Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 2

by Bertolt Brecht

  Just how much Brecht had had to do with the script at this exploratory stage is uncertain, but he now took the lead and proposed that Weill should be brought in to write modern settings for the songs. Aufricht, by his own account, thereupon went privately to hear two of Weill’s Kaiser operas, was appalled by their atonality and told his musical director Theo Mackeben to get hold of the traditional Pepusch arrangements in case Weill came up with something impossibly rebarbative. In mid-May the whole team were packed off to Le Lavandou in the south of France to complete the work: the Brechts, the Weills, Hauptmann, Engel. Here, and subsequently on the Ammersee in Bavaria, Brecht seems to have written some brand-new scenes (the stable wedding for instance, which bears no relation to Gay’s original), and started adding his own songs, four of them piratically derived from a German version of Villon. On 1 August rehearsals started, with a duplicated script which, as our notes show, still contained a good deal of the original work, as well as songs by Gay himself and Rudyard Kipling which later disappeared. A succession of accidents, catastrophes and stopgaps then occurred. Carola Neher, who was to play Polly, arrived a fortnight late from her husband Klabund’s deathbed, and abandoned her part; Roma Bahn was recruited and learned it in four days. Feuchtwanger suggested the new title; Karl Kraus added the second verse to the Jealousy Duet. Helene Weigel, cast as Mrs Coaxer the brothel Madame, developed appendicitis and the part was cut. The cabaret singer Rosa Valetti objected to the ‘Song of Sexual Obsession’ which she had to sing as Mrs Peachum, so this too went; Käte Kühl as Lucy could not manage the florid solo which Weill had written for another actress in scene 8, so this was eliminated and later the scene itself was cut; Weill’s young wife Lotte Lenya was accidentally left off the printed programme; the play was found to be three-quarters of an hour too long, leading to massive cuts in Peachum’s part and the dropping of the ‘Solomon Song’; the finale was only written during the rehearsals; and late on the ‘Ballad of Mac the Knife’ was added as an inspired afterthought.

  All accounts agree that the production’s prospects seemed extremely bad, with only Weill’s music and Caspar Neher’s sets remaining unaffected by the mounting chaos. Even the costumes were simply those available, so Brecht was to say later (p. 323), while the Victorian setting was decided less by the needs of the story than by the shortage of time. The dress rehearsal must have been disastrous, the reactions of the first-night audience a confirmation of this, lasting right into the second scene, even after the singing of ‘Pirate Jenny’ in the stable. But with the ‘Cannon Song’ the applause suddenly burst loose. Quite unexpectedly, inspiredly, improvisedly, management and collaborators found themselves with the greatest German hit of the 1920s on their hands.

  * * *

  It struck Berlin during an interregnum, as it were: at a moment when Piscator had temporarily disappeared as an active force in the left-wing theatre and the various collective groups which succeeded him had not yet got off the ground. For Brecht and Weill there was now the composition of Mahagonny to be resumed – as well as a small Berlin Requiem which Weill had agreed to write for Radio Frankfurt on texts by Brecht, and which they sketched out in November and December 1928. Both men probably also had some involvement in the production of Feuchtwanger’s second ‘Anglo-Saxon Play’ Die Petroleuminseln at the Staatstheater in the former month, for which Weill wrote the music and Neher once more provided sets. But the immediate effect of The Threepenny Opera’s success was to establish the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm as the leading left-wing theatre of the moment in Berlin. Retrospectively Brecht came to speak of it as ‘his’ theatre, and indeed to a great extent he does seem to have dominated its entire opening season. For with The Threepenny Opera temporarily transferred to another theatre (and Carola Neher at some point assuming her original role as Polly), he took over the direction of Marieluise Fleisser’s anti-militarist Bavarian farce Die Pioniere von Ingolstadt, a sequel to the play which he had recommended to the Junge Bühne three years earlier. This opened on 31 March 1929 and featured an unknown actor whom Brecht had advised Aufricht to engage on a three-year contract – Peter Lorre – along with Kurt Gerron and Lenya, the Brown and Jenny from his own play. The farce itself was too outspoken for the police and the military, and had to be bowdlerised, but it none the less ran for two months and broke even; Aufricht later judged it the best of all the productions which he sponsored. Then The Threepenny Opera returned for the rest of the season, and the problem of the next play had to be faced.

  Rather than concern himself with the Mahagonny project, Aufricht wanted another Brecht-Weill work on the same lines as before. It was scheduled once more for 31 August; Engel and Neher were again booked, and a number of the same actors already under contract. But the moment had passed, the first symptoms of the imminent economic crisis were beginning to make themselves felt, the veneer of political tolerance was wearing thin. Brecht had a seismographic feeling for such changes, and he was already heading towards a much more didactic kind of theatre, in which he briefly also managed to involve Weill. As a result Happy End, the Chicago comedy which was supposed to follow up The Threepenny Opera’s success, never really stirred his interest or drew the same inspired ideas from him as had Gay’s inherently much superior original. Superficially the prospects might have seemed the same as before, with Elisabeth Hauptmann providing the basic dialogue and Brecht writing a number of characteristic songs, some of them eliciting first-rate settings from Weill. But whereas in 1928 Brecht was willing to make many radical changes in the former, so that his stamp on the final play is unmistakable, only a year later this was no longer the case. At some point during the spring of 1929 he began writing his first Lehrstücke or didactic plays under the twofold influence of the Japanese Noh drama and Hindemith’s concept of Gemeinschaftsmusik – the educational implications of making music in common. Two works for that summer’s Baden-Baden festival resulted. Almost at the same time his hitherto uncommitted left-wing opinions crystallised as a consequence, it seems, of the Berlin May Day demonstration at which the police killed thirty-one people. From then on he was aligned with the German Communist Party, and in the autumn both Happy End and Piscator’s theatre alike failed.

  * * *

  Meantime, the full Mahagonny libretto had been completed by the middle of 1928, and the understanding between the two men, though never intimate, continued to be good. Brecht still assumed, as he had written in the Baden-Baden programme, that Weill’s work was

  moving in the same direction as those artists in every field who foresee the collapse of ‘society’ art … It is already addressing an audience which goes to the theatre naïvely and for fun.

  – while Weill for his part told the music magazine Melos that

  there is no ground whatsoever for the frequently voiced fear that any collaboration with literary figures of real stature must make the relationship between music and text into one of dependence, subordination or at best parity. The more powerful the writer, the greater his ability to adjust himself to the music …

  The libretto once finished, Weill composed the music during the run of The Threepenny Opera, sending off both script and score to his Viennese publishers Universal-Edition in April 1929. The latter had already warned him that the new work looked like being both controversial and financially hazardous to stage, and now they became even more alarmed at the sight of Brecht’s text for the brothel scene (the original text, that is, as given on pp. 369-70). On being told by their director Alfred Hertzka that any established opera house would certainly reject it, Weill agreed after some argument to drop the most outrageous passage; marked the whole ‘Mandalay’ section, with its depiction of the Men queueing up, as an optional cut; and got Brecht to provide him with the poem of the cranes and the cloud, which he set in 3/8 time as a love duet. Shortly afterwards the two collaborators, who may well by now have come to feel that Amerikanismus had become rather hackneyed, agreed as far as possible to eliminate the exaggeratedly ‘American’ names and allusions in the te
xt, and thereby to make it clear that ‘the amusement town [or fun city] of Mahagonny … is international in the widest sense’ and the satire applicable a good deal nearer home. The Weill-Neher ‘prompt-book’ accordingly carries a warning (p. 353) against creating any kind of ‘Wild West and cowboy romanticism’, while there is a prefatory note in the full score suggesting the use of German names for the original lumberjack quartet of Jim, Fatty, Billy and Jack or Jake. (This was not, however, in time to affect the piano score, whose first edition retains the American names.)

  * * *

  In the cultural life of the Weimar Republic 1929 was a crucial year: and much of the subsequent history of this opera – and perhaps even of the whole Brecht–Weill collaboration – would have been different if the work had been completed twelve months sooner. For the whole climate in which it had been originally conceived now changed, further stages in the process being the death of Stresemann (whose foreign policy ever since 1923 had made quite amazingly few concessions to German nationalism) and the Wall Street crash of October which initiated the world economic crisis. Nationalsim now once more asserted itself, to the great advantage of the Nazis; the Communist left went over to a policy of aggressive confrontation, largely directed against the Socialists; while a period of economic retrenchment began which affected every aspect of life. So far as Mahagonny was concerned the effects were threefold. First of all the opera houses, compelled to economise, started to cut back on modern works, while Klemperer’s Kroll-Oper on the Platz der Republik was actually closed down. Secondly there was a considerable wave of feeling against ‘decadent’ modern art and music, which the crazier Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg interpreted racially as part-negroid (the jazz influence) and partly a destructive operation by the Jews. Finally Brecht’s own attitude to politics and the theatre changed radically as he aligned himself with the Communist Party and began developing the new didactic form.

  With Brecht apparently losing interest once the opera had gone off to the publishers, it was left to Weill to arrange its production. This might possibly have been undertaken by Piscator, who in March had listed it among the forty works under consideration by his company; but that company died in October. Aufricht too, the impresario of The Threepenny Opera, was so angry with Brecht over Happy End that it was two years before he would consider another work by him. Thus the choice would probably have been limited to the opera houses even if Universal-Edition had not in any case seen them as the natural and preferred outlet. Here the obvious candidate would of course have been the Kroll-Oper with its truly remarkable record of modern productions, for Klemperer knew both collaborators and had a high regard for Weill’s music. But such negotiations as took place with the Kroll must have been prior to the opera’s completion. For in July the Prussian government’s public accounts committee proposed to abolish the Kroll-Oper altogether, and from that point the latter was doomed.

  In the end the choice fell on the Leipzig Opera, where two previous Weill premières had been staged (likewise Křenek’s Jonny spielt auf), with a second production to follow at Kassel a few days later. These took place in March 1930, by which time the cultural reaction was well under way, with a Nazi, Wilhelm Frick, actually heading the responsible ministry in nearby Thuringia. Though the Kassel production went calmly enough (after some modifications in the last scene to make its slogans seem less ‘communistic’) the première proper was interrupted by demonstrators, and from then on the opera became a prime target for such people. Accordingly (to quote David Drew), ‘the few music-directors who wished to stage it were anxious to do so only with “closed performances” ’.

  Fortunately Berlin was different, and right up to the Nazi takeover in 1933 left-wing plays and productions continued to be staged; thus Brecht’s own extremely radical re-staging of Man equals Man could be seen at the Prussian State Theatre in February 1931 (though it only ran for a few performances). It was Aufricht, then, who came to the rescue of Mahagonny by deciding to put it on at the specially rented Theater am Kurfürstendamm at the end of that year, and to do so in a predominantly theatrical rather than an orthodoxly operatic production. Actors were engaged rather than singers, with the fortunate result that Weill had to write a new setting for Jenny’s Arietta in scene 5 to allow for Lenya’s vocal limitations (it is now the accepted one). Brecht and Neher were nominated as directors, while the conductor was Schönberg’s brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky, previously Klemperer’s number two at the Kroll. Many cuts were made, including the crane duet, the Benares Song, ‘God in Mahagonny’ and the chorus ‘Lasst euch nicht verführen’; the whole scale was reduced and shortened; the orchestra was cut down. To Theodor Adorno, though he had come to think an opera house the proper place for this work, it was the tightest, clearest and musically strongest performance yet, while Lenya too has written of it as something quite unforgettable. This in spite of the fact that Brecht and Weill were on bad terms throughout: so much so indeed that Aufricht underwrote the almost simultaneous première of the former’s didactic play The Mother in order to distract him from the rehearsals, leaving the more amicable Neher in charge.

  * * *

  Though there was no irreparable quarrel between the two men, there was from mid-1930 onwards a growing divergence which discouraged any further work of the originality of Mahagonny, as well as some specific disagreement about Mahagonny itself. In his edition of the writings of Kurt Weill David Drew has attributed this to what he terms ‘the time-honoured rivalry of words and music’, suggesting in particular that Brecht was riled by the one-sidedly ‘musical’ slant of the programme note to the Leipzig première. Whether or not this was the cause, he left the compilation of the ‘prompt-book’ entirely to his two partners, even though Universal-Edition had announced that he too would take part in it; and he also acted quite unilaterally where the publication of the text was concerned. This seems to have taken place some time in the winter of 1930-31 (the relevant number of his Versuche being actually dated 1930), and it showed a number of variations from the version composed by Weill. Among these was the changing of the German name Johann previously proposed for the hero Jimmy, so as to turn the four lumberjacks into Paul, Heinrich, Jakob and Josef.

  More significantly perhaps, the ‘Notes on the Opera’ which Brecht wrote for this publication in August 1930 not only differ from Weill’s views but indicate a considerable disappointment with the way in which Mahagonny had turned out. Meant as an epic opera of a new kind, it had finished up as a ‘culinary’ one, so Brecht felt: that is to say it resembled the conventional opera whose ingredients, instead of being kept separate, are cooked together for the benefit of an audience of musical gastronomes. In fact this was not a criticism of the work itself so much as of its presentation, which had been left in the first place to the established opera houses. For what Brecht was concerned with, and had doubtless imagined Weill to be concerned with too, was not just the writing of ‘an opera’ but the transformation of the audience and of the whole theatrical and operatic ‘apparatus’: that Establishment, in fact, which he now realised to be socially and economically based. The trouble, then, was not so much a basic incompatibility between the two men – for after all they spent their summer holidays together at Le Lavandou in 1931 and supported each other in the Threepenny Opera film lawsuit that autumn – as a sense on Brecht’s part that Weill, once so full of promise for him, had let him down.

  And there was indeed some inconsistency between the collaborators’ original concept of the staging and the actual results. Thus the provisions of the ‘prompt-book’ (whose foreword by Weill appeared two months before the Leipzig première) suggest that the set must be made ‘so simple as to be equally well transferable from the theatre to any old platform’, with neither emotion, stylisation nor any kind of irony or caricature being added to the bald, almost concert-like delivery of the material with its carefully built-in gests. This extreme economy of approach, reflecting possibly the lessons of the first Lehrstücke as well as the experience o
f the Songspiel of 1927, was intended to make very clear the montage structure of the work. At the same time it rested on a systematic concept of ‘gestic’ writing, acting and composition which was actually formulated in the first place by Weill. Indeed his essay ‘On the Gestic Nature of Music’, which first appeared in Die Musik as early as March 1929 – some two years before Brecht started writing of ‘the gest’ – plainly reflects the work on Mahagonny. This principle of identifying the successive attitudes expressed in a work or a scene or a song, and then communicating them individually in all the separate media involved, underlay the whole Weill-Brecht-Neher collaboration. Each point had to be distinctly made from their three different directions in such a way that the audience could follow the cumulative argument without abandoning what Weill termed ‘the calm posture of a thinking being’.

  Nothing in the available contemporary accounts suggests that these demands ever came near to being fulfilled, not even in the Aufricht production of 1931. And so Brecht may well have blamed Weill for his willingness to listen to the powerful chiefs of Universal-Edition who had done so much to establish the modern repertoire at the Kroll-Oper and elsewhere, instead of seeking that new audience which goes to the theatre ‘naively’. He could equally well, for that matter, have blamed himself, for once the libretto was off his hands he seems to have left Weill, and in a lesser degree Neher, to settle the question of where and how it was to be staged. Whatever the reason, the salient fact is that from then on he apparently lost all interest in what, after all, remains a powerful, funny, unusually concise and often quite beautiful text. Simply to read, it is one of his finest works. Yet after the 1931 production he virtually ignored it, never (for instance) once mentioning it in the Journals that set out his achievements, reflections and preoccupations between 1938 and the end of his life. Certainly he did not view it with anything like the affection which he felt for The Threepenny Opera, though the latter was a far less original piece of writing.