The Threepenny Opera caused an immediate sensation when it opened in Berlin in 1928, changing the shape of musical theatre forever. This savage satire on bourgeois society tells the tale of the villainous but irresistible Macheath (‘Mack the Knife’) a notorious thief, pimp and murderer, and his entourage of criminals. Another appendix offers additional strophes that could be used by performers as alternatives or supplements to four of the songs in the main text.‘The 1928 show that made musicals like Cabaret and Chicago possible: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera is the granddaddy of all the singing, stinging portraits of fat societies on their eves of destruction.’ THE NEW YORK TIMESīrutal, scandalous and raunchy, the Gate Theatre is proud to present The Threepenny Opera, the epic masterpiece of 20th century musical theatre, in association with Dublin Theatre Festival. The editors were able to reconstruct five of these from the instrumental parts and have included them in a special appendix. For instance, the original production included six pieces of instrumental stage music based upon a few of the work’s most popular songs.

Included are many features never before published. The edition presents not just the musical text but the complete dialogue and stage instructions in their proper sequence.

The result is a corrected, self-consistent version true to the historical state of the work that first so electrified its audiences. But the editors went far beyond those three items to consult several dozen other documents, from the original, hand-written instrumental parts to Weill’s correspondence with his publisher Universal Edition, to contemporaneous press reviews and recordings. The new edition reconciles the many confusions of detail in the three key sources that emerged from that famed original 1928 production: Weill’s manuscript, the published libretto, and the published piano-vocal score. Still, through seventy-two years and literally thousands of productions, the work had never been available in an authoritative edition of both text and music in a single volume. The volume is co-edited by Stephen Hinton (Stanford University), one of the pre-eminent Weill scholars active in the world today, and Edward Harsh, the Managing Editor of the KWE project.Įver since its first production took Berlin by storm, Die Dreigroschenoper has been widely seen as one of the most important music-theatrical works of the twentieth-century as well as an icon of Weimar culture. This is the first edited volume of the collected edition series, the Kurt Weill Edition (KWE).

Die Dreigroschenoper ( The Threepenny Opera) is the acclaimed 1928 adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

The threepenny opera by bertolt brecht