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Everything about The Threepenny Opera is ambiguous; in the words of the
scholar Stephen Hinton, it practices a “style of willful and relentless
equivocation on absolutely every level.” The ambiguity reaches down to the
fundamental level of musical identity: like Jerome Kern’s Show Boat, which
opened the previous year, and like Gershwin’s pre-Porgy musicals, Threepenny
The singers were liberated, too. Just as John W. Bubbles and other performers
were allowed to improvise their way through parts of
sits on the border between classical and popular genres, combining “hit”
numbers with modernistic textures and socially critical themes. Weill’s most
ingenious move was to score his breakthrough theater piece not for a
symphony orchestra but for a sleek, mutable band of seven musicians, who
were asked to play no fewer than twenty-three different instruments. (The
drummer, for example, plays second trumpet for a couple of numbers, and the
banjo player at one point picks up the cello.) And, by asking his performers to
take on so many roles, Weill guarantees that the playing will have, in place of
soulless professional expertise, a scrappy, seat-of-the-pants energy.
Porgy and Bess, Lenya
and the rest of the Threepenny
In the 1950s, “Mack the Knife” began a second life as an American pop
standard, and new variations were rung on the tune. When Louis Armstrong
sang it, he warmed up Brecht’s hard-bitten lyrics with the husky humanity of his
voice, and jokingly added Lenya’s name to the list of Mackie’s victims: “Sukey
Tawdry, Jenny Diver / Lotte Lenya, sweet Lucy Brown.” Frank Sinatra turned
the song into a display of Rat Pack braggadocio: “When I tell you all about Mack
the Knife, babe / It’s an offer you can never refuse.” Weill’s song thus became a
showbiz tour de force, although its sting remained. Armstrong and Sinatra, both
children of the streets, understood what the text was about: Armstrong said that
Mack the Knife reminded him of characters he had encountered in New
Orleans, while Sinatra knowingly grafted on a line from Francis Ford Coppola’s
cast had the opportunity to freight Weill’s
deceptively simple vocal lines with varying degrees of knowingness, sarcasm,
ennui, and despair. That freedom of expression became a performing tradition
that continues to evolve today.
Godfather
Weill’s influence did not end there. In 1962 Lenya appeared in the revue
films, which exposed American politicians as gangsters of a higher
order.
Brecht
on Brecht at the Theater de Lys in New York’s Greenwich Village. A young
Minnesota-born singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan came to see the show and
found himself mesmerized by Lenya’s singing of “Pirate Jenny,” in which a
prostitute fantasizes revenge on the men who exploit her. “The audience was
the ‘gentlemen’ in the song,” Dylan wrote in his autobiography, Chronicles. “It
was their beds she was making up … It wasn’t a protest or topical song and
there was no love of people in it.” What especially intrigued Dylan was the
cryptic repetition of the chorus—“And a ship with eight sails and fifty cannon …”
The line reminded him of the foghorns on Lake Superior, next to his childhood
home in Duluth: “Even though you couldn’t see the ships through the fog, you
knew they were there by the heavy outbursts of thunder that blasted like
Beethoven’s Fifth—two low notes, the first one long and deep like a bassoon.”
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In the spirit of Brecht and Weill, Dylan proceeded to carve his own Gestus-like
phrases into the minds of late-twentieth-century listeners: “The answer is
blowin’ in the wind,” “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” “The times they are a-
changin’.” The last was a direct quotation from one of Brecht’s lyrics for Hanns
Eisler. The spirit of Berlin played on.
Twelve-Tone Music
In October 1928, while The Threepenny Opera was still enjoying its first run,
Arnold Schoenberg, resident in Berlin since 1926, began work on a libretto for
an opera titled Moses und Aron. Like Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Moses
would display new religious conviction in a morally uncentered time. In the face
of anti-Semitism, Schoenberg was rediscovering his Jewish roots, and, in telling
of Moses’s struggle to bring the Word of God to his recalcitrant people, he
aligned himself with the prophetic tradition. By the time Hitler came to power,
Schoenberg had completed the second act, which features the dance around
the golden calf—that orgy of idol worship in which the people indulge
themselves while Moses goes up the mountain to receive the Tables of the
Law. The scene has many sardonic echoes of twenties styles—some stamping
Stravinskyan cross-rhythms here, some bustling Hindemithian counterpoint
there, a few woeful Weill-like tunes. Schoenberg had been inveighing against
Weimar culture in his prose writings, and there is a congruence between those
jeremiads and Moses’s thunderings in Act III of the libretto: “You have betrayed
God to the gods, the idea to images, this chosen folk to others, the
extraordinary to the commonplace.”
Schoenberg had unveiled his own new law in 1923, in the form of the “method
of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” Pupils
and friends were summoned to his house in Mödling, outside Vienna, to hear
news of the breakthrough. Schoenberg had hit on the notion of twelve-tone
music after enduring an extended period of creative confusion. The “extreme
emotionality” of atonal composition, in his own words, had exhausted him, and
he needed a less fraught, more orderly way of working. From 1912 to 1915 he
had labored on a choral symphony, which was to have depicted modern man’s
struggle to find a realistic form of faith. One section was titled “The bourgeois
God does not suffice.” The symphony never made it past the sketching stage,
but some of its ideas passed into another project, the oratorio Jacob’s Ladder.
This, too, was never finished, but an impressive beginning was made. At the
outset, Archangel Gabriel gives direction to the hapless denizens of modernity:
“Whether right or left, forward or backward, uphill or downhill—one must go on,
without asking what lies ahead or behind.” This titanic utterance is backed up by
an equally titanic prelude in which a six-note ostinato grinds beneath a
ladderlike ascending sequence of six other notes, making up a total of twelve.
Twelve is the number of steps it takes to go from middle C on a piano to the
next C above or below. Twelve consecutive notes make up what is called the
chromatic scale, so named because it suggests all the colors of a spectrum.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, composers made increasingly free
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use of the complete set of chromatic notes, depending on it to create a
turbulent, even devilish atmosphere. Liszt’s Faust Symphony begins with a
nonrepeating series of twelve, an emblem of Faust’s ceaseless striving after
knowledge. Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra employs a twelve-tone theme to
mock the workings of the scientific mind. Salome and Elektra have several such
episodes of chromatic saturation. Likewise, the first atonal works by
Schoenberg and his students tend to run through the set of twelve in a few bars.
Twelve-tone writing simply made official the tendency to “run the gamut.”
A particular arrangement of twelve notes is called a series or row. The idea is
not to consider the row a theme in itself but to employ it as a kind of fund of
notes, or, more precisely, of relationships among notes, or intervals.
Schoenberg added some concepts from the old art of counterpoint to maximize
the possibilities of thematic play. The composer can run the row in retrograde
(go backward from the last note). Or he can use an inversion (turn it upside
down). For example, if the original begins by moving up three half steps and
down two, the retrograde row will end with that same pattern in reverse, while
the inverted row begins by going down three half steps and up two. The
retrograde inversion goes back to front and upside down. The composer can
also transpose the row by moving it up or down the scale. All told, the chromatic
scale contains a huge number of permutations—to be exact, 479,001,600, the
factorial of 12.
The great discovery made Schoenberg happy. Through the early and mid-
twenties he composed with a fluency that he had not experienced since 1909. A
set of Five Pieces and a Suite for piano, a Serenade, a Wind Quintet, a Septet-
Suite, and a set of Variations for Orchestra appeared in quick succession.
Nearly all of Schoenberg’s early twelve-tone works are couched in established
forms, usually from the Baroque and Classical periods. Formal rules are
observed, dance rhythms replicated, ideas clearly spelled out and rigorously
developed. Schoenberg has almost entirely abandoned the mystical mind-set of
his early atonal period, when he wished to dissolve form and leap into the
unknown.
Along the way, a peculiar thing happens: the tonal building blocks that
Schoenberg formerly disavowed begin popping up on occasion. One may even
find that rootless cosmopolitan, the diminished seventh: the Variations starts
with one. The Swiss composer Frank Martin later noted that the twelve-tone
idea never forbids the use of tonal materials; in fact, one must manipulate the
system to avoid producing them. Schoenberg did not always make the
correction: the groundbreaking twelve-note sequence in Jacob’s Ladder
culminates in a C-sharp-major triad in the horns, followed by a hint of G—
harmonies that follow logically from the intervals contained in the opening
corkscrew figure.
Many of Schoenberg’s pupils loyally adopted the new method. Anton Webern, it
turned out, had been tinkering with his own form of twelve-tone writing for some
time; as far back as 1911, while working on his Bagatelles for String Quartet, he
had made a chart of the twelve chromatic notes and crossed them off one by
one as he composed. “When all twelve notes have gone by,” he would tell
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himself, “the piece is over.” In a manuscript dated 1922, some months before
the ceremonial unveiling of dodecaphony in Mödling, Webern copied out rows in
retrograde and inversion. Schoenberg later complained that his former student
had “used twelve tones in some of his compositions— without telling me.”
Webern’s twelve-tone music is of a piece with his atonal music, with its spare
construction and haiku strokes. In 1927 he completed his first extended
instrumental piece in the new medium, the word “extended” being understood in
a relative sense; the String Trio, the product of nine months’ labor, lasts nine
minutes. Its second and final movement contains an old-fashioned repeat sign,
in a seeming nod toward neoclassical practice; yet the gestures are so
evanescent that the listener may have a hard time noticing when the repeat
commences. A ten-minute Symphony followed in 1928, and, in 1930, the
Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano (this is the work for
which Webern demanded “sex appeal,” to Berg’s amusement). The composer
kept whittling down his materials, employing twelve-tone rows that were really
elaborations of smaller, three-note segments. Works of later years, notably the
Piano Variations of 1936, have the abstract beauty of ice crystals or snowflakes,
their structures made up of symmetrical patterns. Joseph Auner points out that
there was an element of nature-mysticism to Webern’s method. On a hiking trip
in 1930 the composer wrote ecstatically of the experience of being lost in a
snowstorm, of walking into a whiteness that was like a “completely
undifferentiated screen.” His music offered a similar experience for the ears.
In the mad year of hyperinflation, Schoenberg offered a kind of stabilization—
the conversion of a chaotic musical marketplace to a planned economy. There
was a nationalistic thrust, too, to Schoenberg’s return to order; at a time when
Russian, French, and American composers were seizing headlines with their
Jazz Age antics, Schoenberg was reasserting the primacy of Austro-German
composition, its ancient arts of counterpoint and thematic development.
Supposedly, he once declared that he had ensured the supremacy of German
music for the next hundred years. In the end, however, twelve-tone writing
turned out to be an impeccably cosmopolitan method, almost a lingua franca in
the post–World War II period. Already, in the late twenties and early thirties,
scattered young composers were feeling the pull of Schoenberg’s intervallic
games: Nikos Skalkottas in Greece, Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy, Roberto Gerhard
in Spain, Fartein Valen in Norway, and young Milton Babbitt of Jackson,
Mississippi.
Despite the occasional scandal—a Berlin Philharmonic audience registered its
unhappiness when Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the Variations for Orchestra
in 1928—the late twenties were the happiest years of Schoenberg’s life. He felt
vindicated by the esteem that the appointment at the Prussian Academy of Arts
bestowed. “Recognition does one good,” he wrote to Leo Kestenberg. There
was unprecedented stability in his personal life; in 1923, the unfaithful Mathilde
had died after a long illness, and less than a year later Schoenberg married
Gertrud Kolisch, the daughter of a Viennese doctor and the sister of the violinist
Rudolf Kolisch, whose Kolisch Quartet would do much to advance
Schoenberg’s cause.
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Yet the cultural antics of the Weimar era irritated the composer no end. “Art is
from the outset naturally not for the people,” he wrote in 1928. “But one wants to
force it to be. Everyone is supposed to have their say. For the new bliss
consists of the right to speak: free speech! Oh God!” He derided his more
faddish colleagues variously as window dressers, restaurateurs, and purveyors
of greaseproof paper and neckties. The satirical song cycle Three Satires, from
1925–26, took potshots at Stravinsky:
But who’s this beating the drum?
Why, it’s little Modernsky!
He’s had his hair cut in an old-fashioned queue,
And it looks quite nice!
Like real false hair!
Like a wig!
Just like (or so little Modernsky likes to think)
Just like Papa Bach!
In an essayistic introduction to the Satires, Schoenberg widened his attack to
include folkloristic composers, who “want to apply to the naturally primitive ideas
of folk music a technique that only suits a complicated way of thinking” (this
would presumably be Bartók), and certain “middle road” composers who mingle
dissonance and tonality (Krenek, possibly Berg). In another essay from 1926,
Schoenberg wrote, “Many modern composers believe they are writing tonally if
they occasionally introduce a major or minor triad, or a cadence-like turn of
phrase, into a series of harmonies that lack, and must lack, any terms of
reference.” He added cryptically: “They betray their God, but remain on good
terms with those who call themselves His attorneys.” Here is a pre-echo of the
Moses libretto: “You have betrayed God to the gods …”
Curiously, even as Schoenberg vented against the popular styles of the day, he
not so subtly assimilated them in his music. The Serenade, for example,
originally had movements titled “Jo-Jo-Foxtrot,” “Film Dva,” and “Tenn Ski.”
There is a sort of jazz episode, or at least a burst of syncopation, in the eighth
of the orchestral Variations. The comic opera From Today Until Tomorrow,
undertaken in the wake of The Threepenny Opera, portrays an agitated married
couple in a modern setting, replete with ringing telephone, ringing doorbell,
three saxophones, and a guitar. The couple is trying to decide whether to
become “up-to-date” by entering into an open marriage. The wife racily
contemplates taking an array of lovers, “one after the other or two at the same
time, but just not a system!” In the end, husband and wife resolve their
differences, spurn modernity, and reaffirm traditional roles. So sure was
Schoenberg of the opera’s success that he had it published at his own expense,
figuring that he could reap all the profits when it became a runaway hit. For all
its spiky charms, it did not.
In a way, Schoenberg’s resentment of Weimar’s young composers was a
personal affair. As the Satires said, it was a question of betrayal. Those who
had formerly embraced atonality as the one true path were being tempted in
more outwardly fashionable directions. Krenek ventured to criticize a certain
unnamed brand of contemporary music as “the self-gratification of an individual
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who sits in his studio and invents rules according to which he then writes down
his notes.” Schoenberg took offense at this masturbatory metaphor and
snapped in an unpublished commentary that Krenek “wishes for only whores as
listeners.” Eventually, Krenek came back to the fold: at the beginning of the
thirties, he abandoned the jazz airs of Jonny spielt auf and took up twelve-tone
writing, discovering a gritty new voice in his historical opera Charles V.
Hanns Eisler, too, disavowed his teacher’s methods. By 1926, he could no
longer reconcile modernist complexity with his leftist politics, as he said in a
characteristically blunt letter to Schoenberg: “Modern music bores me, it does
not interest me, I hate much of it and even despise it. I will in fact have nothing
to do with the ‘modern.’ If possible I try to avoid hearing it and reading it.”
Schoenberg accused Eisler of committing “treason”—not so much because he
wished to go his own way as because he insisted all along that he remained
loyal to Schoenberg’s cause.
The most infuriating apostasy was that of Kurt Weill. In this case, there could be
no question of personal disloyalty, since the two men barely knew each other.
Perhaps it was the similarities in their backgrounds—both were descended from
synagogue cantors—that prompted Schoenberg to look on Weill as something
of a prodigal son, or, closer to the allegory of Moses und Aron, as a wayward
younger brother.
The Schoenberg-Weill dispute began in October 1927, when Weill wrote an
article drawing a pointed contrast between those composers “who, filled with
disdain for the public, work toward the solution of aesthetic problems as if
behind closed doors” and those who “open up a connection with any kind of
public.” The following year Weill called on composers to end all elitist pursuits
and start “from scratch.” Schoenberg got hold of the second article and
annotated it furiously. Where Weill wrote, “You want to hear music you can
understand without special explanations,” Schoenberg put an “X” next to the
word “understand.” And where Weill imagined a theater in which “operatic
figures become once again living human beings who speak a language
understandable by all,” Schoenberg put a wavy line under “understandable.” His
conclusion was harsh: “In the end, those communally oriented artists will have
addressed their idiocies only to each other.” He began to take pride in the fact
that his music attracted so few listeners. When, in 1930, he was asked to
describe his public, he said, “I do not believe I have one.”
The textual evidence suggests that Schoenberg’s critique of Weill carried over
into Moses und Aron. In the final scene of Act II of the opera the prophet argues
with his brother Aron—Schoenberg having changed Aaron to Aron in order to
avoid an unlucky thirteen-letter title, or so the legend goes—over whether and
how God should be represented. Aron says his mission is to “make [Moses]
understandable to the people in their own accustomed way.” He uses the same
word—“verständlich”—that Schoenberg had underlined skeptically in Weill’s
essay. And as Aron sings of his urge to reach out to all the people the music
keeps slipping into quasi-tonal patterns. Schoenberg probably did not know
Weill’s music well enough to imitate it, but this may be The Threepenny Opera
as he heard it in his head. Moses, reciting nonmelodious Sprechstimme over
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strict atonal harmonies, declares his loyalty to the “unrepresentable,” the
“inexpressible.”
Weimar polemics aside, Moses stands as Schoenberg’s most awesome
achievement. It is a profound meditation on faith and doubt, the difficulty of the
language commensurate with the difficulty of the subject; no doubt the God of
the Old Testament would speak through atonal hexachords. At the same time,
Schoenberg’s parodies in the “Dance Around the Golden Calf” give the work a
stylistic diversity that helps to sustain the ordinary operagoer’s interest. (The
scene is a little like the moralizing politician’s trick of waving pornography while
he condemns it.) Yet Schoenberg does not exempt himself from judgment.
Moses, his alter ego, ends Act II in abject despair, crying out, “O Word, you
Word that I lack!” Admittedly, this aura of frailty dissipates in Act III (never set to
music), where the prophet regains his confidence and wreaks vengeance on all
who misunderstood him. Aron falls dead. The people cannot be saved, there is
no promised land. Moses is destined to roam the desert in the company of his
soldier-acolytes. “In the desert,” he tells them, “you shall be invincible.”
In the summer of 1929, Gustav Stresemann, the foreign minister of the Weimar
Republic, attended a performance by the La Scala opera company of Milan.
The event was part of an extraordinary festival of music, dance, and theater
involving all the leading German musicians (Strauss, Furtwängler, Klemperer,
and so on) as well as Arturo Toscanini’s Italian company and Diaghilev’s Ballets
Russes. It turned out to be Berlin’s last hour of cultural glory before the decline
and fall. Many who bought tickets for that La Scala gala were worried to see
Stresemann in poor health; they knew that he was almost singlehandedly
providing a semblance of a steady center in German politics. When he died that
October, German intellectuals had a sinking feeling. “It’s the beginning of the
end,” the author Bruno Frank said to Klaus Mann. That same month the
American stock-market crash brought on a worldwide depression, putting a
quick end to “relative stabilization” and thus to the merrymaking spirit of what
Germans still call the “Golden Twenties.”
Battle Music
German music entered a new period of sobriety. Many young composers
abandoned notions of entertaining a mass public and instead began writing
music of aggressively political character, in anticipation of a coming battle with
the right.
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Far-left musical agitation had been stirring since the first days of the republic.
One early locus of activity was the Novembergruppe, a cross-disciplinary artistic
organization that took its name from Liebknecht’s aborted revolution of
November 1918. At first, musical leftists hoped to use avant-garde methods to
overthrow bourgeois values. Stefan Wolpe, one of very few Berlin-in-the-
twenties luminaries who were actually from the city, became the prime musical
mover of the Novembergruppe movement; on one occasion he organized a kind
of happening at which eight phonographs played recordings of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony at different speeds. Even fellow Novembergruppists were
aghast at Wolpe’s First Piano Sonata, which had its premiere at a 1927 evening
of “Stationary Music.” Among the most extreme works of the time, it mixed
whiplash mechanical gestures with serpentine, gamelan-like patterns on the
white keys of the piano. Later, Wolpe would write an absurdist Zeitoper titled
Zeus und Elida,
Wolpe’s brand of avant-garde agitation failed to satisfy Hanns Eisler, who
thought that composers should communicate as directly as possible with the
working classes and other potential revolutionary elements. By 1928, Eisler had
developed a genre that he called
in which the god of the Greeks tries to rape Europa in the
middle of a jazz-filled Potsdamer Platz. A narrator tells the audience to think of
Zeus as Hitler. Had the opera been performed, it would have been one of very
few musical works of the period to attack Hitler by name.
Kampflieder (songs of struggle), which was
intended strictly for proletarian audiences and their intellectual allies. Fiercely
trudging marches, usually in a minatory minor mode, and modernized Bachian
chorales served to focus the emotion of the crowd. Eisler’s right-hand man was
the actor-singer Ernst Busch, whose riveting voice, a blunt instrument of
righteous anger, seemed to compel some decisive, brutish act on the part of the
listener. Busch’s postwar recordings of Kampflieder
Schoenberg claimed that the populists of Weimar were talking mostly to each
other. Eisler, though, found a real mass following. The German Worker-Singers
Union, with which he was closely associated, had 400,000 members. He and
Busch would venture into halls and bars in Berlin’s working-class districts,
whipping up fervor with the force of their performances; the composer drew
shouts of approval whenever he banged the piano keys with a balled-up fist.
Unlike other parties on the political spectrum, German Communists did not
stand idle as the Nazi Party gathered strength. The problem was that they, too,
were in thrall to a totalitarian ideology; Germany faced a choice between
tyrannies. Eisler soon began to involve himself not only in German politics but in
the Soviet cultural bureaucracy, taking a role in a Comintern (Communist
International) organization called the International Music Bureau. Eisler could
have been under no illusions about the nature of the emergent Stalinist regime,
which tolerated no dissent or diversity of opinion. Pitilessness was in the air;
sentimental humanist values would have to be sacrificed at the altar of action. In
a way, German Communists were most effective against the Nazis because
they shared the will to violence.
preserve the desperate
passions of the Weimar era; in Eisler’s song “Der heimliche Aufmarsch,” or
“Secret Mobilization,” originally written in 1930, the singer barks out the line
“The attack against the Soviet Union is a stab in the heart of the revolution” with
a palpable tone of wounded pride.
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On such issues the alliance between Brecht and Weill foundered. The two were
still uneasily conjoined in the summer of 1929, during that last spell of freedom.
They appeared once again at the BadenBaden Festival, where the Mahagonny
Songspiel had struck a nerve two years before. This time they presented a
didactic cantata describing Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic. In
the face of a looming deadline, Weill persuaded Hindemith to write several of
the numbers. Hindemith was also the sole composer of Brecht’s other music-
theater project of the summer, The Baden-Baden Learning Play About
Acquiescence.
“Acquiescence”—the German word
This instantly notorious piece explored, by way of interrelated
stories, the question of “whether man helps man.” In one scene a clown named
Herr Schmidt complains that his limbs hurt, whereupon two other clowns tear
them off his body one by one. While blood gushes from the stumps, a “Clown
March” plays in the orchestra. A summary placard is held up, reading, “Better to
make music than to hear it.” Hindemith found the material revolting, and reacted
by moving to the aesthetic and political right during the remaining years of the
Weimar Republic.
Einverständnis also implies “thinking as
one”—became Brecht’s favorite leitmotif. Stephen Hinton paraphrases it as an
individual’s “willingness to act in the interests of the community, even to the
point of sacrificing his own life.” That idea dominated the “school opera” The
Yes-Sayer, for which Weill wrote the music in early 1930. The text was adapted
by Hauptmann and Brecht from the Japanese play Taniko
Brecht secularizes this Buddhistic parable of self-sacrifice, thereby converting it
into agitprop. The politics may be antithetical to Hitler’s, but there is the same
mythologizing of the community, the same disregard for the sanctity of life. Weill
may have had a more conflicted attitude—his music audibly mourns for the boy,
a brief allusion to the funeral march from Beethoven’s
(in an English-
language version). Four young people go on a hazardous mountain journey,
and when the youngest of them falls sick the others face the possibility of
having to turn back. The boy agrees that the mission must go on and that he
should be thrown over the side of the mountain. “With closed eyes, none guiltier
than another,” the others toss the boy off the cliff.
Eroica sending him off
with a tinge of Romantic grandeur—but the hard-heartedness at the core of the
scenario overpowers any countervailing humanistic messages. The opera both
begins and ends with the thought “Above all it is important to learn
acquiescence.” The Yes-Sayer
With both Weill and Hindemith proving insufficiently ruthless, Brecht finally
turned to Eisler, his perfect political match. At the end of 1930 Brecht and Eisler
collaborated on a supremely vicious theater piece titled
was performed hundreds of times in schools in
Berlin and elsewhere, and it inadvertently prepared German children for a time
when they would have to do the unthinkable for the sake of the Führer.
Die Massnahme, or The
Measures Taken, which had its premiere on the same night as Stravinsky’s
Symphony of Psalms. The scenario of The Measures Taken recalls that of The
Yes-Sayer, but the pretense of literary allegory is dropped in favor of something
like an instruction manual for international espionage—and it may have been
directly inspired by secret assignments that Eisler’s brother, the mysterious
Gerhart Eisler, apparently carried out for Soviet intelligence in China.
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The plot is this: covert Communist operatives in China have in their midst a
Young Comrade who compromises their mission by reaching out to the
oppressed. After a string of mistakes, he is told that he must die, and he not
only acquiesces in his own death but plans it. “What shall we do with your
body?” the Agitators ask. “You must cast me into the lime-pit,” the Young
Comrade replies. “In the interests of Communism in agreement with the
progress of the proletarian masses of all lands.” Eisler responds with music of
blistering directness, again using Bachian chorales to ennoble the bloodlust
inherent in the material. The journalist Ludwig Bauer could have been thinking
of The Measures Taken
By 1931, Brecht and Weill were hardly speaking. The divergence of their
worldviews incited bitter arguments; Brecht famously shouted that he would
throw this “phony Richard Strauss” down the stairs. Still, one more Brecht-Weill
masterpiece had made its way into the world.
when he lamented that political fanaticism on both the
right and the left was devaluing the life of the individual. “The I is disappearing,”
Bauer wrote. “Individuals count only as part of the whole.”
Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny was the culmination of everything that Weill sought to do in his
most recent phase, and it was more his opera than Brecht’s—a many-layered
entertainment, critical of social norms but unburdened by dogma. The songs of
the original Mahagonny Songspiel
At the beginning of the opera, the Widow Begbick and her cronies are on the
run from the law, guilty of swindling and procuration. When their truck breaks
down in the middle of the desert, they decide to found a city—Brecht’s uncanny
prophecy of Las Vegas. A solemn drumbeat beneath Begbick’s proud
manifesto, again reminiscent of the funeral music of Beethoven’s
become part of a three-act drama about the
founding, heyday, and decline of a semi-American “paradise city,” otherwise
known as the “city of nets.”
Eroica,
The performance history of
signals
that Mahagonny is destined for a bad end. As the “Alabama-Song” plays, the
sharks move in—the prostitute Jenny and her steely-eyed cohorts. Vice
prospers, fortunes are made, rules laid down. Jim Mahoney, a lumberjack,
realizes that “there is something lacking.” After a hurricane nearly destroys the
city, he proclaims a new rule, which is that all should do as they please. A
bacchanal follows, very Berlinish in its herky-jerky, every-which-way rhythm—
Weill’s version of the “Dance Around the Golden Calf.” The philosophy of self-
gratification has the eventual effect of ruining Jim, who is put on trial for failing
to pay his bills. He is sentenced to death, over music of bone-chilling
relentlessness, and Mahagonny likewise goes to its doom. The slow marching
song that ends the opera is nothing short of apocalyptic, with the Beethovenian
rhythm thundering on the drums and a death motif descending like Mahler’s
hammer blows of fate. The libretto was widely understood as a protest against
rampant capitalism, although it reads just as well as a critique of the fake utopia
of the Soviet Union.
Mahagonny dovetails with the disintegration of the
Weimar Republic. The opera should have had its premiere at the Kroll, but
Klemperer, losing political support, declined to perform it. (The “people’s opera”
closed its doors the following year; its last new production was, appropriately,
Jan´ček’s From the House of the Dead.) Instead, Mahagonny made its debut on