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The Threepenny Opera (1950–1954) and Other Adaptations

Howard Pollack

in Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World

Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press
January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780199791590 eISBN: 9780199949625 acprof:oso/9780199791590.003.0019
Item type: chapter

This chapter discusses Blitzstein’s work as director, translator, and

adapter from 1950 to the end of his life. This includes his supervision
of a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan for which Leonard Bernstein
had written the music; his adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make
an Opera for American audiences; his adaptations of Verdi’s La Traviata,
Offenbach’s L’îsle de Tulipatan, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The
Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and
Brecht’s Mother Courage, among other works. The adaptation of The
Threepenny Opera, which starred Lotte Lenya and Scott Merrill, enjoyed
special success; by the time of its close in 1961, it had broken the record
for New York’s longest-running musical, while one of its songs, “Mack the
Knife,” proved one of the great hits of the time, with recordings by Louis
Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World

Howard Pollack
Published in print: 2012 Published Online: Publisher: Oxford University Press
January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780199791590 eISBN: 9780199949625 acprof:oso/9780199791590.001.0001
Item type: book

This is a study of the life and work of one of America’s most brilliant
and inspiring composer-dramatists, Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964). A
piano student of Alexander Siloti, and composition student of Rosario
Scalero, Nadia Boulanger, and Arnold Schoenberg, Blitzstein innovatively
combined serious and popular techniques and traditions in order to
reach the large audience for radio, film, and Broadway shows, producing
work, conditioned by Marxist perspectives, that spoke to the concerns
of workers, immigrants, women, and minorities. His most successful

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works include the operas The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and Regina (1949,
adapted from Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, The Little Foxes), for which he
wrote both the words and music, and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and
Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which helped popularize that piece
in English-speaking countries, and which yielded the hit song “Mack
the Knife.” Other notable works include the opera No for an Answer,
the Airborne Symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the ballet
The Guests, and two late stage works, Reuben Reuben and Juno. Such
works had, according to Leonard Bernstein, an “incalculable” influence
on the American musical theater, and remain particularly noteworthy in
terms of their musical prosody, their formal novelty, and their amalgam
of serious and popular elements. This study considers other aspects of
the composer’s life: his Jewish-Russian background and his childhood in
Philadelphia; his activities as a pianist, critic, and translator; his marriage
to the writer Eva Goldbeck and his relations with friends and colleagues;
his involvement with various progressive social causes; his service in the
Army as an entertainment specialist during World War II; his brush with
anti-communist attacks; and his violent death in Martinique at age fifty-
eight.

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