You fellow men who want to live, like us
Pray do not think you have to judge us harshly
And when you see us hoisted up and trussed
Don’t laugh like fools behind your big moustaches.
Oh, you who’ve never crashed as we came crashing
Don’t castigate our downfall like the courts:
Not all of us can discipline our thoughts –
Dear fellows, your extravagance needs slashing
Dear fellows, we’ve shown how a crash begins.
Pray then to God that he forgive our sins.
The rain washes away and purifies.
Let it wash down the flesh we catered for.
And we who saw so much, and wanted more –
The crows will come and peck away our eyes.
Perhaps ambition used too sharp a goad
It drove us to these heights from which we swing
Hacked at by greedy starlings on the wing
Like horses’ droppings on a country road.
Oh, brothers, learn from us how it begins
I pray that you kindly forgive our sins.
The men who break into your houses
Because they have no place to sleep in
The gossipper, the man who grouses
And likes to curse instead of weeping;
The women stealing your bread ration
Could be your mothers for two pins.
They’re acting in too mild a fashion –
I pray you to forgive their sins.
Show understanding for their trouble
But none for those who, from high places
Led you to war and worse disgraces
And made you sleep on bloodstained rubble.
They plunged you into bloody robbery
And now they beg you to forgive.
So choke their mouths with the poor débris
That’s left of where you used to livel
And those who think the whole thing’s over
Saying ‘Let them expiate their sins’
Are asking for a great iron crowbar
To stave their ugly faces in.
NEW CHORALE
Don’t punish small wrong-doings too much. Never
Will they withstand the frost, for they are cold.
Think of the darkness and the bitter weather
The cries of pain that echo round this world.
But tackle the big crooks now, all together
And chop them down before you’re all too old:
Who caused the darkness and the bitter weather
And brought the pain that echoes round this world.
[‘Anhang’ to The Threepenny Opera, in GW Stücke 2, pp. 491 ff., excluding the ‘Neufassung der Ballade vom angenehmen Leben’, which differs only marginally from that in our text, and the closing verses from the film version, which we have given above (p. 304). The dates indicate that the first and fourth of these songs were written in 1948, the other two in 1946].
ON The Threepenny Opera
Under the title The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera has been performed for the past two hundred years in theatres throughout England. It gives us an introduction to the life of London’s criminal districts, Soho and Whitechapel, which are still the refuge of the poorest and least easily understood strata of English society just as they were two centuries ago.
Mr Jonathan Peachum has an ingenious way of capitalising on human misery by artificially equipping healthy individuals as cripples and sending them out to beg, thereby earning his profits from the compassion of the well-to-do. This activity in no sense results from inborn wickedness. ‘My position in the world is one of self-defence’ is Peachum’s principle, and this stimulates him to the greatest decisiveness in all his dealings. He has but one serious adversary in the London criminal community, a gentlemanly young man called Macheath, whom the girls find divine. Macheath has abducted Peachum’s daughter Polly and married her in highly eccentric fashion in a stable. On learning of his daughter’s marriage – which offends him more on social grounds than on moral ones – Peachum launches an all-out war against Macheath and his gang of rogues; and it is the vicissitudes of this war that form the content of The Threepenny Opera. However, it ends with Macheath being saved literally from the gallows, and a grand, if somewhat parodistic operatic finale satisfactorily rounds it all off.
The Beggar’s Opera was first performed in 1728 at the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre. Contrary to what a number of German translators have supposed, its title does not signify an opera featuring beggars but ‘the beggar’s opera’, in other words an opera for beggars. Written in response to a suggestion by the great Jonathan Swift, The Beggar’s Opera was a parody of Handel, and it is said to have had a splendid result in that Handel’s theatre became ruined. Since there is nowadays no target for parody on the scale of Handel’s theatre all attempt at parody has been abandoned: the musical score is entirely modern. We still, however, have the same sociological situation. Just like two hundred years ago we have a social order in which virtually all levels, albeit in a wide variety of ways, pay respect to moral principles not by leading a moral life but by living off morality. Where its form is concerned, the Threepenny Opera represents a basic type of opera. It contains elements of opera and elements of the drama.
[‘Über die Dreigroschenoper – 1’ from GW Schriften zum Theater p. 987. Dated 9 January 1929, when it appeared as an article in the Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten to introduce the production in Brecht’s home town.]
NOTES TO The Threepenny Opera
The Reading of Plays
There is no reason why John Gay’s motto for his Beggar’s Opera – nos haec novimus esse nihil – should be changed for The Threepenny Opera. Its publication represents little more than the promptbook of a play wholly surrendered to theatres, and thus is directed at the expert rather than at the consumer. This doesn’t mean that the conversion of the maximum number of readers or spectators into experts is not thoroughly desirable; indeed it is under way.
The Threepenny Opera is concerned with bourgeois conceptions not only as content, by representing them, but also through the manner in which it does so. It is a kind of report on life as any member of the audience would like to see it. Since at the same time, however, he sees a good deal that he has no wish to see; since therefore he sees his wishes not merely fulfilled but also criticised (sees himself not as the subject but as the object), he is theoretically in a position to appoint a new function for the theatre. But the theatre itself resists any alteration of its function, and so it seems desirable that the spectator should read plays whose aim is not merely to be performed in the theatre but to change it: out of mistrust of the theatre. Today we see the theatre being given absolute priority over the actual plays. The theatre apparatus’s priority is a priority of means of production. This apparatus resists all conversion to other purposes, by taking any play which it encounters and immediately changing it so that it no longer represents a foreign body within the apparatus – except at those points where it neutralises itself. The necessity to stage the new drama correctly – which matters more for the theatre’s sake than for the drama’s – is modified by the fact that the theatre can stage anything: it theatres it all down. Of course this priority has economic reasons.
The Principal Characters
The character of JONATHAN PEACHUM is not to be resumed in the stereotyped formula ‘miser’. He has no regard for money. Mistrusting as he does anything that might inspire hope, he sees money as just one more wholly ineffective weapon of defence. Certainly he is a rascal, a theatrical rascal of the old school. His crime lies in his conception of the world. Though it is a conception worthy in its ghastliness of standing alongside the achievements of any of the other great criminals, in making a commodity of human misery he is merely following the trend of the times. To give a practical example, when Peachum takes Filch’s money in scene 1 he does not think of locking it in a cashbox but merely shoves it in hi
s pocket: neither this nor any other money is going to save him. It is pure conscientiousness on his part, and a proof of his general despondency, if he does not just throw it away: he cannot throw away the least trifle. His attitude to a million shillings would be exactly the same. In his view neither his money (or all the money in the world) nor his head (or all the heads in the world) will see him through. And this is the reason why he never works but just wanders round his shop with his hat on his head and his hands in his pockets, checking that nothing is going astray. No truly worried man ever works. It is not meanness on his part if he has his Bible chained to his desk because he is scared someone might steal it. He never looks at his son-in-law before he has got him on the gallows, since no conceivable personal values of any kind could influence him to adopt a different approach to a man who deprives him of his daughter. Mac the Knife’s other crimes only concern him in so far as they provide a means of getting rid of him. As for Peachum’s daughter, she is like the Bible, just a potential aid. This is not so much repellent as disturbing, once you consider what depths of desperation are implied when nothing in the world is of any use except that minute portion which could help to save a drowning man.
The actress playing POLLY PEACHUM should study the foregoing description of Mr Peachum. She is his daughter.
The bandit MACHEATH must be played as a bourgeois phenomenon. The bourgeoisie’s fascination with bandits rests on a misconception: that a bandit is not a bourgeois. This misconception is the child of another misconception: that a bourgeois is not a bandit. Does this mean that they are identical? No: occasionally a bandit is not a coward. The qualification ‘peaceable’ normally attributed to the bourgeois by our theatre is here achieved by Macheath’s dislike, as a good businessman, of the shedding of blood except where strictly necessary – for the sake of the business. This reduction of bloodshed to a minimum, this economising, is a business principle; at a pinch Mr Macheath can wield an exceptionally agile blade. He is aware what is due to his legend: a certain romantic aura can further the economies in question if enough care is taken to spread it around. He is punctilious in ensuring that all hazardous, or at any rate bloodcurdling actions by his subordinates get ascribed to himself, and is just as reluctant as any professor to see his assistants put their name to a job. He impresses women less as a handsome man than as a well situated one. There are English drawings of The Beggar’s Opera which show a short, stocky man of about forty with a head like a radish, a bit bald but not lacking dignity. He is emphatically staid, is without the least sense of humour, while his solid qualities can be gauged from the fact that he thinks more of exploiting his employees than of robbing strangers. With the forces of law and order he is on good terms; his common sense tells him that his own security is closely bound up with that of society. To Mr Macheath the kind of affront to public order with which Peachum menaces the police would be profoundly disturbing. Certainly his relations with the ladies of Turnbridge strike him as demanding justification, but this justification is adequately provided by the special nature of his business. Occasionally he has made use of their purely business relationship to cheer himself up, as any bachelor is entitled to do in moderation; but what he appreciates about this more private aspect is the fact that his regular and pedantically punctual visits to a certain Turnbridge coffee-house are habits, whose cultivation and proliferation is perhaps the main objective of his correspondingly bourgeois life.
In any case the actor playing Macheath must definitely not base his interpretation of the part on this frequenting of a disorderly house. It is one of the not uncommon but none the less incomprehensible instances of bourgeois demonism.
As for Macheath’s true sexual needs, he naturally would rather satisfy them where he can get certain domestic comforts thrown in, in other words with women who are not entirely without means. He sees his marriage as an insurance for his business. However slight his regard for it, his profession necessitates a temporary absence from the capital, and his subordinates are highly unreliable. When he pictures his future he never for one moment sees himself on the gallows, just quietly fishing the stream on a property of his own.
BROWN the police commissioner is a very modern phenomenon. He is a twofold personality: his private and official natures differ completely. He lives not in spite of this fission but through it. And along with him the whole of society is living through its fission. As a private individual he would never dream of lending himself to what he considers his duty as an official. As a private individual he would not (and must not) hurt a fly. … In short, his affection for Macheath is entirely genuine; the fact that it brings certain business advantages does not render it suspect; too bad that life is always throwing mud at everything. …
Hints for actors
As for the communication of this material, the spectator must not be made to adopt the empathetic approach. There must be a process of exchange between spectator and actor, with the latter at bottom addressing himself directly to the spectator despite all the strangeness and detachment. The actor then has to tell the spectator more about his character ‘than lies in the part’. He must naturally adopt the attitude which allows the episode to develop easily. At the same time he must also set up relationships with episodes other than those of the story, not just be the story’s servant. In a love scene with Macheath, for instance, Polly is not only Macheath’s beloved but also Peachum’s daughter. Her relations with the spectator must embrace her criticisms of the accepted notions concerning bandits’ women and shopkeepers’ daughters.
1.* [p. 103] The actors should refrain from depicting these bandits as a collection of those depressing individuals with red neckerchiefs who frequent places of entertainment and with whom no decent person would drink a glass of beer. They are naturally sedate persons, some of them portly and all without exception good mixers when off duty.
2. [p. 103] This is where the actors can demonstrate the practical use of bourgeois virtues and the close relationship between dishonesty and sentiment.
3. [p. 104] It must be made clear how violently energetic a man needs to be if he is to create a situation in which a worthier attitude (that of a bridegroom) is possible.
4. [p. 107] What has to be shown here is the displaying of the bride, her fleshliness, at the moment of its final apportionment. At the very instant when supply must cease, demand has once again to be stimulated to its peak. The bride is desired all round; the bridegroom then sets the pace. It is, in other words, a thoroughly theatrical event. At the same time it has to be shown that the bride is hardly eating. How often one sees the daintiest creatures wolfing down entire chickens and fishes! Not so brides.
5. [p. 119] In showing such matters as Peachum’s business the actors do not need to bother too much about the normal development of the plot. It is, however, important that they should present a development rather than an ambience. The actor playing one of the beggars should aim to show the selection of an appropriately effective wooden leg (trying on one, laying it aside, trying another, then going back to the first) in such a way that people decide to see the play a second time at the right moment to catch this turn; nor is there anything to prevent the theatre featuring it on the screens in the background.
6. [p. 127] It is absolutely essential that the spectator should see Miss Polly Peachum as a virtuous and agreeable girl. Having given evidence of her uncalculating love in the second scene, she now demonstrates that practical-mindedness which saves it from being mere ordinary frivolity.
7. [p. 131] These ladies are in undisturbed possession of their means of production. Just for this reason they must give no impression that they are free. Democracy for them does not represent the same freedom as it does for those whose means of production can be taken away from them.
8. [p. 134] This is where those Macheaths who seem least inhibited from portraying his death agony commonly baulk at singing the third verse. They would obviously not reject the sexual theme if a tragedy had been made of it. But in our day and
age sexual themes undoubtedly belong in the realm of comedy; for sex life and social life conflict, and the resulting contradiction is comic because it can only be resolved historically, i.e. under a different social order. So the actor must be able to put across a ballad like this in a comic way. It is very important how sexual life is represented on stage, if only becuase a certain primitive materialism always enters into it. The artificiality and transitoriness of all social superstructures becomes visible.
9. [p. 137] Like other ballades in The Threepenny Opera this one contains a few lines from François Villon in the German version by K. L. Ammer. The actor will find that it pays to read Ammer’s translation, as it shows the differences between a ballade to be sung and a ballade to be read.
10. [p. 156] This scene is an optional one designed for those Pollys who have a gift for comedy.
11. [p. 160] As he paces round his cell the actor playing Macheath can at this point recapitulate all the ways of walking which he has so far shown the audience. The seducer’s insolent way, the hunted man’s nervous way, the arrogant way, the experienced way and so on. In the course of this brief stroll he can once again show every attitude adopted by Macheath in the course of these few days.
12. [p. 161] This is where the actor of the epic theatre is careful not to let his efforts to stress Macheath’s fear of death and make it dominate the whole message of the Act, lead him to throw away the depiction of true friendship which follows. (True friendship is only true if it is kept within limits. The moral victory scored by Macheath’s two truest friends is barely diminished by these two gentlemen’s subsequent moral defeat, when they are not quick enough to hand over their means of existence in order to save their friend).
13. [p. 163] Perhaps the actor can find some way of showing the following: Macheath quite rightly feels that in his case there has been a gruesome miscarriage of justice. And true enough, if justice were to lead to the victimisation of any more bandits than it does at present it would lose what little reputation it has.
Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 2 Page 32
