The Threepenny Opera
by Bertolt Brecht
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bertolt BrechtCollaborator: E. Hauptmann
Collaborator: Kurt Weill
Translator: Ralph Manheim
Translator: John Willett
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Published: 1977
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 81
Publisher: Vintage Books
Book Reviews of The Threepenny Opera
Book Review: Just Say No to Mac the Knife
Summary: 1 Stars
Reading the German playwright Bertolt Brecht today is like reading some medieval theologian whose works were once considered inspired and were an authentic reflection of his times but whose world-view has become so outdated that to comprehend him now requires an effort of will prefaced by extensive historical analysis. The music and the dialogue may still amuse, but the message has become stale and barely comprehensible.
Macheath, more commonly known as "Mac the Knife," made famous by Louis Armstrong's rendition, is not merely the chief protagonist of this "beggar's opera," and the vicious leader of a criminal gang, but is intended by Brecht to be the pre-eminent "bourgeois phenomenon." Reliable only in his duplicity, wealthy only in his criminal reputation and police connections, Macheath is the inevitable result of the workings of the ideological "superstructure" of capitalism, which, in Brecht's Marxian view, causes people to objectify human relations in the quest for short-term profit.
Like most Marxists, Brecht's Marxism is as deep and unquestioned as that of any religious zealot. His goal is to transform the theater from a mere medium of passive amusement for well-endowed bourgeois patrons into a field of action where the players act upon the theater-goers and engage them in the acting process, forcing them to gaze into a mirror and confront their own flawed participation in the "capitalist" economic system. Brecht even shows the elitism of classic Marxists, convinced despite all evidence to the contrary that they alone held the keys to the secrets of history and the salvation of Mankind, by stating that his technique of projecting scene-titles onto well-lit boards to introduce the play's songs is an attempt at "literarization of the theater," as if the average middle-class theater-goer in Berlin in 1928 had yet to learn to read.
In the end, Brecht's Three-Penny Opera is not about art, or the theater, and much less about the London lower-classes where the Opera ostensibly takes place, but about semi-religious proselytizing. He wishes to convert, not educate or entertain. Unfortunately, the Marxian faith of simple economic determinism that he propounds was already fading by the time of the Weimar Republic, having been superseded by successive waves of philosophical innovation that explicitly rejected (Friedrich Nietzsche) or implicitly undermined (Martin Heidegger) the Marxist view, and was replaced among most Marxists by Lenin's conspiratorial Communism during the 1890's. Reading the Three-Penny Opera today is like opening one's door to a wandering Jehovah's Witness. One may have a rousing conversation, but the topic and the purpose of the exchange are pre-determined, and the conversants will soon be reduced to fruitless attempts to refute each other's arguments with snippets of scriptural dogma.
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