Kurt Weill at His Best
COOK, BRUCE
On Music KURT WEILL AT HIS BEST by BRUCE COOK In 1928, the young partnership of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill was looking around for an ambitious project to undertake. The year before, the two...
...As for the New York Shakespeare Festival recording, it does justice to the composer and lyricist—and that, of course, is saying a good deal— but it is far from perfect: Raul Julia may not have the degree of vocal strength that the part of MacHeath demands...
...Indeed, his facility may have proved to be his undoing...
...they are overly literary, and rather un-singable...
...It seems time, therefore, for someone to point out that at least half the credit belongs to Kurt Weill...
...It is, whatever its weaknesses, as good an original cast recording as I have heard in some time...
...Foreman gave the performance crispness and a sense of movement...
...her hollering and howling occasionally make her lose pitch...
...Thus his brilliant score to The Threepenny Opera, as funny as or funnier than Brecht's sour, heavy-handed literary humor...
...It was subsequently used as the basis for Brecht and Weill's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.} Before long their eyes came to rest on The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's lusty ballad opera glorifying the escapades of the highwayman MacHeath...
...A superb melodist, the composer was able to put aside his avant-garde pretensions and write fetching, catchy, popular melodies...
...But he was a man of the theater, a composer and a lyricist, and he did know how to write song lyrics that were singable...
...Polly's "Barbara Song," in praise of her proletarian lover, is a bit more in the French style, the kind of musical flirtation sopranos love to trill...
...He sounds exactly the way he looks, rotund and commanding—the very voice (as Brecht intended) of laissez-faire capitalism...
...Last year, when Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival presented The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center, it turned out to be the one palpable hit of an otherwise drab season...
...It made possible Weill's lucrative career in the United States as a Broadway composer, and helped Brecht at least to survive in Hollywood through the Second World War...
...There are echoes, too, of Gilbert and Sullivan in the second-act jealousy duet sung by Polly and Lucy Brown...
...A truly literal rendition of these lines would go something like this: "And the shark, he has teeth/And he wears them in his face/And MacHeath, he has a knife/ Yet that knife one doesn't see...
...If you have not given much thought to the music of the Threepenny Opera, or even if you have, treat yourself to this album...
...Brecht had the book translated by his assistant, Elizabeth Hauprman, and decided that in a free adaptation—Brecht always adapted freely —he and Weill could make something entirely new of it...
...Rarely have the fine points of literal rendering and paraphrasing been discussed so forcefully and with such supposed erudition...
...Finally, this is in several important respects as finished and polished a recording as one could hope to hear...
...Everybody knows what Blitzstein did with the number—Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin each had gold records of it...
...I suspect more than enough energy has been devoted to it already...
...And it is "faithful" to Brecht's text—in intent, if not ad-ways exactly in letter—making for a sexier, raunchier Threepenny that is in keeping with the temper of our time...
...w Y y bill's satire is made particularly effective by the inherent quality of his songs...
...The year before, the two had nearly started a riot at the Baden-Baden Festspiel with "Mahagonny," a song cycle in dramatic settings based on Brecht's poems...
...On the positive side, Caroline Kava twitters to perfection as Polly Peaohum...
...The lowliest reviewers have come on as scholars, praising the new Ralph Manheim-John Willett translation for its faithfulness to the German original...
...When he emigrated to America in 1935, he found an easy entry into the Broadway theater...
...So much for faithful translations...
...In fact, the collaboration was to sustain each man during his years in exile...
...I do not care, however, to be drawn too far into the battle of the translations...
...Choral passages, especially those at the end of each act, are sung well and with all stops out...
...It was Brecht who ultimately ended the partnership, wounding the composer with the critical remarks he made in his preface to the published text of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny...
...In form, if not in spirit, about as close as any European work has ever come to American musical comedy, Threepenny was a frank effort by Brecht and Weill to succeed on the commercial stage...
...Weill's music was treated as little more than an accompaniment to the playwright's text...
...That may be so: Blitzstein was neither a professional translator, like Ralph Manheim...
...The two labored throughout the summer, and in the autumn The Threepenny Opera opened to wide critical and popular acclaim...
...What I would like to do, with this new album in hand, is call attention to its music...
...The accompanying band plays the original Weill orchestrations with remarkable sharpness...
...Kurt Weill's great gift was as a musical parodist...
...G. W. Pabst made a film version in 1931 (shot in both French and German...
...Suddenly, life and vigor and real theatrical energy appeared in a city surfeited by British imports and grown jaded on supermusicals...
...Compared to his, some of the Manheim-Willett lines seem very bookish, written without much of a notion that they would ever actually be performed...
...But what has proved most remarkable about the play is its staying power...
...That Papp's Threepenny was greeted exclusively as a Brecht revival is a mark of the respective posthumous fates of the two collaborators...
...on vinyl, I found myself wishing on occasion that he had a little more oomph...
...He makes wicked fun of Bach and Handel and, most devastatingly, of European operetta...
...He is said to have taken an essential sting out of it...
...Oddly enough, though (and here Simon and I have no quarrel), it seems to be the translation employed by the Shakespeare Festival that has most widely been given credit for the superiority of its production...
...And the strongest singer of all is C. K. Alexander...
...nor a German scholar, like John Willett...
...Without sacrificing any of their esthetic standards, they did so gloriously: The original production—one of the Continent's biggest hits between the wars—was followed by others (including the first New York staging, in 1933...
...both are absolutely essential for this rather long show that tends, toward the end, to bog down in its own vast ironies...
...None of them had the wit, the bite or the strength of his work with Bertolt Brecht...
...The work was enjoying its 200th anniversary that year, an occasion marked by Sir Nigel Playfair's excellent and celebrated presentation...
...After one fairly ambitious and well-realized attempt at an opera-musical (Street Scene), he confined himself to conventional musicals—Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus—that were good enough, yet largely indistinguishable from others of their kind...
...The first-act love duet sung by MacHeath and Polly Peachum at their mock wedding is perfect...
...1 also thought Brecht's son, Stefan, who is said to have insisted that Richard Foreman direct, made the right choice...
...All of the encomiums heaped upon Manheim and Willett's new words have been at the expense of the old ones by Marc Blitzstein...
...In general, the music conveys the feeling of a certain grand baroque majesty humorously contrasting—as it should—with the whores, thieves and beggars who are doing the singing...
...and record and sheet-music sales were considerable...
...On stage, his magnificent presence more than compensates for any weakness...
...Although John Simon found every aspect of the latest revival "a major outrage" ("Threepenny Dreadful," NL, June 7, 1976), I felt the cast—featuring Raul Julia as a truly sinister MacHeath, Ellen Greene as Jenny, and C. K. Alexander as Peachum—was quite good...
...This fact struck me as I listened to the recently-released original cast recording of Papp's Threepenny Opera (Columbia PS 34326), and nowhere more forcefully than with the show's most familiar song, the "Ballad of Mack the Knife," which opens the first act and closes the last...
...Other examples are plentiful...
...Four lines should be sufficient to demonstrate the nature of the Manheim-Willett version: See the shark has teeth like razors All can read his open face And MacHeath has got a knife, but Not in such an obvious place...
...All" and "open face" in the second line, and "obvious place" in the fourth simply do not belong...
...Admittedly, when the team began working together Weill, with only two one-act operas to his credit, was very much the junior partner...
...Ellen Greene, on the other hand, puts too much into her songs...
...Still, they emerged from Threepenny as peers, a development that clearly did not delight the dramatist—who surrounded himself with assistants and collaborators but had difficulty working with anyone on terms approaching equality...
...Although she has perhaps the best voice in the cast, she also has a tendency to descend into histrionics...
...the first English translator...
...it could be inserted intact into one of Franz Lehar's sentimental confections...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 3
