2013-02-28
4 分钟Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein discuss Moritat die Mackie Messer from Threepenny Opera by Brecht/Weill
The story of music in 50 pieces with Howard Goodall and Susie Klein.
Howard, we've talked about composers like Gershwin bringing together the worlds of highbrow in quotes, and lowbrow musical culture.
Arguably, nobody did that more successfully than Kurt Weil in the thropny opera.
Songs like Mack the Knife, which is the ultimate fusion of all.
All of those musical worlds, the opera house, the concert hall, the sleazy bars of Berlin, all come together in that one song.
Yes, Gershwin came from a jazz songwriting background and then approached writing Rhapsody in Bleu by sort of picking up how you write classical music.
Kurtwhl came from the other direction.
Kurtweil was classically trained and wrote classical pieces of music.
In a sense, he came from a very old fashioned german background in music.
And then his collision, if you like, with Bertholdt Brecht and marxist politics and the Weimar Republic cabaret jazz scene in Berlin is a remarkable and rather unexpected outcome for a composer, the son of a cantor from East Germany, to have ended up writing this edgy cabaret style music.
And it's the strange coming together of operatic style, of theatre, of polemic, and his musical ingredient that made the thruppenny opera.
It makes it such an interesting 20th century piece.
Apart from the fact that it was immensely popular outside of Mack the knife, which has been covered by swing artists like Frank Sinatra, Robbie Williams, whoever you care to do.
It's pretty much sung, that song.
In fact, the rest of the piece of the srepignopre is quite a complex, quite an unusual sounding mix of styles, which draws on lutheran chorale, it draws on sort of mock opera arias.
It's written for voices other than for his wife, Lotilania, who sings in a kind of croaky, frog like voice.
Apart from Lotilena, the rest of the voices in it are actually operatic voices.
They're not jazz singers.
This is not a musical in the sense that we would understand it in terms of a musical where people sing with natural show voices.
Bertol, Brecht and Kurtweil knew about a production of the Beggars opera that was put on in London, where they'd updated it and done a new translation.