Those Who Live in the Dark

In the late summer of 1928, at the small Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, the thirty-year-old playwright Bertolt Brecht and the twenty-eight-year-old composer Kurt Weill premiered Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), an “anti-opera”—as Weill imagined it—about an underworld of beggars, criminals, and prostitutes. It caused a sensation. Performances sold out, Berlin clubs hosted Dreigroschen dance bands, and a Dreigroschen pub appeared on the Kantstrasse. There was even a Dreigroschen wallpaper pattern.

Over the next five years, as the Great Depression multiplied the number of beggars in the streets on both sides of the Atlantic, “Threepenny Fever” swept Europe, from communist Moscow, where Die Dreigroschenoper was endorsed by Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, to fascist Milan, where the production featured elements of commedia dell’arte. The fever ended in Germany only when Hitler took power in 1933 and banned the work. The Weill scholar Stephen Hinton notes, however, that at the Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Music” in 1938 “the room devoted exclusively to Die Dreigroschenoper had to close because it attracted such large and appreciative crowds.”¹

Threepenny Fever did not, however, extend to New York City. The production that opened there in 1933 closed after just twelve performances, dismissed by the Tribune as a “torpid affectation, sluggish, ghastly” and by the New York American as a “dreary enigma.” The World Telegram declared it “as humorless as Hitler.” Virgil Thomson took favorable note of Weill’s music, but not until 1954, with a celebrated translation by the American composer Marc Blitzstein, did The Threepenny Opera make its mark in New York, with more than 2,500 performances off-Broadway in Greenwich Village. 

Since then the city has had several important revivals, including Joseph Papp’s 1976 production at the Vivian Beaumont, directed by Richard Foreman and starring Raul Julia as Mack the Knife; a new translation by Wallace Shawn for Alan Cumming in 2006, with the cast cross-dressed and leather-costumed by Isaac Mizrahi; and Robert Wilson’s expressionist-Kabuki production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011. The latest, also at BAM, was a German-language presentation by the Berliner Ensemble company—founded by Brecht himself—that came to town for just four sold-out performances last month. This landmark production by the Australian director Barrie Kosky was first staged four years ago in Germany during the pandemic, at the still-thriving Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. 

The director of Berlin’s Komische Oper company since 2012, Kosky has a reputation for radically reimagining the classics, often with an outrageous sense of humor. (His Carmen, for instance, sang the “Habanera” in a gorilla suit.) He shook up the Wagner establishment in 2017 when he came to Bayreuth to direct Die Meistersinger—the first Jewish director at the festival and the first director of Die Meistersinger there who was not a member of Wagner’s family. His production was a powerful historical and political statement, with the mayhem of the second-act urban brawl turning into a pogrom. By the third act the Renaissance Nuremberg of Hans Sachs had become the postwar Nuremberg of the Nazi trials, and Sachs delivered his “Wahn, wahn” monologue, about a world gone mad, from the witness stand. 

And yet Kosky’s Dreigroschenoper moves in the other direction, if anything underplaying the political messages of a work that has often been interpreted in the light of Brecht’s communism. Kosky has resisted the piece’s conventional equation of criminals with capitalists—which has allowed some productions to suggest that Mack the Knife might be a shark financier. If there is a political aspect to Kosky’s conception, it lies instead in its celebration of a kind of subversive anarchism driven by sexual energy. The set is a climbing structure, a grid of interlocking stairs and platforms filling the entire stage, permitting the performers either to pursue one another from chamber to chamber or step back and observe, as voyeurs, from above or below. A shimmering curtain of black and silver streamers adds a cabaret atmosphere to big numbers like “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” But the true anthem of Kosky’s production is “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency [Hörigkeit],” with its calm conviction that libido, at the end of day, is the force that governs our destinies. Kosky allows us to be seduced over and over by the perverse beauty of Weill’s musical settings, which dramatize human instincts and emotions that go beyond morality and even politics to embrace the intensity of violence, revenge, and above all sexual compulsion. 

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The creation of Dreigroschenoper began in 1927. That year the writer Elisabeth Hauptmann produced a German translation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and began to work with Brecht and Weill on developing a libretto for a contemporary German treatment that would update the spirit of the Swiftian satire. Gay, indeed, originally intended The Beggar’s Opera as a satire on opera itself, at a time when the English public was polarized around Italian operatic display. The work thus especially inspired Weill, who had his own modernist ambivalence about the genre. 

In May 1928 Brecht and Weill bolted from Berlin to the French Riviera, where they hurled themselves into the collaboration. “The two men wrote and rewrote furiously, night and day, with only hurried swims in between. I recall Brecht wading out, pants rolled up, cap on head, stogy in mouth,” commented Weill’s Viennese wife Lotte Lenya, who would become a twentieth-century theater legend after appearing in Dreigroschenoper as the philosophical and treacherous prostitute Jenny. 

In the German tradition of Singspiel, with plenty of spoken text, the opera tells the story of the arch-criminal Macheath, a.k.a. Mackie Messer, famous in English as Mack the Knife—a murderer, a thief, and a pimp. In the first act he seduces and marries Polly, the innocent young daughter of Mr. Jonathan Peachum, the clever, entrepreneurial mafioso who equips the beggars of London with prosthetic limbs, manages their business, and takes a cut of their earnings. Mrs. Celia Peachum, Polly’s mother, seeks revenge. Macheath has gone into hiding, but she resolves to track him to one of the prostitutes he frequents and turn him over to the law for execution—complicated by his secret best friendship with the police chief Tiger Brown. Jenny will be the one who betrays him. 

“First comes eating, then comes morality,” runs a representative Brechtian lyric. It is not difficult to see how the work’s profound moral cynicism reflected Brecht’s politics, which became more radical in the years immediately following the premiere. The opening of Dreigroschenoper in Berlin on August 31, 1928, coincided with the conclusion of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. It was the moment of Stalin’s consolidation of power; the Congress called for more intense class struggle, denounced social democrats as “social fascists,” and renounced collaboration with the moderate left. The newspaper of the German Communist Party, the Rote Fahne (“Red Flag”), was unimpressed by Dreigroschenoper at its opening, and Brecht spent the next several years sharpening its Marxist message. Weill, more resistant to ideology, is later supposed to have told his collaborator that he could not compose music for the Communist Manifesto.

Nor did he. Dreigroschenoper is by no means a setting of the Manifesto: the cast of characters doesn’t even feature a member of the industrial proletariat. The more relevant Marxist text might be the brilliant political analysis of the Lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which the little people rally behind the farcical demagogue, Napoleon’s nephew, who was doing away with constitutional government in France after 1848. Marx offered a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style “little list” of the members of this motley class: 

vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lepers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.

In Dreigroschenoper these “bohemians” pocket whatever they can, indifferent to political principles, and enjoy their own anarchic impact with song and saxophone; they are cheerfully vicious and violent in a way that would surely have shocked the impoverished but good-hearted operatic characters of Puccini’s La bohème. Brecht and Weill rejected his verismo sentimentality along with Wagner’s impassioned Romanticism.² 

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The death of Puccini in 1924 marked the end of the operatic age of late Romanticism, and in the years that followed it was an open question what sort of musical language would characterize modernist opera. Alban Berg’s masterpiece Wozzeck, presented in Berlin in 1925, made a case for atonality, its notes laid out across the twelve tones of the scale, astringently renouncing the harmonies and resolutions that defined classical music dating back to the age of Haydn and Mozart. Dreigroschenoper, by contrast, offered hummable, singable ballads, rendered unsettling with something like the jangling circus spirit found in Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which was also completed in 1928, although not performed until 1930.  

The Berliner Ensemble’s magnificently vivid rendition of Weill’s score made clear just why this music sounded so thrilling in 1928. At BAM seven players in the pit, led by the music director and conductor Adam Benzwi, handled piano, percussion, and harmonium, clarinet and piccolo, flute and guitar, double bass and banjo, trumpet and trombone, and soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophone. The saxophone timbres played off each other with plaintive intensity, adapting their diverse ranges to the styles of classical counterpoint, musical hall ballad, Protestant hymnal, foxtrot and tango, jazz and blues. Sometimes the saxophones accompanied the human voices, sometimes they sang with voices of their own.

Brecht and Weill soon collaborated again, on the marvelous opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), but they both fled Germany as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933. Weill ended up in New York in 1935; Brecht arrived in California in 1941 after spending six years in Denmark. The two former partners now squabbled over which, if either, of them possessed the rights to authorize or block performances of Dreigroschenoper: Brecht envisioned an all-black American cast starring Paul Robeson as Peachum, while Weill worried that such a production would end up rearranging his orchestrations. He was longer and better established in America than Brecht, who in 1942 proposed they collaborate again “and simply erase all the misunderstandings and longstanding semi-quarrels.” Weill found him “pitiful” and thought of helping him out, but Lenya wrote a telegram saying tersely, “Don’t send money to Brecht.” By 1946 Weill was reporting to friends that Brecht was “still the old egomaniac and obsessed with his idiotic old theories, without a sign of a more human development.” 

Weill died of a heart attack at fifty in New York on April 3, 1950, exactly seventy-five years before Kosky’s Dreigroschenoper opened at BAM. He spent his last decade writing musicals for Broadway. Just this spring one of them, Love Life, with a libretto by Alan Jay Lerner, was revived for a few performances at New York City Center as part of its Encores series. It’s an interesting piece, the portrait of an American marriage across epochs of the country’s history, with a boldly conceived dream sequence of vaudeville numbers titled “The Love Life Illusion Show.” But ultimately it reveals how lucky Weill was to collaborate with the egomaniacal Brecht, his complementary genius and artistic soulmate. 

Brecht, for his part, returned after the war to communist East Germany. There, in 1949, he founded the Berliner Ensemble, which established itself at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1954. That same year, a quarter of a century after the opening of Dreigroschenoper, Lenya was still dazzling audiences as Jenny in the New York production. Her name had been accidentally left off the program at the premiere in 1928, but now she became the work’s great surviving custodian and interpreter. The postwar public would continue to associate Dreigroschenoper with her sense of command, her sexual magnetism, and her throaty contralto. 

Even as “Mack the Knife” was appropriated by such vocal legends as Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald, Lenya was recording Weill’s songs in her instantly recognizable voice, which the philosopher Ernst Bloch described in 1935 as “sweet, high, light, dangerous, cool, with the radiance of the crescent moon.” (Ever throatier as she aged, she herself supposedly summed up her voice as “an octave below laryngitis.”) Her calling card was “Pirate Jenny” (or “The Ship with Eight Sails”) a chillingly vindictive song Brecht initially intended for Polly in 1928 but which Lenya hijacked for herself when the film version was made in 1931. She had some remarkable roles in the 1960s—as a James Bond villain in From Russia with Love and as Christopher Isherwood’s landlady from the Berlin Lumpenproletariat of the 1930s in the Broadway musical Cabaret—but she remained forever associated with a song she wasn’t originally supposed to sing. 

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Kosky aims to give us a Dreigroschenoper for our own times, and his production, with its abstract climbing structure, hardly replicates the 1928 sets, which featured a giant fairground organ. Yet he also strips away some of the accretions of the last century, including excessive staging that has sometimes leaned too heavily on the theatrical “decadence” of Cabaret. He pays particularly close attention to Weill’s score, making the orchestral performers almost members of the cast, while Benzwi brings out the individual voices of each of the instruments. The mesmerizing result was a performance that let us come as close as we are likely to get to the original spirit of the work.

Mr. Peachum was played by the veteran actor Tilo Nest as a genial host and amiable comedian, nimbly demonstrating various exaggerated styles of pathetic begging. As Mrs. Peachum, Constanze Becker appeared in a black fur coat and black silk stockings, utterly redefining a role that is sometimes performed as grimly shrewish. Her alto voice glided slinkily up and down the scales of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” along with the tenor saxophone in slow waltz time, as she relished the weakness of men who, no matter how proud by day, end up abasing themselves by night. Deemed too obscene to sing at the opening in 1928, the song may not have been restored to the score until the Vienna production of 1929.  

Weill, in a Vienna interview in 1929, called his score a “reaction to Wagner” and “the complete destruction of the concept of the music drama.” He might have imagined the Peachums as a kind of anti-Wotan and anti-Fricka. But Kosky, working within the tradition of the Singspiel operetta, seems to envision the couple as something closer to an unholy union between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The final verse of the evening, “Some live in the dark, some live in the light,” sung to the tune of “Mack the Knife,” both echoes and rejects Sarastro’s concluding verse from the age of Enlightenment: Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht (“the rays of the sun drive away the night”). Brecht and Weill believe that the night is always with us, even if we don’t see those who live in darkness: Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

At his first appearance the young actor Gabriel Schneider, small and wiry, invested Macheath with the persona of a hard-bitten kid from the brat pack. He came onstage dressed in black tie for a marriage that neither he nor Polly really believes in: they harmonized sweetly on the unsentimental Brechtian lyric “Love lasts, or it doesn’t last.” Yet as the evening proceeded Schneider’s Mackie turned out to be a young man of ferocious passions. Some performers have played the character as an elegantly suave Casanova, including the first Macheath, Harald Paulsen (later to become a devoted Nazi). But for Kosky, Mackie is always ruled by his own instincts for sex and violence—Don Giovanni as modern sociopath. 

In the spectacular soldier’s duet with Tiger Brown (played in trousers as a Chaplinesque persona by the actress Kathrin Wehlisch), the brasses and saxophones raucously accompanied the pair as they remembered their army service together (Soldaten wohnen/auf den Kanonen, they sing: “Soldiers live/upon the cannons”). If this famous duet has often been performed in a spirit of nostalgic, comradely chumminess (Brecht and Weill considered bringing some Kipling verse into the libretto), Kosky has a very different vision: as the men sang, Mackie feverishly climbed on top of the chief of police and humped him to Weill’s jaunty rhythm. You never doubted that this was a Mackie who, as Mrs. Peachum predicted, would destroy himself by succumbing to his omnivorous sexual compulsions. At the conclusion of the second act, arrested and shackled by one ankle, his face covered with blood, he danced around the stage in a frenzy while leading the great ensemble: Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? (“How do human beings live?”). The answer was delivered in a spirit of fierce catharsis: they live by violence. The libretto tells us, in Brechtian paradox, that a human being survives “only by being able to forget completely that he is a human being”—and Schneider showed us Mackie in the raging condition of a chained monster. 

Polly Peachum, sometimes envisioned as a naive young soprano—one of Mackie’s victims—was here portrayed by the actress Maeve Metelka as an assertive teenager who knows what she wants, quite capable of taking charge of the situation. She magnificently delivered the anthem of the poor washerwoman’s murderous revenge, “The Ship with Eight Sails,” offering it to Mackie as a musical entertainment for their wedding, dressed in a shimmering tulle dress with sparkling silver wedge heels. No washerwoman herself, Metelka’s Polly enjoys the drama from her own privileged perspective. For the verses she employs spiky Sprechstimme, the musically notated speech pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg, alternating here with the eerie melody of the “eight sails and fifty cannons” refrain. Having thus restored “Pirate Jenny” to Polly, as Brecht and Weill intended, Kosky leaves Jenny with the haunting “Solomon’s Song,” lamenting that neither the biblical wisdom of Solomon nor the classical courage of Caesar lead to happy outcomes in this unhappy world: Bettina Hoppe gave voice to Jenny’s resignation with delicate beauty, accompanied by the solemn harmonium. 

The production was at its very best in Mackie and Jenny’s breathtakingly obscene duet, the “Pimp’s Ballad” (“Zuhälter-Ballade”). With strange nostalgia, they recall their early life together, when he was her pimp and she was his whore, when they were young and in love (perhaps), when they made love by day, since she was busy earning money for him with other men by night. The subject is troubling enough that the Blitzstein translation in the 1950s sanitized it entirely, eliminating the word “bordello” and making it a generic comic number about a man who was too lazy to work and let his girlfriend support him. 

Weill, however, made something weirdly beautiful out of this ugly tale, and the Berliner Ensemble performed it accordingly. The alto saxophone sang the first verse along with Mackie while piano and banjo marked a seductive tango rhythm. When Jenny recalled his abusive violence, her verse was supported by the trumpet (playing dolcissimo) and ornamented by the flute, suggesting her lost innocence. Kosky had the couple following each other, not dancing, through the intricate climbing structure, singing as they climbed, mingling nostalgia and bitterness, until the orchestra took them to an elegant rhythmic conclusion. Then, just as the tango ends, Jenny betrays Mackie to Mrs. Peachum, who caresses him and puts him in chains. 

When Weill left Berlin in 1933, on his way to New York he stopped for a time in Paris, where he composed a French song with a similarly syncopated dance rhythm: not an Argentine tango but a Cuban “habanera,” the signature rhythm of operatic seduction in Bizet’s Carmen. The song’s title— “Youkali”—refers to a fantasy island that we all long for as “le pays de nos désirs” (“the land of our desires”). The world of Dreigroschenoper is also the land of our desires, but Brecht knew that human desires, fulfilled or unfulfilled, are always dangerous, fervent, and subject to exploitation. Weill, meanwhile, knew how to make those desires perilously alluring, even exhilarating. The Berliner Ensemble understands this dynamic all too well. In the Kosky production the balladeer of “Mack the Knife” (hypnotically performed by Josefin Platt) doesn’t sing the libretto’s opening line but speaks it starkly: Und der Haifisch (“and the shark”). And then the marvelously lilting music begins: der hat Zähne. He has teeth.