Brecht Collected Plays: 6: Good Person of Szechwan; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui; Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  (b) About the music

  The basic character of the music was dictated by setting the ‘great historical gangster play’ of the prologue within the colourful shooting-gallery framework of a fairground. At the same time it was the music’s job to stress the atmosphere of horror. It had to be garish and nasty.

  This suggested the use of pieces of music abused by the Nazis, e.g., the theme from Liszt’s Les Preludes which they degraded into a signature tune for special announcements on the radio. The idea of playing Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ at set intervals throughout the long-drawn-out warehouse fire trial was suggested by Brecht. Tempi and rhythms of these themes were of course radically altered to accord with the basic character established for the production.

  The orchestra consisted of just a few instruments: trumpet, trombone, tuba, horn, piccolo, clarinet, electric guitar, saxophone, piano, harmonium and percussion.

  The sharpness and the fairground effect were furthered by technical effects in the course of recording on tape.

  All music was on tape. For the first time the accompaniments to the three songs – Ted Ragg’s song poking fun at the delay, Greenwool’s soppy ‘Home Song’ and Givola’s ‘Whitewash Song’ – were all reproduced from tape.

  [Ibid., pp. 147–8, ‘Probennotat,’ and p. 150, ‘Die Musik’. In this production Ekkehard Schall played Ui: an outstanding performance. The music was by the Ensemble’s musical director Hans-Dieter Hosalla.]

  SONGS FOR THE BERLINER ENSEMBLE PRODUCTION

  1. Ragg’s Song

  There was a little man

  He had a little plan.

  They told him to go easy

  Just wait, my little man.

  But waiting made him queasy.

  Heil Ui!

  For he wants what he wants right now!

  [Derived from the ‘Was-man-hat-hat-man Song’ in scene 7 of The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads, GW Stücke, p. 993.]

  2. Greenwool’s Song

  A cabin stands beside the meadow

  It used to be my happy home.

  Now strangers’ eyes are looking out the window

  Oh, why did I begin to roam?

  Home, take me home

  Back to my happy home!

  Home, take me home

  Back to my happy home!

  [Origin uncertain. Not by Brecht.]

  3. Whitewash Song

  When the rot sets in, when walls and roof start dripping Something must be done at any price.

  Now the mortar’s crumbling, bricks are slipping.

  If somebody comes it won’t be nice.

  But whitewash will do it, fresh whitewash will do it.

  When the place caves in ’twill be too late.

  Give us whitewash, boys, then we’ll go to it

  With our brushes till we fix things up first-rate.

  Now, here’s a fresh disaster This damp patch on the plaster!

  That isn’t nice. (No, not nice.)

  Look, the chimney’s falling!

  Really, it’s appalling!

  Something must be done at any price.

  Oh, if only things would look up!

  This abominable fuck-up Isn’t nice. (No, not nice.)

  But whitewash will do it, lots of white will do it.

  When the place caves in ’twill be too late.

  Give us whitewash, boys, then we’ll go to it

  And we’ll whitewash till we’ve got it all first-rate.

  Here’s the whitewash, let’s not get upset!

  Day and night we’ve got the stuff on hand.

  This old shack will be a palace yet.

  You’ll get your New Order, just as planned.

  [GW Stücke, tr. by Ralph Manheim, p. 936. This song originated as an appendage to Brecht’s treatment (‘The Bruise’) for The Threepenny Opera film, and was then taken into The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads, where it is sung to a setting by Hanns Eisler as an interlude between scenes 2 and 3.]

  Editorial Note

  Though Ui was among the most quickly written of all Brecht’s plays we know little about its antecedents in his fertile mind. He himself spoke of it (in a journal entry for March 10, 1941) as inspired by thoughts of the American theatre and harking back to his New York visit of 1935, when he no doubt was made particularly aware of the Chicago gangs of the prohibition era and the films made about them by such firms as Warner Brothers and First National. The highly un-American name Ui however, and its application to a Hitler-type leader, evidently originated slightly earlier when he was planning his never-finished prose work about the Tui’s or Tellect-Ual-Ins, upside-down intellectuals whose ineffectiveness allowed such leaders to come to power. Walter Benjamin, making one of his visits to Brecht in Denmark in September 1934, noted that in addition to this more ambitious work Brecht was then writing a satire called Ui ‘On Hitler in the style of a Renaissance historian’. This materialized in an unfinished and untitled short story set in classical Italy and describing an upstart city boss of Padua named Giacomo Ui, which can be found among Brecht’s collected stories. Its style is deadpan, somewhat like that of the Julius Caesar novel which followed; its content is virtually the story of Hitler transposed into Roman terms. It resembles the eventual play in its depiction of the boss’s rages, his aggressive ambitions, his currying of popular favour and even the way in which

  he was taught how to speak and walk by an old actor who had once in his heyday been permitted to play the mighty Colleone, and accordingly also taught him the latter’s famous way of standing with his arms folded across his chest.

  But the eight short sections of this story hardly get beyond establishing the character, and nothing is said about Hindenburg, the Reichstag Fire trial and the murder of Ernst Röhm, let alone the territorial annexations which were still to come. There are, however, several allusions to that anti-Semitism which the play curiously ignores (as do the notes on it) but which formed a major theme of another play in mock-Elizabethan style dating from 1934–35, The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads (which had itself developed out of an adaptation of Measure for Measure begun before 1933).

  For years the three threads of gang warfare, the Ui-Hitler satire, and the elevated Elizabethan style, seem to have lain loosely coiled at the back of Brecht’s mind before finally coming together in the spring of 1941. A further element may have been the example of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, even though Brecht could hardly yet have seen the actual film. On March 10 he roughed out a plan for ten or eleven scenes; by March 29 the first typescript was complete; after which Margarete Steffin drove him to tighten up the blank verse, another fortnight’s work (all this according to his journal). The complete play, virtually in its present form, was ready about a month before the Brechts set out on their trip to the United States, whose imminence had of course helped to prompt it. There is thus much less than usual in the way of alternative scripts and versions, most of the revisions, such as they were, having been made directly on the first typescript. Many of them are primarily concerned with the iambic metre of the verse.

  However, it appears that the Cauliflower Trust originally contained another member called Reely, who appeared in lieu of Butcher in scene 2. Dogsborough’s first appearance was to have been in his city office, not in the homely surroundings of his restaurant, an amendment on the first script. In scene 3 Ui’s first speech was shorter, the present version only having been established since the play’s appearance in Stücke IX in 1957, when not all Brecht’s amendments were available. The first three lines were as now, down to ‘Is fame in such a place,’ after which the speech concluded

  Two months without a brawl

  And twenty shoot-outs are forgotten, even

  In our own ranks!

  There were also differences in the wording of Roma’s speech which follows, though its sense was similar. In Scene 6, with the old actor, Ui’s and Givola’s prose speeches were broken into irregular verse lines, and it was an afterthought to have Ui take over the Mark Ant
ony speech from the actor and deliver most of it solo. The name ‘Dockdaisy’ too was an afterthought; to start with she was simply ‘Mrs. Bowl’ or ‘the Person’. Clark’s speech in scene 7, showing the trust’s solidarity with Ui and his gang, was added at some point after the first script, together with Ui’s ensuing speech down to where Clark is heard to applaud it (pp. 162–3). Then in the trial scene the playing of Chopin’s Funeral March on the organ was an afterthought on the first script, .as were all references to Giri’s habit of wearing his murdered victims’ hats (which echoes an incident at the beginning of Happy End, written in 1929). The first script ends with the woman’s speech later shifted to scene 9 (i.e., immediately prior to the interval in the Berliner Ensemble production), this shift having been made after the play’s publication in 1957. The epilogue was not in the first script.

  When the play was finally staged by Palitzsch and Wekwerth in 1959 further changes were made, which were not included in the published text but were meant to take account of the changed public understanding of the historical background. According to Wekwerth, Brecht himself was long chary of staging this play in view of ‘the German audience’s lack of historical maturity’; he did not allow his younger collaborators even to read it until the summer before he died. They had to treat it as confidential, nor was it to be produced until they had first staged Fear and Misery of the Third Reich as an introduction to the tragic circumstances which it satirized. Thus warned, and well aware of the type of criticism voiced by Lothar Kusche (p. 357), the two directors now set to work to implicate Dogsborough and the industrialists more closely with Ui and to discourage German audiences from sympathizing with Roma. Ui accordingly was not referred to in scene ia, and only entered the play once Sheet had refused to sell his shipping business in 1b. Dogsborough’s packet of shares was given to him, not sold, while in scene 7 instead of seeming merely passive he was seen actually to give Ui his support. The episode with Goodwill and Gaffles was cut (pp. 146–8), to be replaced by a new section stressing the involvement of heavy industry. Roma was made to murder the journalist Ted Ragg, and scene 14 with his Banquoesque ghost was omitted; he still, however, emerged as a good deal less unpleasant than Giri and Givola. The name of Chicago was replaced by Capua or Capoha throughout. Finally an extra song was introduced, the ‘Whitewash Song’ from The Round Heads and the Pointed Heads, which Givola sang after the interval (pp. 364–5).

  The main interest of the scripts, however, lies rather in the evidence which they give of Brecht’s intentions with regard to the play. The title varies: once or twice it is simply The Rise of Arturo Ui, while the copy formerly belonging to Elisabeth Hauptmann is headed ‘Arturo Ui. Dramatic Poem. By K. Keuner’ – Mr. Keuner (or Mr. Naobody) being the alter ego who features in Brecht’s prose aphorisms, as well as figuring as a character in two of the unfinished plays. Elsewhere Brecht referred to Ui as ‘the gangster play,’ a title which he also tried rendering into English as The Gangster Play We Know or again That Well-known Racket. There is a table too, giving what he calls ‘The Parallels’, to wit:

  Dogsborough = Hindenburg

  Arturo Ui = Hitler

  Giri = Göring

  Roma = Röhm

  Givola = Goebbels

  Dullfeet = Dollfuss

  Cauliflower Trust = Junkers (or East Prussian landowners)

  Vegetable dealers = Petty bourgeoisie

  Gangsters = Fascists

  Dock aid scandal = ‘Osthilfe’ [East Aid] scandal

  Warehouse-fire trial = Reichstag Fire trial

  Chicago = Germany

  Cicero = Austria

  – Röhm having been Captain Ernst Rohm, chief of staff of the brownshirted S.A. or main Nazi private army, who was murdered in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934, while the Osthilfe scandal related to a controversial pre-1933 subsidy to the Junkers. There are also slightly varying versions of the historical analogies provided by the projected ‘inscriptions’. Thus in the first script the inscription following scene 4 read:

  In January 1933 President Hindenburg more than once refused to appoint Party Leader Hitler as Reich Chancellor. He was, however, nervous of the proposed investigation of the so-called ‘Osthilfe’ scandal. Moreover he had accepted state money for the Neudeck estate presented to him, but failed to use it for its intended objective.

  After scene 8, the trial, there was a now-omitted inscription which read:

  When Reich Chancellor Schleicher threatened to expose the tax evasions and misappropriation of ‘Osthilfe’ money, Hindenburg on 30 January 1933 gave power to Hitler. The investigation was suppressed.

  That after scene 13 read as follows:

  The occupation of Austria was preceded by the murder of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor. Tirelessly the Nazis continued their efforts to win Austrian sympathies.

  – and the final inscription simply:

  Perhaps there is something else that could stop him?

  Further light on the play’s topical meaning is given by the photographs stuck into the pages of Brecht’s first script. Scene 2, with Dogsborough, is followed by a portrait of Hindenburg, scene 3 by a drawing of gangsters captioned ‘Murder Inc.’ In scene 6, with the old actor, there are four pictures of Hitler in his characteristic attitude with the hands clasped before the private parts, followed by two more with the arms folded and one captioned ‘Hitler the Orator’. A further picture of Hitler speaking precedes the trial scene (8). In scene 10, following Givola’s forgery of Dogsborough’s will, there is a photograph of Hitler and Goebbels going over a document together, then at the end one of Hitler and Goring shaking hands. Scene 11 (the garage) is preceded by a picture showing Göring and Goebbels in uniform, while in scene 13 (Dullfeet’s funeral) there is a photograph of a gangster funeral in Chicago.

  MR PUNTILA AND HIS MAN MATTI

  A Finnish Bacchus

  by Hella Wuolijoki

  ‘Enough of that,’ said Madam Maria, laying her well-manicured white fingers on the table in a conclusive gesture. ‘I insist that Farmer Punttila gets invited to my birthday. I am not having my daughter-in-law’s father left out of the party.’

  Toini sank her elegant teeth into her cake and passed the butter to her husband’s father. He was a pillar of society: Consul, factory owner, engineer, and much more. ‘All right. Then on your head be it, Mother. Nothing ever gets celebrated here without brandy, and Father will make such a fool of himself in front of your English guests that we shall never hear the last of it.’

  The Consul said something inaudible behind his newspaper.

  ‘Mother’s just not thinking of the ghastly consequences there are bound to be,’ said Maria’s son, chief aide to his father and like him an engineer. ‘But after all it’s her birthday, and if Mother has set her mind on it there’s nothing to be done.’

  Maria smiled as she watched her sister-in-law distractedly shovelling sugar into her coffee. ‘Leave a little space for the coffee, Hanna dear.’ Miss Hanna pushed her cup aside. ‘It’s all very well for you to laugh, Maria, but you’ve never had to look after Farmer Punttila like I have.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said the master of the house, putting down his paper. ‘That’s not the worst of our worries. Fina, can you go and get me some hot coffee?’

  Fina, the old parlourmaid in her neat white apron, gave a curtsey and disappeared.

  ‘We must have something better for our foreign guests, either a proper butler or at least smarter servants than that rustic parlourmaid of yours.’

  Madam Maria’s coffee cup halted in mid-air, and this time her smile had more edge to it. ‘You’re quite wrong, Markus, if you think I’m going to turn our house upside down for your foreign guests, let alone make an Englishman’s country seat out of it. Old Fina and my peasant girls will do their jobs properly and your guests can lump it. That’s second nature to any well-brought-up visitor.’

  ‘You win,’ said the Consul, as he left the table. The engineer pushed his chair back. ‘Mother, y
ou really are impossible.’ His wife folded up her napkin and put it in its sachet. ‘Mother knows her own mind.’ Maria and Aunt Hanna were left on their own.

  ‘I like old Punttila,’ said Madam Maria, ‘better than I like his daughter. You shouldn’t get so worked up, Hanna.’

  Aunt Hanna peered venomously into her coffee cup. ‘You ought to realise that Markus’s position creates certain social obligations. And it is up to us to see that these foreign visitors get the right impression of our country.’

  Maria gave a clear, disrespectful laugh, and Aunt Hanna went off in dudgeon.

  * * *

  The evening before the birthday the main building of the home farm was lit up for the occasion, even though the lady of the house had gone to sleep following the usual eve-of-birthday serenade to which she had been treated. In the servants’ hall sat the hosts’ and guests’ chauffeurs playing cards, while old Fina took them coffee. In the smoking-room the gentlemen sat over their brandies. They were noisy and at ease. The women were already asleep. Only Aunt Hanna went rustling round the house in her black satin, restless and ready to pounce. From the smoking room Punttila’s voice could be heard topping the rest. While waiting for the serenade they had absorbed a few shots of brandy with their coffee, after which came further drinking.

  The company was divided strictly according to language. On the sofa sat the English and Finnish bankers with their host, talking in English about the timber business and cursing the Russians for their dumping. By the porcelain stove, however, the prohibition laws were being treated with scant respect, the dominant figure being farmer Punttila, red as a brick, his hair ruffled, and around him the judge, the architect and the engineer. Every now and again Punttila went over to the foreign-language group and clinked glasses.