POLLY: Anyway it was very considerate of you. Here, have a sip of water. You must feel terrible. Why don’t you come and see me. I truly am your friend.
LUCY: Polly, men aren’t worth it…
There is then no change of scene, since the set is a split one, with the bedroom above and Macheath’s cell below. A change of lighting introduces our
Scene 9 [still 2 in script]
The bells ring, Smith leads in Macheath, and the dialogue is much as in our text as far as Smith’s exit shrugging his shoulders (p. 161). Macheath then ‘sings the “Epistle to his Friends” by François Villon’, in other words our ‘Call from the Grave’, whose text is given. After its second stanza Mrs Coaxer appears, and Macheath tries to borrow £600 from her. ‘What! At five in the morning?’ she asks. Mac: ‘Five? He bellows: Five twenty-four!’ Smith then puts his question about the meal. Macheath says there isn’t going to be a mounted messenger arriving like in a play to shout ‘Halt, in the King’s Name!’ then tells Smith: ‘Asparagus!’ Mrs Coaxer grumbles about her overheads, but eventually agrees that she might be able to manage £400.
Then the lights go up briefly in the bedroom again, showing Lucy prostrate, with Polly giving her cold compresses. Enter Mrs Peachum, with Filch in attendance carrying a cardboard box. ‘Go outside, Filch; this is not for your eyes,’ she says, and tells Polly to get changed. ‘You must do like all widows. Buy mourning and cheer up.’ The bedroom darkens and the light returns to the cell, where Smith makes his inquiry about the soap (shifted from p. 162). After saying ‘This place is a shambles’ he brings in the table as on page 163, followed by Brown’s entrance. The dialogue is then close to ours up to the end of Macheath’s verse (p. 164). More persons in mourning enter, including Peachum and five beggars on crutches, while Brown and Macheath prolong their haggling over the former’s percentages. Then Macheath looks at his watch and says ‘5.48. I’m lost’.
MAC: Jack, lend me £200. I’m finished. I must have those £200 – for Polly, you know. 5.50. Here am I, talking …
BROWN has come up to him: But Mackie, you only have to … you only have to ask, you can right away … 500 right away – I owe you so much … Do you imagine I’ve forgotten Peshawar?
MAC weakly: 200, but right away. Right away, right away.
BROWN: And Saipong and Azerbaijan and Sire, how we stood in the jungle together, shoulder to shoulder, and the Shiks mutinied, and you said …
The bells of Westminster interrupt him. Macheath gets up.
MAC: Time is up. Jack, you’re too emotional to rescue your friend. And you don’t even know it.
Smith then opens the door, and a group including eight whores enters the cell.
Walter, with a little money-bag, stands near Macheath. Mrs Coaxer too has the money.
SMITH: Got it?
Mac shakes his head.
Peachum then asks which is Macheath, as in our text (p. 165), which thereafter is approximately followed down to (inclusive) Jenny’s ‘We Drury Lane girls …’ (p. 166), but missing out the second half of Peachum’s long speech (from ‘Mr Macheath, you once …’ to ‘no place at all’) and Matt’s ensuing remarks (’See here’ etc.). Brown too makes no more reference to Azerbaijan but simply says farewell and leaves for the Coronation, gulping as he goes. Macheath’s farewell speech follows, starting ‘Farewell, Jackie. It was all right in the end’ and going on with his ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ as now, down to ‘So be it – I fall’ (p. 166). As in Gay, however, it is Jemmy Twitcher who has betrayed him, not Jenny.
The speech over, Macheath asks for the doors and windows all to be opened, and ‘Through the windows we see treetops crowded with spectators’. He then sings ‘Ballad to his Friends by François Villon’, whose text, however, is not given. After the ensuing farewells to Polly and Lucy, Macheath is led to the door, the whores sob, and the procession forms behind him. Then:
The actor playing Macheath hesitates, turns round suddenly and doubtfully addresses the wings, right.
ACTOR PLAYING MACHEATH: Well, what happens now? Do I go off or not? That’s something I’ll need to know on the night.
ACTOR PLAYING PEACHUM: I was telling the author only yesterday that it’s a lot of nonsense, it’s a heavy tragedy, not a decent musical.
ACTRESS PLAYING MRS PEACHUM: I can’t stand this hanging at the end.
WINGS RIGHT, THE AUTHOR’S VOICE: That’s how the play was written, and that’s how it stays.
MACHEATH: It stays that way, does it? Then act the lead yourself. Impertinence!
AUTHOR: It’s the plain truth: the man’s hanged, of course he has to be hanged. I’m not making any compromises. If that’s how it is in real life, then that’s how it is on the stage. Right?
MRS PEACHUM: Right.
PEACHUM: Doesn’t understand the first thing about the theatre. Plain truth, indeed.
MACHEATH: Plain truth. That’s a load of rubbish in the theatre. Plain truth is what happens when people run out of ideas. Do you suppose the audience here have paid eight marks to see plain truth? They paid their money not to see plain truth.
PEACHUM: Well then, the ending had better be changed. You can’t have the play end like that. I’m speaking in the name of the whole company when I say the play can’t be performed as it is.
AUTHOR: All right, then you gentlemen can clean up your own mess.
MACHEATH: So we shall.
PEACHUM: It’d be absurd if we couldn’t find a first-rate dramatic ending to please all tastes.
MRS PEACHUM: Right, then let’s go back ten [?] speeches.
– and they go back to Macheath’s ‘So be it, I fall’ once more. Then after the farewells to Polly and Lucy:
POLLY weeping on his neck: I didn’t get a proper wedding with bridesmaids, but I’ve got this.
LUCY: Even if I’m not your wife, Mac …
MAC: My dear Lucy, my dear Polly, however things may have been between us it’s all over now. Come on, Smith.
At this juncture Brown arrives in a panting hurry and his gala uniform.
BROWN breathlessly: Stop! A message from the Queen! Stop! Murmurs of ‘Rhubarb’ among the actors, with an occasional amazed ‘From the Queen?’
Then Brown calls for ‘Bells!’ into the wings, and makes his speech as now (p. 168), adding at the end ‘Where are the happy couples?’
MRS PEACHUM nudges the others: Happy couples!
Whores, bandits and beggars pair off with some hesitation, choosing their partners with care.
Peachum thumps Macheath on the back and says ‘It’s all right, old man!’ Mrs Peachum speaks the last speech as now given to Peachum, and the final chorale is given in full. After it Mrs Peachum has the concluding line: ‘And now. To Westminster!’
3. FROM THE STAGE SCRIPT TO THE PRESENT TEXT
The prompt book for the original production, which established the greater part of the final text, is essentially a copy of the stage script just discussed with new typescript passages interleaved, texts of songs, and many cuts. It is now in the East German Academy of Arts in Berlin. At the beginning there is a full text of the Mac the Knife ballad, only lacking its stage directions, while interleaved in the first Act are the ‘No, they can’t’ song, the Love Duet, the Finale and two verses of the Ballad of Sexual Obsession. The version of Peachum’s opening speech cited above is deleted and replaced by ours; the speech presenting the types of human misery also seems to have been added; and there is a fresh version of the ending of the scene, starting from Filch’s protest at washing his feet (p. 99), virtually as now. In the stable scene the start is retyped and the ‘Bill Lawgen and Mary Syer’ song pencilled in; the rest emerges more or less in its final form, aside from the presentation of the nuptial bed, which is still missing. Scene 3 seems to have been completely revised twice, the first time remaining close to the stage script, the second resulting almost in the text as now, apart from the section on p. 122 where Peachum apostrophises Macheath (which is also lacking where recapitulated in scene 9).
>
In the second Act an amendment to the end of scene 4 made the gang go out shouting ‘Three cheers for Polly!’ who then went on to sing ‘Nice while it lasted’ and continued with her monologue as in the stage script. This was then changed to give the complete text as now spoken over the music, from ‘It’s been such a short time’ on. The song, of course, is all that remains of the second of the Kipling ballads, whose refrain it is; it was omitted from the song texts as published by Universal-Edition in 1928. The ‘Ballad of Sexual Obsession’, which follows in our text, is inserted before the beginning of the scene, but was omitted from the production and from the piano score of 1928. Scene 5, the brothel, was revised as far as the Villon song (or ‘Tango Ballade’), but the setting remained the Cuttlefish Hotel; thereafter there were cuts. In scene 6 the only important additions were the text of the Jealousy Duet and Peachum’s Egyptian police chief speech (p. 144–5), replacing the speech cited above in answer to Brown’s ‘What do you mean?. The text of the second Act finale, too, was inserted just before the end of the scene.
In the third Act scene 7 was redesignated ‘Peachum’s Counting-House’ and entirely revised; the additions included the ‘Ballad of Insufficiency’ (described as ‘sung before the Sheriff of London’) and the remaining verse of the ‘Ballad of Sexual Obsession’. Brown’s long speech about friendship was cut, also virtually everything following his exit. Though Lucy’s Aria at the beginning of scene 8 was now cut out for good, the cut was not actually marked, perhaps because the whole of that scene was omitted from the production. Thereafter in the equivalent of our scene 9 Mrs Coaxer’s appearance was cut, likewise most of the passage where Macheath tries to borrow money from Brown, down to Smith’s opening of the door. What follows was retyped, again, however, omitting Peachum’s apostrophising of Macheath (p. 165). Peachum’s verse speech was interpolated and the Third Finale revised. The scene titles were separately listed, with instructions for their projection.
A later version of the Bloch stage script bore the title ‘The Threepenny Opera (The “Beggar’s Opera”). A play with music in a prologue and eight scenes from the English of John Gay’, then gave the credits as before. The first published edition was number 3 of Brecht’s Versuche series, which appeared in 1931 and described it as ‘an experiment in epic theatre’. This contained the text as we now have it, as also did the collected Malik edition of 1938. After the Second World War, however, Brecht made certain revisions, notably for a production at the Munich Kammerspiele by Hans Schweikart in April 1949. For this he devised the amended song texts now given as an appendix to the play, and made some small changes in the first Act, eliminating for instance the entry of the five beggars in scene 3. He discarded these improvements in the 1950s when it was decided to include the play in volume 3 of the new collected edition, for which he went back to the Versuche text. The new songs, for instance, were not used in Strehler’s Milan production of 1956, though this included a version of the final chorale which Brecht wrote for the occasion and whose German text has been lost. A rough rendering would be:
Since poverty won’t haunt this earth for ever
Don’t blame the poor man too much for his sins
But fight instead against perverted justice
And may it be the human race that wins.
THE RISE AND FALL OF
THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY
Text by Brecht
NOTES TO THE OPERA The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
OPERA –
Our existing opera is a culinary opera. It was a means of pleasure long before it turned into merchandise. It furthers pleasure even where it requires, or promotes, a certain degree of education, for the education in question is an education of taste. To every object it adopts a hedonistic approach. It ‘experiences’, and it ranks as an ‘experience’.
Why is Mahagonny an opera? Because its basic attitude is that of an opera: that is to say culinary. Does Mahagonny adopt a hedonistic approach? It does. Is Mahagonny an experience? Itis an experience. For – Mahagonny is a piece of fun.
The opera Mahagonny pays conscious tribute to the irrationality of the operatic form. The irrationality of opera lies in the fact that rational elements are employed, solid reality is aimed at, but at the same time it is all washed out by the music. A dying man is real. If at the same time he sings we are translated to the sphere of the irrational. (If the audience sang at the sight of him the case would be different.)
The more unclear and unreal the music can make the reality – though there is of course a third, highly complex and in itself quite real element which can have quite real effects but is utterly remote from the reality of which it treats – the more pleasurable the whole process becomes: the pleasure grows in proportion to the degree of unreality.
The concept of opera – far be it from us to profane it – leads in Mahagonny’s case to all the rest. The intention was that a certain unreality, irrationality and lack of seriousness should be introduced at the right moment, and wash itself out altogether.1 The irrationality which enters thus only fits the point where it enters.
Such an approach is purely hedonistic.
As for the content of this opera, its content is pleasure. Fun, in other words, not only as form but as object. At least, enjoyment was meant to be the object of the inquiry even if the inquiry was intended to be an object of enjoyment. Enjoyment appears here in its current historical role: as merchandise.2
It is undeniable that this content is bound at present to have a provocative effect. In the thirteenth section, for instance, where the glutton stuffs himself to death, it is provocative because hunger is the rule. Although we never even hinted that others were going hungry while he stuffed, the effect was provocative. Not everyone who is in a position to stuff himself dies of it, yet many are dying of hunger because he dies from stuffing himself. His pleasure is provocative because it implies so much.3 Opera as a means of pleasure is generally provocative in contexts like this today. Not of course so far as the handful of opera-goers are concerned. In its power to provoke we can see reality reintroduced. Mahagonny may not taste all that good; it may even (thanks to guilty conscience) make a point of not doing so; but it is culinary through and through.
Mahagonny is nothing more or less than an opera.
– WITH INNOVATIONS!
When the epic theatre’s methods begin to penetrate the opera the first result is a radical separation of the elements. The great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production – which always brings up the question ‘which is the pretext for what?’: is the music the pretext for the events on the stage, or are these the pretext for the music? etc. – can simply be bypassed by radically separating the elements. So long as the expression ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ [or ‘integrated work of art’] means that the integration is a macédoine, so long as the arts are supposed to be ‘fused’ together, the various elements will all be equally degraded and each will act as a mere ‘feed’ to the rest. The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must of course be fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, or is likely to induce improper intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up.
Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another.
(a) Music
For the music, the change of emphasis proved to be as follows:
Dramatic Opera
Epic Opera
The music dishes up
The music communicates
Music which heightens the text
Music which sets forth the text
Music which proclaims the text
Music which takes the text for granted
Music which illustrates
Which takes up a position
Music which depicts the psychological situation
Which gives the attitude
Music plays the chief part in our thesi
s.4
(b) Text
We had to make something instructive and direct of our piece of fun if it was not to be merely irrational. The form that suggested itself was that of the moral tableau. The tableau is depicted by the characters in the play. The text had to be neither moralising nor sentimental, but to put morality and sentimentality on view. The spoken word was no more important than the written word (of the titles). Reading seems to encourage the audience to adopt the most relaxed attitude towards the work.
(c) Image
Showing independent works of art as part of a theatrical performance is a new departure. Neher’s projections adopt an attitude towards the events on the stage; as when the real glutton sits in front of the glutton whom Neher has drawn. Each scene repeats in fluid form what is fixed in the image. These projections of Neher’s are quite as much an independent component of the opera as are Weill’s music and the text. They provide its visual aids.
Of course such innovations also demand a new attitude on the part of the audiences who frequent opera houses.
[…]
Perhaps Mahagonny is as culinary as ever – just as culinary as an opera ought to be – but one of its functions is to change society; it brings the culinary principle under discussion, it attacks the society that needs operas of such a sort; it still perches happily on the old limb, perhaps, but at least it has started (out of absent-mindedness or bad conscience) to saw it through. … And here you have the effect of the innovations and the song they sing.
Real innovations attack the roots.
[From ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny”’ in GW Schriften zum Theater, p. 1004, originally published over the names of Brecht and (Peter) Suhrkamp in Versuche 2, 1931. These notes, which are given complete in Brecht on Theatre under the title ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, have here been shorn of those passages which are not primarily relevant to the present work. This has meant the omission of all section 1, the long table contrasting epic and dramatic theatre in section 3, all but the last two paragraphs of section 4 and the whole of section 5. The full essay is perhaps the most important pre-1933 statement of Brecht’s ideas about the theatre in general.]
Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 2 Page 36