Word: weills
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Once in a while, one may notice a similar visibility problem in the Leverett House production of the opera, but Weill's music and Bertolt Brecht's words ultimately triumph over all obstacles...
...HELL WITH posterity: I write for today," Kurt Weill remarked about the period during which he was writing The Threepenny Opera. But 44 years after its premiere in the Berlin Goebbels had just told "you're going to have a lot of fun with us," the opera is unfortunately as powerful and pointed as ever, with no end in sight...
Langmuir might have taken a tip from Weill, whom songs generally make their points by threatening to become happy, lyrical jazz just before they turn irretrievably sour. The opera's overture--a sort of bitter chorale in which the saxophones seems to be playing Bach just a little out of tune--sets the mood, and then things really get underway with the Moritat, better known as "Mack the Knife." If you have only heard Mantovani versions, you can have no idea what bite this song has. Stephen Schmidt, the conductor, puts it across beautifully, although the band has an occasional...
...Mack is executed. Kazaras rises to the occasion. "What is the robbing of a bank to the founding of one?" he asks. A mounted messenger promptly rushes up to knight him, though Brecht reassures us that real life would not have come out so happily. We are left with Weill's corrosive tunes and a second-act reminder that shines through Marc Blitzstein's generally smooth translation: "For even honest men may act like sinners, unless they've had their customary dinners...
While the Berlin section of the evening is less well done, it is more meaningful because Weill's collaborator was Bertolt Brecht. Between them they fashioned a dramatic rhetoric of music and lyrics that moved with deceptive ease from the beat of the goose step to the glide of the tango. Decadence was their target, but they were half in love with what they hated; Weill could decant sin from a saxophone. The music that he later composed in the U.S. somehow lacks that moral bite that Brecht inspired...