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    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"
    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"
    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"
    Ebook41 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535840040
    A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera"

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      A Study Guide for Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera" - Gale

      4

      The Threepenny Opera

      Bertolt Brecht

      1928

      Introduction

      Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 play The Threepenny Opera was his most financially successful play and the work with which he is most closely identified. The play is an early example of his epic theater, consisting of theatrical innovations designed to awaken audiences to social responsibility. Epic theater uses alienating devices, such as placards, asides to the audience, projected images, discordant music and lighting, and disconnected episodes to frustrate the viewer’s expectations for simple entertainment. This theater of illusions (as anti-realists such as Brecht termed it) allowed the audience to comfortably and passively view a production without being changed by it. It was Brecht’s intention to use drama to invoke social change, to shake his audiences out of their complacency and expect more from the theater than entertainment.

      The disruptive capacity of Brecht’s drama was designed to awaken the theater-goers critical mind and galvanize them into political awareness and action. The Threepenny Opera, which he produced with the aid of his secretary (and lover) Elisabeth Hauptmann (who had just translated John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera [1728] into German) and composer Kurt Weill, is a satire of bourgeois society, containing many of the major elements of epic theater: placards announcing the ballad singers, discordant music, and a plot that frustrates expectations for romantic resolution. The Threepenny Opera is very closely based on Gay’s eighteenth-century play, another social satire. Brecht and Hauptmann borrowed ballads from Francois Villon, and Weill turned them into darkly twisted cabaret songs for this version of the play.

      Brecht also made some stylistic changes, transforming the protagonist, Macheath, into a morally ambiguous hero, emphasizing the parallels between Polly and Lucy, and creating the character of Sheriff Jackie Brown, a former army buddy of Macheath’s who protects his friend’s criminal activity in exchange for a percentage of his spoils. Brecht’s play places blame on capitalist society for the criminal underworld that Gay presented merely as a mirror-image satire of eighteenth-century aristocracy. Weill’s discordant mesh of jazz, folk, and avant-garde music adds to the play’s popular appeal, which was the polar opposite of what Brecht wanted: he designed his epic theater to awaken the audience’s critical judgement, not its empathy. Despite Brecht’s designs, The Threepenny Opera has become one of the hallmarks of musical theater and his most popular play. While it is regarded in modern drama as a significant political work,

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