, while West German intellectuals, theater people, and publishers who discovered and promoted his works quickly laid the foundation for a ‘Brecht industry’ that still flourishes today. In the process, and despite a propensity for causing trouble long after his death, Brecht became, depending on how one views it, one of the most dominant influences on, or obstacles to, the development of German theater and literature in both Germanys for the next two-and-a-half decades.”

In the poem entitled “Poor Bertolt Brecht”, Tikva Levi writes:

Poor Bertolt Brecht came from the black forest

a poet of the forest that chilled him to the very bone

In his early plays, Brecht experimented with dada and expressionism, but in his later work, he developed a style more suited his own unique vision. He detested the “Aristotelian” drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a kind of trance-like state, a total identification with the hero to the point of complete self-oblivion, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and, ultimately, an emotional catharsis. He didn’t want his audience to feel emotions–he wanted them to think–and towards this end, he determined to destroy the theatrical illusion, and, thus, that dull trance-like state he so despised. He envisioned the theater as more of a debate hall than a place of illusions.

The result of Brecht’s research was a technique known as “verfremdungseffekt” or the “alienation effect”. It was designed to encourage the audience to retain their critical detachment. His theories resulted in a number of “epic” dramas, among them Mother Courage and Her Children which tells the story of a travelling merchant who earns her living by following the Swedish and Imperial armies with her covered wagon and selling them supplies: clothing, food, brandy, etc… As the war grows heated, Mother Courage finds that this profession has put her and her children in danger, but the old woman doggedly refuses to give up her wagon. Mother Courage and Her Children was both a triumph and a failure for Brecht. Although the play was a great success, he never managed to achieve in his audience the unemotional, analytical response he desired. Audiences never fail to be moved by the plight of the stubborn old woman.

Explaining his technique in A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht says, “In order to produce A-effects [alienation effects] the actor has to discard whatever means he has learnt of getting the audience to identify itself with the characters which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he must not go into a trance himself. His muscles must remain loose, for a turn of the head, e.g. with tautened neck muscles, will ‘magically’ lead the spectators’ eyes and even their heads to turn with it, and this can only detract from any speculation or reaction which the gesture may bring about. His way of speaking has to be free from parsonical sing-song and from all those cadences which lull the spectator so that the sense gets lost. Even if he plays a man possessed he must not seem to be possessed himself, for how is the spectator to discover what possessed him if he does?… His feelings must not at bottom be those of the character, so that the audience’s may not at bottom be those of the character either. The audience must have complete freedom.”

Renate Rechtien points out that it was not just his theatrical theories that Brecht was concerned with. He was equally political. “Brecht was always at odds with the prevailing official affirmative notion of culture,” She says, “and continuously sought to challenge, undermine and transform it. Forged as a means of transforming society, art … was understood by Brecht to be more than simply a superstructural affirmation of reality. Brecht defined its role as active and critical appropriation of reality, with the artist confronting, exposing and acting upon real societal contradictions with a view to bringing about social change” (Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays) And it is true that, in his resistance against the Nazi and Fascist movements, Brecht wrote his most famous plays: Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, Mr. Puntila and has man Matti, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Person of Sezuan, and many others. Astrid Herhoffer agrees that “Brecht commits himself in his work to the cause of the humiliated and the offended, and it is in this political commitment that lies the strength of his literary work” (Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays).

Bertolt Brecht’s theories and personality were so dominating in his time, that the term “Brechtian” has come to be used by drama critics in regards to anything reminiscent of Brecht’s particular style and approach to theatre.

Strange Bertolt Brecht Collage

Lotte Lenya

Lotte Lenya, née Karoline Wilhelmine Blamauer, was born in 1898 in Vienna to working-class parents. An early ambition to become a dancer led her in 1914 to Zurich, where she studied classical dance and the Dalcroze method and gained experience in the opera and ballet at the Stadttheater. As the acting student of Richard Révy, she then worked in repertory at the Schauspielhaus, where she appeared in dozens of productions and encountered artists of the stature of Elisabeth Bergner and Frank Wedekind. In 1921 she set out for Berlin with the hope of making a career as a dancer. During her audition for Zaubernacht in 1922, she was introduced to its composer, Kurt Weill, but couldn’t see him at his position at the piano in the pit. (She was cast, but out of loyalty to her teacher, who was not, she declined the offer.)

Marriage and Opera Roles

In 1924, the leading German Expressionist dramatist, Georg Kaiser, re-introduced Lenya to his new collaborator, Kurt Weill. Two years later they married, and in 1927 Lenya sang the role of Jessie in Mahagonny (Songspiel) at the Baden-Baden Music Festival. Although her inimitable but untrained soprano voice already set her apart from the opera singers who comprised the rest of the cast, she did not achieve a secure position in Berlin’s vibrant theatrical scene until she created the role of Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928. Thereafter, she enjoyed an active stage, recording, and film career; although her efforts centered on her husband’s works, she also appeared on the legitimate stage in Berlin in such plays as Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen, Karlheinz Martin’s historic production of Dantons Tod and Leopold Jessner’s of Oedipus. In 1931, after all the opera houses in Berlin had rejected Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Weill simplified the role of Jenny so that Lenya could sing it in the production at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm.

Divorce and Reconciliation in America

Although they were estranged at the time they fled Germany and soon to be divorced, in 1933 Weill composed the role of Anna I in Die sieben Todsünden for her. They were not reconciled until they departed for New York in September 1935; they remarried the following year. Lenya then played Miriam in The Eternal Road (1937), sang at the fashionable nightclub, Le Ruban Bleu, and toured with Helen Hayes in Maxwell Anderson’s A Candle in the Wind (1942). After the success of Lady in the Dark, the Weills bought Brook House in Rockland County, New York. Lenya recorded six of Weill’s songs on the Bost label, supported the war effort with performances for Voice of America and the Office of War Information, and retired from the stage after disparaging notices for her portrayal of the Duchess in The Firebrand of Florence.

Lenya and the Weill Rediscovery

After Weill’s death in 1950, Lenya, no longer confident of her talents, reluctantly agreed to appear in a memorial concert at Town Hall; its astounding success prompted nearly annual revivals until 1965. In 1951 she created a role on Broadway in Anderson’s Barefoot in Athens and married the writer/editor George Davis. It was Davis who persuaded her to recreate the role of Jenny in Blitzstein’s adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, first under Leonard Bernstein in a concert version at Brandeis in 1952 and then at the Theater de Lys in 1954, a performance which won her a Tony Award. For the rest of the decade, Lenya devoted herself almost exclusively to the Weill renaissance her performances had initiated. Although her tessitura was now almost an octave lower than it had been during the Twenties, she recorded Berlin Theater Songs, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Johnny Johnson, Happy End, Die Dreigroschenoper, Die sieben Todsünden, and American Theater Songs. She also returned to Germany to search for Weill’s lost scores, to administer his copyrights, and to make her first stage and concert performances there since 1932. The shock of George Davis’s sudden death at age 51 in 1957 only intensified Lenya’s devotion to Weill’s legacy. In 1962, she married artist Russell Detwiler, who died under tragic circumstances just seven years later at the age of 44.

During the first two decades following Weill’s death Lenya re-established her international career both as singer and actress in non-singing roles and as a specialist in Brechtian theater. In addition, she appeared in several television specials devoted to Weill’s music, as well as the film, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. In close succession followed the revue Brecht on Brecht in New York, the role of Rosa Kleb in the film From Russia with Love, the title role in Mutter Courage in Recklinghausen, Frau Schneider in Cabaret, the film The Appointment, and the Fortune Teller in a television production of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real. In 1969, she was honored by the West German government with the Order of Merit, First Class. In 1971 she appeared in a concert performance of Der Silbersee at the Holland Festival and played Mother Courage at the University of California/Irvine. As late as 1975, at the age of 77, she planned to premiere a number of Weill’s works at the Berlin Festival, a landmark in the continuing

Weill revival, but illness forced an unfortunate cancellation. Her last film appearance, as a masseuse in Semi- Tough with Burt Reynolds, is indicative of the creative and personal energy that characterized her life until the final months before she succumbed to cancer on 27 November 1981. But even her last coherent moments had been devoted to Weill matters, as she embraced Teresa Stratas as her successor and entrusted the Kurt Weill Foundation established in 1962 with her unfinished mission, the protection and promotion of Kurt Weill’s music.

–Kim H. Kowalke

Forthcoming in the American National Biography Project, Oxford University Press

David Bowie performs “Alabama Song”

The Doors Perform “Alabama Song”

Manitoba Song

I found this song which paradies the now famous Alabama Song. Here are the lyrics to the original.

Gesprochen/spoken:
Basil [the polar bear], it’s easter in Montreal, it seems that easter is yet to come here
True, Louis [the francophone otter], but I thought that it was still a few weeks away
[Louis,] I’ll ask Dodi [the fearless pilot]
[Basil and Louis,] I’ll fly you all to Montreal, and there we’ll have Easter, so I have written a song to get us there

Gesungen/Sung:
Oh, show us the way to the next beer parlor
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
For we must find the next beer parlor
Or if we don’t find the next beer parlor
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die

Oh, Sun of Manitoba,
It’s time to say good-bye eh!
We’ve lost our good friend eh,
And must have beer eh!
And you know why

Oh, Sun of Manitoba,
It’s time to say good-bye eh!
We’ve lost our good friend eh,
And must have pizza eh!
And you know why

Oh, show us the way to the next tire money
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
For we must find the next beer parlor
Or if we don’t find the next beer parlor
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die

Oh, Lake of Manitoba,
It’s time to say good-bye eh!
We’ve lost our good friend eh,
And must have money
And you know why

Oh, Lake of Manitoba,
It’s time to say good-bye eh!
We’ve lost our good friend eh,
And must have price hike
And you know why

Gesprochen/Spoken:
Sorry, we left our oranges and chocolate in the forrest, we’ll have to start again.

Gesungen/Sung:
Oh, show us the way to the next tire money
Oh, don’t ask why
Oh, don’t ask why
For we must find the next beer parlor
Or if we don’t find the next beer parlor
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die

Oh, Flag of Menitoba
It’s time to say auf Wiedersehen
We’ve got so very cold eh!
and must have *German* girl, oh, you know why
You know why
Well, You know what

Oh, Flag of Menitoba
It’s time to say auf Wiedersehen
We’ve got so very cold eh!
and must have *German* girl, oh, you know why
You know why
And that’s aboat it.

Gesprochen/Spoken:
Yes, it’s easter in Montreal, have a good night!