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141

Historians of Weimar debate whether German democracy was preordained to

fail, or whether Hitler’s rise to power was a freak event. Music historians face a

similar problem. Was Weimar a kind of fever dream, its arts programs destined

to fall victim to the vagaries of commercial culture? Or might Weimar have given

artists a permanent safe haven? As so often, the pessimists seem to have the

force of history behind them. Schoenberg, who lived in Berlin from 1926 on,

warned his colleagues against a futile chase after popularity, and in this period

he devised a new way of working—a “method of composing with twelve

notes”—that would protect the serious composer from vulgarity.

Back in Vienna, Alban Berg went his own way; his second opera, the opulent

and terrifying Lulu, reconciled his teacher’s latest ideas with Weimar rhythms

and Romantic chords. Wozzeck conquered Berlin in 1925; in an alternate

universe, Lulu

might have had the same reception. But Berg did not live to finish

it, and by the time of his death, in 1935, Klaus Mann’s “writing on the wall” had

become reality.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated his throne on November 9, 1918, Germany

fell into a political disorder from which it never fully recovered. Leaders of the

Social Democratic Party proclaimed a republic from the windows of the

Reichstag. Karl Liebknecht hailed a Communist revolution while standing on the

steps of the Royal Palace.

Ministry of Enlightenment

Kurt Weill, an eighteen-year-old student at the Hochschule für Musik, was in the

streets that day; he heard Liebknecht’s speech and watched the skirmishes

around the Reichstag. “I’ve had indescribable experiences the last few days,”

he wrote to his parents. What he saw on the ground led him to make a

perceptive comment, which historians of the Weimar period have confirmed: the

moderate elements lacked power and influence, so the extremes of the left and

the right were setting the tone and the agenda. This was an ominous note on

which to inaugurate a republic.

Still, the school stayed open and musical life went on. Cafés were full and the

trams were running. Even as the revolution began, the Ufa film studio held a

champagne reception for Ernst Lubitsch’s film of Carmen. The previous night

Richard Strauss had conducted Salome

The brief life of the Weimar Republic is usually divided into three periods:

chaos, stabilization, and the devolution toward Nazism. Chaos lasted a full four

years, bringing with it various coups and counterrevolutions and an astonishing

total of four hundred political murders. (One victim was Gustav Landauer,

commissar for people’s enlightenment of the short-lived Soviet Republic of

Bavaria, whose wife, Hedwig Lachmann, translated

at the Court Opera, which promptly

shook off its royal title and became the State Opera.

Salome into German.) Most

damaging to the country’s psychological security was the hyperinflation of 1923,

at the height of which the mark was valued at several trillion to the dollar.

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“Nothing was so mad or so atrocious that it could have caused any awe in

people anymore,” Thomas Mann wrote of the inflation. “[Germans] learned to

look on life as a wild adventure, the outcome of which depended not on their

own effort but on sinister, mysterious forces.”

The “stabilization” period, which lasted from 1924 to 1929, unfolded under the

guiding hand of the master politician Gustav Stresemann, who, first as

chancellor and then as foreign minister, restored economic order and led

Germany back into the world community. Stresemann’s death in 1929 removed

from the scene the most powerful personality who might have stopped Hitler.

Directing the “stabilization” of music was a man named Leo Kestenberg, who in

December 1918 assumed the post of musical adviser to the Prussian Ministry of

Science, Culture, and Education. He had studied piano with Ferruccio Busoni

before becoming active in the Social Democratic Party. In the spirit of that well-

meaning organization, he aimed to clear away the cobwebs of elitist culture and

promote the creation of “art for the people.” One of his flagship institutions was

the Kroll Opera, which presented antitraditional stagings to a working-class

audience. Half the seats were made available to the Volksbühne, the socialist

theater, at prices appropriate to the salary of a manual worker. The conductor

was Otto Klemperer, a Mahler protégé, who at this early stage of his long career

specialized in subversive productions of classic repertory. Kestenberg also gave

Berlin’s new-music scene a shot of adrenaline by appointing two leading

progressives to teach at the conservatories: Busoni at the Prussian Academy of

Arts and Franz Schreker at the Hochschule für Musik. When Busoni died,

Schoenberg moved from Vienna to take his place. Schreker and Schoenberg

brought with them bristling cohorts of students, who quickly took over the

limelight.

Inconvenient realities soon intruded on Kestenberg’s arts utopia. As the critic

John Rockwell has shown in his study of Weimar musical politics, Kestenberg

never really figured out who the People were or what they wanted to hear: the

working classes whom the Kroll Opera hoped to serve were often confounded

by the company’s revisionist take on the classics. At the same time, Kestenberg

lacked the political skill to placate the right wing, which deplored all avantgarde

doings. While Weimar’s bohemians and leftists had their time in the sun, the

reactionary, xenophobic strain in German culture was never far below the

surface. One night in 1928, Joseph Goebbels walked around the

Tauentzienstrasse cabaret district and returned home to write: “This is not the

true Berlin … The other Berlin is lurking, ready to pounce.”

During the Great War, Paul Hindemith banged the bass drum in a military band,

racing back and forth a mile or so behind the front lines, playing marches and

dances for soldiers who were recovering from their spell in the trenches. He

also performed in an all-soldier string quartet, at the behest of a cultured

commanding officer, Count von Kielmannsegg, who adored Debussy. The

Music for Use

143

group happened to be playing the Debussy Quartet when news of the

composer’s death came over the radio. The count himself died in action a few

months later. Such surreal juxtapositions of music and war left their mark on

Hindemith’s imagination, and he, more than anyone, set the pace for postwar

German music.

A no-nonsense man with a bulbous face and a machine-gun manner of speech,

Hindemith had nothing aristocratic or bourgeois in his background. He was the

son of a small-town manual laborer, and attended the Hoch Conservatorium in

Frankfurt with the help of a full scholarship. In the first months of the peace, he

declared his independence from German Romanticism by completing a series

of six sonatas for stringed instruments, crisply constructed pieces in which the

influence of Debussy and Ravel was pervasive; few German composers of the

preceding fifty years had written music of such uncomplicated grace. The young

composer also showed a deep feeling for pre-Romantic traditions, for the stately

forms of the Renaissance and the Baroque, although he modernized them

relentlessly.

“Beauty of sound is beside the point,” Hindemith instructed the player in his

Second Sonata for Solo Viola. He was considered the musical personification of

what Gustav Hartlaub called the New Objectivity—a form of expression “neither

Impressionistically vague nor Expressionistically abstract, neither sensuously

superficial nor constructivistically introverted.” The archetypal Hindemith piece

takes the form of a fast, furious, off-kilter march, with fanfares in multiple

tonalities and bass lines bent off course. The music is intense, but it does not

take itself particularly seriously, or seriously at all. The “Ragtime” movement of

Hindemith’s Suite 1922 for piano is inscribed with the placard-like notice “Mode

d’emploi—Direction for Use!!” in which the performer is told to “look on the

piano as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and act accordingly.” The

Kammermusik No. 1, also from 1922, opens with an homage to Stravinsky’s

Petrushka

There was something bracingly un-German about this new German talent.

Strauss, even in his merriest prankster mood, could never have perpetrated

something like

and ends with a squealing siren out of a Dada cabaret. All this

resembles the up-to-date, streetwise music that Milhaud was writing in Paris,

except that Hindemith’s constructions had a rougher, rowdier edge.

The Flying Dutchman Overture as Sight-Read by a Bad Spa

Orchestra by the Village Well at Seven in the Morning, in which a string quartet

plays Wagner’s overture horribly out of tune. Hindemith was anything but

visionary in his preoccupations; he was practical, efficient, down-to-earth.

Another catchword that became attached to him was Gebrauchsmusik, or music

for use. If, say, a bassoonist and a double-bass player were looking for

something to play, then Hindemith would dash off a Duet for Bassoon and

Double Bass and not worry what posterity might make of it. He worked fast and

to order; on one occasion he wrote two sonata movements in the buffet car of a

train and performed them on arrival. As violist of the Amar Quartet, he

energetically promoted his colleagues’ music as well as his own. He helped to

organize festivals and “new-music weeks” in Donaueschingen, Salzburg,

Baden-Baden, and eventually Berlin, where, in 1927, he became a teacher at

the Hochschule für Musik.

144

The idea of “music for use” quickly took root in the Weimar musical scene. The

Munich-born Carl Orff, who would find everlasting fame as the composer of

Carmina burana, cultivated it assiduously. If Hindemith, like Stravinsky, found

rejuvenation in the curt forms and sharp timbres of the Baroque, Orff went much

further back in time, to the music theater of ancient Greece. The austere

aesthetic of Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Histoire du soldat metamorphosed into

a timeless ritual language, tuneful, percussive, and hypnotically repetitive. In his

early years Orff tended to the political left, setting poems by Bertolt Brecht. But

his most singular achievement was a massive cycle of pieces for children, the

School Work

“Music for use” and educational music went hand in hand with what Peter Gay

has called Weimar’s “hunger for wholeness”: its obsessive pursuit of arts-and-

crafts projects, physical culture, back-to-nature expeditions, youth movements,

sing-alongs, and so on. After the war, Theodor Adorno professed to see proto-

Fascist tendencies in Weimar’s communitarian music making, playing off the

fact that both Hindemith and Orff had become entangled, to a greater or lesser

degree, in Nazi culture. Yet the denunciation rests on specious logic. There is

nothing intrinsically fascistic about the longing to connect music to a community;

it can just as easily serve as a vehicle for the propagation of democratic

thought. Untold millions of children would learn the basics of musical language

by tapping out notes on the mallet percussion instruments that Orff had

constructed to his purposes. The man himself may have been politically

duplicitous, but his passion for teaching was profound, and it probably touched

more lives than any music described in this book.

project, which, by way of infectious musical invention, instructed

youngsters in the basics of mode, harmony, form, and rhythm. Kestenberg took

notice, and by the early thirties he was proposing to give Orff control of the

entire German music education system. The Nazi takeover in 1933 ended that

prospect.

A publicity photo issued by the music publisher Universal Edition in 1927 shows

the twenty-seven-year-old Austrian composer Ernst Krenek in a vaguely druggy

double exposure, an endless cigarette holder dangling from his mouth. With his

sharp suit and unlined face, he looks like a baby gangster gone legit. Another

photomontage from that year puts the young artist together with two other

celebrities of the moment: the boxer Max Schmeling and the aviator Charles

Lindbergh.

Now Opera

For a little while in the late twenties, Krenek acquired certifiable, almost

Gershwin-like celebrity; his opera Jonny spielt auf, or Jonny Strikes Up, was

enshrined as one of those pop-culture artifacts that every Central European had

to know. Fame came Krenek’s way because he dared to bring jazz—or what

passed for jazz—onto the hallowed opera stage. Like George Antheil in Paris

and New York, he was an ambitious young man seeking to make a splash,

although there was a serious side to his enterprise as well; like so many young

145

Austrians and Germans, he yearned to break out of the hothouse of Romantic

and Expressionist art, to join the milling throngs in the new democratic street.

Jonny exemplified a new subgenre that came to be called Zeitoper,or Now

Opera. Composers working in this mode set works in factories, or on board

ocean liners, or, in one case, on “Fiftieth Avenue” in Manhattan. Typical was the

plot of Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins, memorably described by Nicolas

Slonimsky in his reference work Music Since 1900: “A cuckolding libertine

pushes the husband of his mistress to his death in the cogs of a monstrous

machine and strangles her when he finds out that she has become a

promiscuous prostitute, whereupon the foreman, Maschinist Hopkins, dismisses

him from his job ostensibly for inefficiency.” Now Operas almost always

contained a scene in which one or another of the characters throws off his or

her inhibitions to dance a Charleston, a Fox-Trott,

Several

a shimmy, or a tango.

Composers thereby liberated themselves.

Zeitoper composers, Krenek and Brand among them, studied with the

once celebrated and now unfairly neglected Austrian opera composer Franz

Schreker, who, back in 1912, had unveiled a remarkable work titled Der ferne

Klang, or The Distant Sound.

The magic of Schreker’s opera is that from the first bars we have been hearing

the music that Fritz cannot grasp—buoyantly lyrical vocal writing, more Italian

than German in style; a golden blur of orchestral sound, more Debussy than

Wagner in timbre; a cosmopolitan sensualism, incorporating, in the “grand

bordello” sequence of Act II, Gypsy bands, barcaroles, and choral serenades.

The story of that opera is essentially the story of

this book: the cultural predicament of the composer in the twentieth century. An

ambitious young musical dramatist named Fritz decides to abandon his

middling career and his adoring fiancée in order to find a new style—a

“mysterious distant sound,” a “high, sublime goal.” He produces a work that

people call “something really new,” “spine-chilling.” It causes a Schoenbergian

scandal, replete with stamping and whistling. Meanwhile, Grete, Fritz’s fiancée,

sinks low in the world, ending up as a prostitute. In the opera’s final scene they

meet again, and Fritz, dying of an unspecified illness, tragically realizes that the

sound he has been seeking has been around him all this time, in the

multifarious textures of modern life, and in Grete’s voice.

Jonny tries to replicate Schreker’s achievement, but with more modern means.

The title character is a Negro jazz violinist on a European tour, a sort of Austrian

cartoon of Will Marion Cook. He crows in triumph: “Across the sea comes New

World brilliance / Inheriting old Europe with dance.” The cast also features a

composer named Max, who, at the beginning of the opera, is seen sitting at the

side of a grim glacier, which he addresses as “Du schöner Berg” (“you beautiful

mountain”). Like Fritz in Der ferne Klang, Max cannot forgo the pursuit of a

distant sound, presumably of the Schoenbergian variety. The subtext becomes

amusingly obvious when Max says of the glacier, “Everyone loves it once they

have got to know it,” as if quoting from propaganda literature of the Second

Viennese School. The glacier eventually instructs Max, through the medium of

an invisible choir of women’s voices, to “return to life.” In a climactic railway-

station scene Max catches up with his beloved Anita as she rides off into the

146

unknown. Jonny jumps up on top of the station clock and the chorus reprises

his song of triumph. According to Krenek’s original notes, the opera was to have

ended with the image of a 78-rpm recording spinning on a phonograph, the

composer’s name inscribed upon it.

The entire plot was autobiographical. Before discovering a taste for jazz and

other popular materials, Krenek had gone through his own wild-eyed semi-

atonal phase, with Schoenberg and Bartók his guides. In writing Jonny, he was

trying to live out Max’s epiphany, exposing his own glacier world to the warmth

of Jonny’s violin. Furthermore, the character of Anita was based on Anna

Mahler, Gustav and Alma’s daughter, to whom Krenek was briefly and

tempestuously married. Not long after the relationship ended, the composer

went to see Sam Wooding’s jazz revue Chocolate Kiddies, which was the rage

of Europe in the mid-twenties, and he seized on Wooding’s polite jazz

arrangements as a lifeline that would lead him out of the abysses of Central

European despair. Interestingly, the revue contained at least one early Duke

Ellington song, “Jig Walk,” and that tune bears a slight resemblance to Jonny’s

big number. Alas, Krenek’s engagement with African-American music went

about as deep as the blackface painted on the singer playing Jonny.

Zeitoper drew sharp criticisms from both ends of Weimar’s hyperextended

political spectrum. The Nazis attacked it as degenerate art. The Communist

composer Hanns Eisler, meanwhile, wrote ofJonny in Die Rote Fahne: “Despite

the infusions of chic, this is exactly the same mushy, petit bourgeois stuff that

other contemporary opera composers produce.” Eisler was equally unkind to

Hindemith’s “music for use,” dismissing it as a “relative stabilization of music” (a

wry echo of German economic lingo). All modern music lived a Scheindasein,

What Germany needed, Eisler said, was music that told deeper truths about

human society. Open the window when you compose, he instructed his

colleagues. “Remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is

made by man … Discover the people, the real people, discover day-to-day life

for your art, and then perhaps you will be rediscovered.” By that time, the

revolution had begun;

an illusory existence bereft of meaning or community. In 1928 Eisler wrote: “The

big music festivals have become downright stock exchanges, where the value

of the works is assessed and contracts for the coming season are settled. Yet

all this noise is carried out in the vacuum of a bell glass, so to speak, so that not

a sound can be heard outside. An empty officiousness celebrates orgies of

inbreeding, while there is a complete lack of interest or participation of a public

of any kind.”

The Threepenny Opera

was playing to packed crowds at

the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

Kurt Weill’s schoolmates probably never imagined him as the cynosure of a

decadent city. The son of a Jewish cantor in the town of Dessau, about seventy

miles from Berlin, Weill grew up a shy, serious boy, devoted to music. Like

Gestic Music

147

Krenek, he admired Schoenberg in his youth, and yearned to study with the

Master himself in Vienna, but the family’s limited finances prevented him from

going. Instead, in the last weeks of 1918, Weill journeyed to revolutionary

Berlin, where he ended up enrolling in Busoni’s master class at the Prussian

Academy of Arts.

His first reactions to Weimar culture were skeptical. After a visit to the 1923

Frankfurt Chamber Music Festival, he reported to Busoni that “Hindemith has

already danced too far into the land of the foxtrot.” Yet his ears were opening to

a broader gamut of sounds: Mahler’s catchall symphonies, Stravinsky’s pop-

tinged Histoire du soldat.

As Krenek followed Schreker’s path out into the wider world, Weill followed

Busoni, a magus-like musician who hovered over the early twentieth century

like a spider in his web. A Tuscan of Corsican descent, a resident variously of

Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig, Helsinki, Moscow, New York, Zurich, and Berlin,

Busoni was a cosmopolitan in a nationalist age, a pragmatist in an era of

aesthetic absolutism. In 1909, Busoni reprimanded Schoenberg for rejecting the

old while embracing the new; as Busoni saw it, you could do both at once, and

in the

The latter work appeared on the Frankfurt programs,

and Weill was moved to admit—his snobbery was on the wane—that its

“pandering to the taste of the street is bearable because it suits the material.”

Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music he called simultaneously for a

reinvention of the “tonal system” and for a return to Mozartean, classical grace.

Like so many Romantics and modernists before him, Busoni idolized the figure

of Faust, but he delighted more in the science of magic than in the theory of

heaven and hell. Doctor Faust,

Perhaps the most effective lesson that Busoni imparted to Weill was a single

sentence: “Do not be afraid of banality.” For a young German who had been

raised to think that “banality” included almost everything Italian and French, this

advice had an enlightening effect. Busoni showed how the great operas of

Mozart and Verdi interwove naive tunes and sophisticated designs. He talked

about the

his unfinished operatic masterpiece,

circumnavigated the globe of musical possibility, incorporating diatonic, modal,

whole-tone, and chromatic scales, Renaissance polyphony, eighteenth-century

formulas, operetta airs, and flurries of dissonance.

Schlagwort, the “hit word” or catchword, which can sum up in one

instant an intricate theatrical situation—for example, the scalding cry of

“Maledizione!” (“The curse!”) in Verdi’s Rigoletto. In a 1928 essay, “On the

Gestic Character of Music,” Weill elaborated the related idea of Gestus, or

musical gesture. The literary critic Daniel Albright defines Gestus as the

dramatic turning point “in which pantomime, speech, and music cooperate

toward a pure flash of meaning.” Bertolt Brecht, Weill’s principal literary

collaborator, would give the concept of Gestus

Weill’s first efforts at music theater were one-act operas:

a political cast, describing it as a

revolutionary transfer of energy from author to audience. For Weill, though, it

always had a more practical meaning, one to which politics might or might not

be attached.

The Protagonist, a

neat little shocker in which an Elizabethan actor, unable to distinguish between

art and life, murders his own sister onstage; Royal Palace, in which a socialite

148

throws herself into a lake rather than pursue a spiritually empty Jazz Age

existence; and The Tsar Has Himself Photographed, in which a female

anarchist posing as a society photographer plots the assassination of the tsar.

Each of these works contains a pivotal moment—“gestic” in the musical if not

political sense—when a popular, everyday sound grabs the listener’s attention.

In The Protagonist it is an oompahing wind-and-brass octet, which intrudes on

the dissonant ruminations of the orchestra. In Royal Palace it is the blast of an

auto horn and the jangling of a honky-tonk piano, which illustrate an innovative

film interlude in the center of the piece. And in The Tsar it is the effortlessly

slinky “Tango Angèle” that plays as the tsar and his would-be assassine

The transformation of Weill’s style was quickened by two crucial meetings, one

with Lotte Lenya and one with Bertolt Brecht. Weill become romantically and

professionally involved with Lenya starting in 1924, and was never the same

afterward. If Weill had a “cool, withdrawn” nature, as Busoni observed, Lenya

was in every sense a woman of the world. The product of a poor background

and an abusive father, she found employment variously as a dancer, a singer,

an actress, a stage extra, an acrobat, and, briefly, a prostitute—a profession

that ensnared countless German and Austrian women during the years of chaos

and inflation. Weill met her through the playwright Georg Kaiser, who wrote the

texts for

dance

and fall in love. Weill asked that this last piece be executed not by the orchestra

but by an onstage Victrola, and, to this end, a 78-rpm record was included with

the score. Something interesting happened after the premiere, which took place

in February 1928: Weill’s publisher, Universal Edition, began selling the Tango

in stores, and it became a hit.

The Protagonist and The Tsar.

Brecht barged into Weill’s life in early 1927. Scholars are still trying to capture

the dynamic of their collaboration, which Brecht obfuscated for many years by

telling arrogant, self-serving lies; the playwright used to say that he had written

all the best tunes of

His music began to resemble Lenya’s

voice—that famously unpolished, cutting, wearily expressive instrument. “She

can’t read music,” Weill wrote in 1929, “but when she sings, people listen as if it

were Caruso.”

The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny

Weill asserted his musical personality not just in the large structures that

contained his “hits” but in the interstices of the songs themselves. Consider the

“Alabama-Song,” from

and that Weill, a

“composer of atonal psychological operas,” had merely transcribed them.

Subsequent investigations have shown that it was Brecht who relied quite often

on the work of others—touching up translations of foreign plays and calling

them his own, borrowing indiscriminately from the literature of several centuries,

playing down or covering up the contributions of co-writers such as Elisabeth

Hauptmann, his sometime lover. All the same, Brecht had an utterly distinctive

style—his sentences say what they have to say and then snap shut—and with a

modicum of editing he could stamp his voice on anyone’s writing. On Weill,

Brecht had as electric an effect as Lenya did: he further toughened the

composer’s image, pushing him in the direction of hard-left politics and giving

him words with teeth and bite.

Mahagonny Songspiel, the first collaboration between

Weill and the firm of Brecht. The title, an Americanization of the old German

149

genre of the popular Singspiel, signals the creators’ intentions to appropriate

modern pop, and the lyrics, by Hauptmann, are couched in a delightfully

eccentric version of the English language: “Oh show us the way to the next

whisky bar / Oh don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why.” A steady rhythm chugs under

the almost entirely monosyllabic text, but subtle irregularities complicate the

song’s progress. The vocal line keeps plunking down a minor third, and then

drops a minor third again, like a drunk whose legs buckle under him as he

staggers forward. Extraneous notes creep into what seems to be a C-minor key,

and by the seventh bar (“Oh don’t ask why”) the harmony has tilted across the

tritone into the area of F-sharp before veering back again. The chorus—“Oh!

Moon of Alabama”—comes as a relief, its arching tune shaking off the

churlishness of the verse. But one of the inner voices descends by half steps,

like the chromatic bass of a Renaissance lament, and a bare fifth drones dully

and menacingly in the bass. Berlinish world-weariness is woven into the fabric

of the score.

Mahagonny Songspiel had its first performance at Hindemith’s Baden-Baden

Festival in 1927, where it was an instant smash. At the party after the

performance, Lenya felt a huge hand on her shoulder and turned to see the

looming figure of Otto Klemperer, who grinned and sang a line from the

“Benares Song”: “Is here no telephone?” Everyone in the bar joined in. Thrilled

at the impact that this spontaneous little work had made on the new-music elite,

Weill and Brecht decided to create an evening-length opera based on the

Mahagonny material; this would become

Before that project came to fruition, however, composer and playwright took a

detour into the criminal underworld of eighteenth-century London. And in the

process they escaped the paradox that had encircled the jazzy, poppy ventures

of Paris composers, as well as Leo Kestenberg’s state-funded modernist

theater; they produced “art for the people” that the people heard and liked.

Rise and Fall of the City of

Mahagonny.

Brecht loved outlaws, thugs, men of no principles. In his adolescence, he

idolized the turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright Frank Wedekind, who

shocked Vienna with his scabrous, criminal appearance—“ugly, brutal,

dangerous, with close-cropped red hair,” in Brecht’s words. Brecht had his hair

shorn in the same style and, like Wedekind, took to strumming on a guitar

during poetry recitations.

The Threepenny Opera

How Brecht’s infatuation with antisocial hooligans can be reconciled with the

strict Marxist doctrine that the writer adopted after 1926 is something that

scholars have long struggled to comprehend. In a 1930 article, Walter Benjamin

proposed that Brecht’s thugs should be understood as promising material for

revolutionary transformation, and used a Faustian metaphor to describe the

hoped-for process: “Just as Wagner [Doctor Faust’s assistant] produced a

homunculus in a test tube from a magic brew, Brecht hopes to produce the

150

revolutionary in a test tube from a mixture of poverty and nastiness.” But Brecht

seemed to relish the nastiness more than the promise of socialist redemption to

follow.

Macheath, a.k.a. Mackie, the antihero of The Threepenny Opera, is the nastiest

of Brecht’s homunculi. He is based on the character of Captain Macheath in

John Gay’s eighteenth-century ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera, which served

as the main source for Brecht and Hauptmann’s libretto. In the original,

Macheath is a master criminal with a dashing style who stands in metaphorically

for the corrupt politicians of Gay’s time. Benjamin, in a later essay on The

Threepenny Opera

Weimar culture exhibited an unhealthy fixation on the figure of the serial or

sexual killer. The German press gave comprehensive coverage to such

homicidal lunatics as Georg Karl Grossmann, the “Bluebeard of the Silesian

Railway”; Karl Denke, the “Monster of Münsterberg”; Fritz Haarmann, the boy

killer of Hannover; and Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf.” The artists

George Grosz and Otto Dix depicted the bloody corpses of prostitutes in pitiless

fashion; Grosz went so far as to have himself photographed acting out the

crimes of Jack the Ripper (also a character in Wedekind’s prewar play

and its sources, observed how “intimately the

countermorality of beggars and rogues is intertwined with the cant of the official

morality.” Brecht and Weill’s Macheath is at once more charming and more

menacing than Gay’s, mainly because of the musical number that introduces

him: “Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” otherwise known as “Mack the Knife.”

This most famous of Weimar songs takes the form of a “murder ballad,” a

catalog of killings. Macheath is revealed not merely as a high-living

highwayman but as an apparent psychopath who kills as much for pleasure as

for financial gain. Schmul Meier has disappeared, along with many rich men;

Jenny Towler is found with a knife in her breast; seven children die in a great

fire in Soho; a young girl is raped.

Pandora’s Box).

Weill encased Brecht’s hymn to Macheath in insidiously hummable music. A

simple tune circles around and around, coming to rest repeatedly on an added-

sixth chord—a C-major triad plus the note A—which was a favorite device of

Debussy. That “sweetened” harmony would become a standard device in jazz,

but there is something desperate and bedraggled about Weill’s use of it here. In

the first verse, the main chord is wheezed out on a solo harmonium; thumping

bass notes give the melody heavy feet; and, throughout, the almost obsessive

stress on the note A tends to darken rather than lighten the mood, nudging the

music toward the minor mode. “Mack the Knife” is a song chained to one chord.

It’s a pop tune with no exit.

Peter Lorre portrayed a child killer in Fritz Lang’s film M.

Macheath has something in common with all these bloodthirsty types. At the

same time, he fits the profile of the detective-story archcriminal, a figure like

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty and Lang’s Dr. Mabuse—and the

Weimar fascination with masterminds is also unsettling in retrospect, given how

Hitler would blame everything on the hidden machinations of the Jews. In one

way or another, Macheath seems to be the agent of all that is insoluble and

unspeakable behind the scenes of the Western city.