The Threepenny Opera brought a revolutionary new dramatic and musical world into the theatre. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill took John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s 18th century ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera and adapted it into a disillusioned and cynical work that criticised contemporary capitalism. The elegant MacHeath (“Mack the Knife”) became in their work an immoral criminal, while the grand finale was an acerbic parody of a happy end. The “fourth wall” in traditional theatre was removed so the audience could not relax watching the actors as if inside their own “closed world”. The audience is addressed directly, the stage is opened up, the singers perform songs in a confrontational manner aiming them at the audience. The end result is the “alienation effect”. This theatre piece is the bold, ever modern ancestor for today’s musicals. Its music is clearly strongly influenced by jazz and Weill called for a fifteen strong jazz combo. The first song was originally the morning chorale of the Peachums, as a tribute to the original music of Pepusch. Harald Paulsen, who was the first performer of Mack the Knife threatened to quit if his character did not receive an appropriate musical introduction before he took to the stage. For this reason, the most famous piece in the opera, Mack the Knife was placed at the beginning of the work before its première in 1928. Performances of the The Threepenny Opera are frequently artistic compromises, since they are usually played by prose actors whose musicality is not their strength. We now hear the original: in German, in Weill’s own orchestration, sung by superb opera singers.

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