Coda | BLO | Spring 2018

THE MAGAZINE OF BOSTON LYRIC OPERA | SPRING 2018

ESTHER NELSON, STANFORD CALDERWOOD GENERAL & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR | DAVID ANGUS, MUSIC DIRECTOR | JOHN CONKLIN, ARTISTIC ADVISOR

WEIMAR GERMANY AND BALMY TAHITI COME TO BOSTON

EDITORIAL STAFF Cathy Emmons Rebecca Kirk Sara O’Brien Lacey Upton Eileen Williston

As rehearsals draw near, designs are finalized, and artists begin to gather in Boston—in preparation for the second half of our 41st Season— I think of the rich musical history in and around Boston that has sustained and generated so many fine musical works over generations. There are also fascinating connections to be found in the operas in our spring Season, The Threepenny Opera and Trouble in Tahiti.

CONTRIBUTORS Lucy Caplan John Conklin Richard Dyer Harlow Robinson Laurence Senelick

Like many classical music organizations in America, BLO is celebrating Leonard Bernstein’s centenary in 2018. The composer and conductor’s local connections are well-known (Lawrence-born, Harvard-educated, BSO-affiliated), but less well-known is that Bernstein’s masterful one-act Trouble in Tahiti had its 1952 World Premiere at Brandeis University in Waltham—part of the inaugural “Festival of the Creative Arts.”

Founded by Bernstein while on the faculty, the Festival continues at Brandeis to this day. In 2018, BLO is honored to open Brandeis’ Festival with a mini-concert celebrating Bernstein and a panel discussion on Tahiti and his brilliant song cycle Arias & Barcarolles, with which we pair Tahiti in May. Please join us for this Festival event on April 15— find more info at BLO.org.

MISSION The mission of Boston Lyric Opera is to build curiosity, enthusiasm, and support for opera by creating musically and theatrically compelling productions, events, and educational resources for our community and beyond. We produce opera in all forms, large to small, popular to lesser known, from early music to newly-commissioned works.

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE Boston Lyric Opera 11 Avenue de Lafayette Boston, MA 02111-1736 P: 617.542.4912 | F: 617.542.4913

Bernstein’s 1952 Festival also featured the first-ever performance of Marc Blitzstein’s translation of The Threepenny Opera, with Lotte Lenya reprising the role of Jenny (which she originated in Germany) and Blitzstein (a good friend of Bernstein’s) as the Narrator. The Blitzstein production went on to a historic Off-Broadway run of 2,611 performances—and cemented Threepenny’s place in American culture, pop and otherwise. To see fascinating photos of the inaugural Festival from the Brandeis University Archives, turn to page 8.

AUDIENCE SERVICES 617.542.6772 | boxoffice@blo.org PATRON SERVICES Bailey Kerr 617.542.4912 x 2450 | bkerr@blo.org

Threepenny and Tahiti, very different on their surfaces, are full of surprising confluences.

By mining the allegorical, the personal, and the political, these operas, along with Arias, evaluate the society we inhabit with sharp wit and piercing insight. We hope you join us this spring, to experience our exciting new productions of these great works.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & EDUCATION Lacey Upton 617.542.4912 x2420 | education@blo.org EVENTS Sara O’Brien 617.542.4912 x2900 | sobrien@blo.org

Esther Nelson

For a full listing of BLO staff, please visit BLO.org/about.

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BLO’s programs are funded, in part, by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Coda Magazine is underwritten with the support of Jane and Jeffrey Marshall.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS “The World Is Poor and Men Are Bad”: The Threepenny Opera and Politics, Then and Today.................................... 2 High Five: Get to Know The Threepenny Opera in 5 Minutes or Less....................... 4

CELEBRATES LEONARD BERNSTEIN

T

Journey To Tahiti: The Genesis of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti............................ 5

his spring, BLO brings the vitality and artistry of Leonard Bernstein across Greater Boston as we honor the 100th anniversary of his birth. BLO artists perform a short concert of music from throughout Bernstein’s canon at four partnering institutions, paired with experts and discussions that illuminate various aspects of his rich musical and personal life, as well as the upcoming BLO production of Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles.

High Five: Get to Know Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles in 5 Minutes or Less.......................................... 7

BLO MEETS BERNSTEIN: CONCERT AND PANEL DISCUSSION Sunday, April 15 | 12:00 – 1:15 PM Brandeis University | Slosberg Music Center Festival of the Creative Arts

TROUBLE IN TAHITI AND THE AMERICAN DREAM Thursday, May 3 | 6:30 – 8:00 PM The Boston Athenæum BLO Signature Series LEONARD BERNSTEIN & PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY Thursday, May 10 | 6:00 – 7:30 PM John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum | Columbia Point Kennedy Library Forum Series

LEARN MORE AT BLO.ORG/EVENTS

THIS PROGRAM IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE BOSTON CULTURAL COUNCIL, A LOCAL AGENCY WHICH IS FUNDED BY THE MASS CULTURAL COUNCIL AND ADMINISTERED BY THE MAYOR'S OFFICE OF ARTS AND CULTURE.

PHOTOGRAPHER: FRIEDMAN-ABELES - THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BILLY ROSE THEATRE COLLECTION, 1950-1965

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: AMERICA’S MAESTRO Wednesday, April 25 | 6:00 – 7:00 PM BPL Central Branch | Rabb Lecture Hall Opera Night at the Boston Public Library

Bernstein’s Festival, 1952: Photos from the Brandeis University Archives..................... 8 Brecht Hated Opera: So Why Write Threepenny?.............................. 10 Spotlight: The World Premiere Opera Schoenberg in Hollywood, in Progress................................. 12 The Personal, Political Leonard Bernstein..................... 14 A Double-Edged Blade: The Curious History of “Mack the Knife”....................... 17 Contributors..............................20 Curtains...................................... 21

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 1

Karl Marx in 1875, International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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N EARLY 1952, the New York City Opera announced that it would stage the first major American production of The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) the following season.

The reaction in conservative political circles was immediate and outraged. Composer and critic Kurt List questioned in The New Leader why a “more or less publicly supported institution should lend itself to any kind of political propaganda,” and declared that “the morality of the Dreigroschenoper is completely out of place in our America of today.”

JOHN JABEZ EDWIN MAYAL

“THE WORLD IS POOR AND MEN ARE BAD.” THE THREEPENNY OPERA AND POLITICS, THEN AND TODAY

BY HARLOW ROBINSON 2 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

In 1952, the “America of today” was at war in Korea, and consumed with anti-Communist hysteria whipped up in Washington, D.C.,

by Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was well known, List wrote, that Bertolt Brecht—co-creator of The Threepenny Opera along with composer Kurt Weill—“belonged to the fringe of Communist sympathizers.” Indeed, Brecht (1898-1956) had been summoned to testify concerning his relationship with the Communist Party before the Committee on Un-American Activities of the U.S. House of Representatives (HUAC) in 1947. Shortly afterwards, he left America to live and work in Communist East Germany. Brecht’s Communist convictions, formed originally in his native Germany in the late 1920s, were common knowledge and permeated much of his extensive work as a playwright and librettist—including The Threepenny Opera, his most popular and infamous creation.

Given all this, List concluded in his diatribe in The New Leader, “the gentlemen responsible for the production should announce it as what it essentially is: a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda which exalts anarchical gangsterism and prostitution over democratic law and order.” That City Opera was planning to use a new adaptation recently completed by Marc Blitzstein, another committed Communist (and even worse, homosexual) best known for his pro-union 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock, only further scandalized the powerful anti-Communist guardians of Cold War American culture.

Bowing to the intense political pressure, the chairman of the board of directors of City Opera announced only three days after the publication of List’s article that the planned production had been “postponed from this spring until next fall because of financial troubles.” Thirteen years would pass before the company would finally mount its first production of this acknowledged masterpiece of 20th-century musical theater in 1965, long after the work had established itself in less august surroundings Off-Broadway and elsewhere in America as both a commercial and artistic success.

(A concert version at Brandeis University in 1952 conducted

by Leonard Bernstein played an important role in bringing The Threepenny Opera to the attention of a wider American audience—see pages 8 & 9 for an inside look.)

In 2018 America, Communism no longer terrifies the same way it did in 1952. Or even in 1928, the year that Die Dreigroschenoper took the stage in its first scruffy incarnation at the Theater

am Schiffbauerdamm, in the free-wheeling Weimar Berlin immortalized by Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and the musical and film Cabaret. That same year, Josef Stalin became the supreme leader of the USSR, the world’s first socialist nation, and set about establishing a tyrannical regime that would eventually control millions of people in Europe and Asia. But the USSR collapsed in 1991, along with most other Communist regimes around the world. Since then, Russia has embraced capitalism—sort of. And China is still—nominally— a Communist nation, but threatens us more as an economic than an ideological rival.

So does the original Marxist message of The Threepenny Opera still speak to us today? Is it still true, as Polly Peachum and her parents sing at the end of Act I, that “The world is poor and men are bad”?

For Brecht, the political took precedence over all else. In a 1933 mock interview he conducted with himself, the librettist recorded this exchange: What, in your opinion, accounted for the success of Die Dreigroschenoper?

I’m afraid it was everything that didn’t matter to me: the romantic plot, the love story, the music….

And what would have mattered to you?

The critique of society.

pimps and prostitutes. Set to Weill’s piquant, naughty, jazzy and urban music, the text was adapted by Brecht as a vehicle perfect for his political views.

But political manifestoes rarely make for great nights in the theater.

There are plenty of examples in the deadening and monotonous Socialist Realist style that was required of writers and musicians in the USSR and other Communist nations. The Threepenny Opera has endured because it has vibrant, sexy, multi-dimensional and recognizable characters, great tunes, and most of all because the musical and literary styles complement each other in a fresh, provocative and “modern” style. It was a new kind of entertainment for a new and troubling era.

And really, is there any question that the message of The Threepenny Opera still resonates in post-Communist 2018, when the gap between rich and poor around the world is only widening?

The sentiments of the cynical realist Macheath (in Eric Bentley’s translation) at the end of Act II still—unfortunately—carry a familiar sting: What does a man live by? By resolutely Ill-treating, beating, cheating, eating some other bloke!

A man can only live absolutely Forgetting he’s a man like other folk!

Kurt Weill (1900-1950), a German Jew who later sought refuge from the Nazis in the United States, did not share Brecht’s fierce Marxist passions.

Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, who took the role of the salacious, world-weary Jenny in the original Berlin production and later in a smash-hit version staged at a Greenwich Village theater in 1954, once observed with her caustic candor that Weill “was not interested in setting the Communist manifesto to music.” By the mid-1930s, after several more collaborations including The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, another searing indictment of capitalism, the two men drifted apart, in part because Weill found Brecht’s political views aesthetically confining.

Right, Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel on the roof of the Berliner Ensemble during the International Workers’ Day demonstrations in 1954. Above, original WPA poster for The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein, 1938.

HORST STURM

Brecht had discovered Marx’s writings shortly before he began work on The Threepenny Opera. At the time, Germany was mired in a severe economic crisis, with rampant corruption, unemployment and inflation. For many intellectuals and creative artists, communism seemed a humane and more egalitarian alternative to capitalism—and to the rising threat of fascism. After reading Marx’s masterwork Das Kapital, Brecht declared that “this man Marx was the only audience for my plays that I had come across.” It was in this mood that Brecht encountered a translation by his collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera, a sordid and colorful tale of London’s thieves, corrupt cops and politicians,

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 3

WHO’S WHO KELLY KADUCE AS POLLY PEACHUM CHRISTOPHER BURCHETT AS MACHEATH With Daniel Belcher as Tiger Brown and Renée Tatum as Jenny Conducted by David Angus and directed by James Darrah. Scenic Design by Julia NoulinMérat, Costume Design by Charles Neumann, and Lighting Design by Pablo Santiago.

HIGH FIVE:

Get to Know Threepenny in Five Minutes or Less THE THREEPENNY OPERA MARCH 16 – 25 Music by Kurt Weill | Libretto by Bertolt Brecht Sung in English, in a translation by Michael Feingold, with no supertitles.

Length: Approx. 2 hours, 45 minutes, including 1 intermission SUPER-SHORT SYNOPSIS Soho, London: June, 1838, leading up to the coronation of Queen Victoria. A street singer describes the recent crimes of the gangster Macheath—better known as “Mack the Knife.”

Mr. and Mrs. Peachum’s daughter, Polly, did not return home last night. They conclude that she spent the evening with Macheath, and Peachum—the boss of London’s beggars—vows to destroy him.

Polly and Macheath celebrate their marriage with a crowd of his men. The Chief of Police, Tiger Brown, arrives, and Macheath reveals that Brown is on the take. Polly returns home and announces her marriage to her parents, inadvertently sharing Macheath and Brown’s connection.

Macheath and Polly make plans for him to evade arrest. He visits his favorite brothel to say good-bye to his ex, Jenny—whom Mrs. Peachum has bribed. Brown arrests him.

In jail, Macheath reflects. Polly argues with Lucy, Brown’s daughter and another of Macheath’s girlfriends. Lucy helps Macheath escape, but Peachum coerces Brown into arresting him again.

Back in jail, Macheath again awaits his hanging. Suddenly, a messenger arrives with startling news, and the company gathers to sing the final moral of the tale.

ABOUT THE BLO PRODUCTION • Director James Darrah will focus on the characters’ personal journeys as they fall in and out of love (and lust), lose their innocence (if they ever really had it), and scheme for survival (perhaps most important).

• Though set in the early 19th century, costumes are evocative of the 1920s, when the opera premiered, with a few dramatic period touches.

• In keeping with its roots as a piece of theatre, and because it was composed to be sung by performers from a wide range of musical backgrounds, BLO will present Threepenny Opera without supertitles.

Kurt We ill a at home nd Lotte Lenya in 1942.

PHOTO S

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HAUPTMANN: THE UNCREDITED CO-WRITER? Several scholars have debated the role that Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht’s longtime lover and collaborator, played in the writing of Threepenny. It was Hauptmann who translated The Beggar’s Opera from English to German, seeing many parallels to the corruption of 1920s Germany. Officially, Brecht adapted her translation into the Threepenny text, but scholars such as John Fuegi claim that Hauptmann was actually responsible for 80 to 90% of the final work—without receiving a writer’s credit. This is a pattern, they say, that Brecht repeated with Hauptmann and several other female collaborators throughout his career.

While the extent and details of their collaborations are still hotly debated, it’s clear that Elisabeth Hauptmann was a brilliant literary mind who devoted much of her life and work to the political and artistic ideals that Brecht espoused.

WORLD WIDE

THE INSPIRATION The Threepenny Opera is based on the 1728 smash hit, The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay. Gay satirized the upper crust of London society with his irreverent work, which utilized popular songs of the day with witty new lyrics. Several characters were drawn from well-known figures: for instance, the highwayman Macheath was based on the notorious thief Jack Sheppard,

who escaped jail four times and penned a (possibly ghostwritten) autobiography that became wildly successful after he was finally caught and hanged in 1724. The opera poked fun at the pretensions of the elite and the conventions of Italian opera, the art form of choice for London’s high society, and lampooned corruption, deals, and bribe-making on all levels of society.

Bernstein at the piano, making annotations to a musical score.

AL RAVENNA, WORLD TELEGRAM & SUN AND LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

JOURNEY TO TAHITI:

THE GENESIS OF BERNSTEIN’S TROUBLE IN TAHITI

BY RICHARD DYER

BLO CELEBRATES THE 100TH BIRTHDAY OF LEONARD BERNSTEIN WITH EIGHT PERFORMANCES OF A DOUBLE BILL OF ONE OF HIS MOST SUCCESSFUL EARLY PIECES, THE OPERA TROUBLE IN TAHITI (1952) AND HIS LAST COMPLETED WORK, THE SONG-CYCLE ARIAS & BARCAROLLES (1988) IN THE VERSION FOR TWO SINGERS AND TWO PIANISTS.

L

EONARD BERNSTEIN often complained that he never had enough time to compose the music he wanted to—he was always too busy—but the list of works he did complete is long, and nearly all of the best of it is vocal music.

The range of musical styles he worked in is extraordinarily wide— he knew everything there is to know about the standard repertory and about thousands of other works—but the range of subjects he engaged with is comparatively narrow, and all of the subjects came out of his own life: love, family, and all the various ties that bind.

He had a title for Arias & Barcarolles for decades before the work took shape. After a concert at 1960 in the White House in which Bernstein played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the unexpected role of music critic, observed, “I like music with a tune in it, not all them arias and barcarolles.” Bernstein’s final work contains neither an aria nor

a barcarolle, but it does develop from a lot of music he had composed for other occasions, dating back to 1955—a piece he wrote to celebrate the birth of his son Alexander. There was also music he wrote for his daughter Jamie’s wedding in 1984, and a song he composed to celebrate his mother’s 88th birthday in 1986.

But all this music is adapted for a new purpose—an exploration of love, and specifically family love. There are seven songs, a prelude and a postlude, each dedicated to someone important in Bernstein’s life. In the prelude, the only words are “I love you,” which the singers are directed to sing without expression while the accompaniment depicts just how difficult love is, or how difficult the challenges that love faces are. The last of the songs is wordless, although the original text, a bit of doggerel comparing his mother’s 88 years to the 88 keys on the piano, suggests that the elusive answer to every dilemma lies in music.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 5

Sam Bernstein opposed the idea of his child seeking a career in music for obvious practical reasons. He later asked, poignantly, “How was I to know he would turn out to be Leonard Bernstein?”

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (MUSIC DIVISION)

An important dimension of Trouble in Tahiti is satirical—a wickedly witty look at the “perfect” American family as depicted for more than two decades on network radio and, in 1952, in the new medium of television. A jazzy, swinging vocal trio joins Sam and Dinah onstage to set the scene and deliver the ironic commentary—Bernstein compared their role to that of a singing commercial on the radio, or the Chorus in an ancient Greek play.

Bernstein ca. 1921 with parents, Samuel and Jennie.

Likewise, the trouble in Bernstein’s first opera was not in Tahiti; instead it was right here, in an affluent, orderly, unnamed suburb.

This was not the kind of suburb that Bernstein grew up in; in fact he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Roxbury, Massachusetts, playing with friends in Franklin Park. Nonetheless, his family was similar to the one depicted in Trouble in Tahiti, and the principal characters Dinah and Sam are in many ways similar to Bernstein’s parents, Sam and Jennie (Dinah was the name of one of his grandmothers). Both of them were immigrants from Ukraine; they grew up 75 miles apart but did not meet each other until they were in America. Their marriage endured for 52 years, and Sam Bernstein died holding his wife’s hand. Bernstein was devoted to each of his parents, but his biographers agree that their marriage was a mismatch.

It would be an oversimplification, however, to describe the opera as an exercise in autobiography, although there are autobiographical elements in it. Junior, the son of Sam and Dinah, is an offstage character, and a key element of the “plot” is that each parent decides not to attend Junior’s school play. In fact, Sam Bernstein did not show up for his 16 year-old son’s first appearance as piano soloist with an orchestra, the first movement of the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Boston Public School Symphony in 1934.

Like many a parent who had worked hard all of his life in order to become who and what he was, Sam Bernstein opposed the idea of his child seeking a career in music for obvious practical reasons.

He later asked, poignantly, “How was I to know he would turn out to be Leonard Bernstein?”

6 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

Sam and Dinah are both self-absorbed—he in business, the idea of success, and idle flirtations, she in daydreams formulated by Hollywood. Sam wins a game of handball instead of going to Junior’s play; Dinah sneaks out to the movies to see a schlocky escapist film set in the South Pacific called Trouble in Tahiti, complete with Hollywood stereotypes of U.S. military personnel, a heroine in a sarong like Dorothy Lamour, wailing natives, a tidal wave and an erupting volcano (at the time Bernstein was writing this work, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific was in the third year of its seven-year run on Broadway). Dinah at least wants something different from what she has, and imagines life as an idealized garden—a potent symbol for Bernstein that turns up in his later works like Candide and West Side Story and indeed his most ambitious opera, A Quiet Place, composed 30 years later.

That work opens at the funeral for Dinah, who has died in an automobile accident, and incorporates the whole of Trouble in Tahiti as a flashback.

Bernstein wrote the libretto for Trouble in Tahiti in Mexico before his marriage, but then there was a hiatus because of other events and commitments; surprisingly, he began composing the music about a failing marriage while he was on his honeymoon in Mexico with his new wife, the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre. Finally, during her first pregnancy, he spent five weeks holed up and composing in earnest at the Yaddo Colony in upstate New York.

The premiere took place during the first Festival of the Creative Arts which Bernstein curated at Brandeis University (see pages 8 & 9). The circumstances were not ideal—the outdoor amphitheater seating 3,000 people was not yet finished; the sound system was terrible; and the schedule of symposia was overcrowded and ran late, so the performance began at 11PM. Bernstein wasn’t happy and revised the final scene before the second performance at Tanglewood, a few weeks later (where it was directed by Boston impresario Sarah Caldwell), and then conducted it on television— it was one of the first new operas to be televised, just short of a year after Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. Bernstein’s opera was returning to its roots in popular culture—and popular culture is what the opera both celebrates and subverts.

WHO’S WHO HEATHER JOHNSON AS DINAH MARCUS DELOACH AS SAM With Mara Bonde, Neal Ferreira, and Vincent Turregano as members of the Trio Conducted by David Angus and directed by David Schweizer. Scenic Design by Paul Tate dePoo III, Costume Design by Nancy Leary, and Lighting Design by Jeff Adelberg.

HIGH FIVE:

Get to Know Tahiti/Arias in 5 Minutes or Less

RATION AND RECORDS ADMINIST NATIONAL ARCHIVES

TROUBLE IN TAHITI and ARIAS & BARCAROLLES MAY 11 – 20 Music and Libretto by Leonard Bernstein Sung in English, with English supertitles Length: Approx. 75 minutes, with no intermission

Family watching television, circa 1958

SUPER-SHORT SYNOPSIS: TROUBLE IN TAHITI A jazz trio sings of suburban life in the 1950s. In a picture-perfect house, married couple Sam and Dinah argue over breakfast. Later, at his office, Sam confidently denies and grants loan requests.

In her psychiatrist’s office, Dinah recalls a dream: she was in an overgrown garden, trying to find her way out, when she heard a voice promising to lead her to a quiet place.

At lunch, Dinah and Sam run into one another and each invents an excuse to hurry away. They reflect on the unhappy turn their relationship has taken.

Sam revels in his triumph at a handball game. After seeing a movie called “Trouble in Tahiti,” Dinah recounts how terrible it was, but gets caught up in the fantasy of it all. That evening, Sam wishes he did not have to return home. Sam and Dinah try to have an honest conversation, but quickly fail to connect. Growing desperate, he suggests they go to a movie. They prepare to leave, each wondering if a happier future lies ahead while the trio croons.

ARIAS & BARCAROLLES Arias & Barcarolles is a song cycle which Bernstein wrote and premiered in 1988, toward the end of his long career and life (he died in 1990). At its premiere, it was performed in a version for four singers (soprano, mezzo, and two baritones) with Bernstein himself at the piano along with Michael Tilson Thomas (pianist, conductor, and composer, as well as the current Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony). BLO will perform a version of the piece for mezzo-soprano and baritone, with piano four hands and chamber ensemble. The eight-song cycle is approximately 30 minutes in length and is a highly personal reflection of love, family, and self— at times full of irony, at times optimistic. For more on how Arias & Barcarolles (and Trouble in Tahiti) both reflect and go beyond Bernstein’s autobiography, see “The Personal, Political Leonard Bernstein” on page 14.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LENNY: BERNSTEIN AT 100 The year 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth (August 25, 1918) and companies around the country are presenting programming to celebrate his music. Locally, these include (of course) BLO’s production of Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles (May 11 – 20); New England Philharmonic with a concert titled “Ancient, Modern and Bernstein” at the Tsai Performance Center on March 3; Boston Symphony Orchestra’s March 2018 presentations of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, and Symphony No. 3, Kaddish; Brandeis University’s Festival of the Creative Arts honors Bernstein from April 15 – 22; Symphony Pro Musica with his suite from On the Waterfront (May 19 & 20); and the Tanglewood Festival 2018 Season, dubbed the Bernstein Centennial Summer and replete with can’t-miss performances of Chichester Psalms, A Quiet Place, Candide, Fancy Free, and much more.

THE BLO PRODUCTION In a unique and imaginative production, Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles will be presented as a cabaret, built within the DCR Steriti Memorial Rink. Audience seating will be at small tables surrounding a thrust stage, with traditional rows of seats ringing the space’s perimeter. With 15,000 square feet for BLO’s designers to play with, and only steps away from the legendary restaurants and amenities of Boston’s historic North End, this is a theatrical experience not to be missed.

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This year, the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth from April 15–22. BLO proudly joins its roster with a mini-concert and panel discussion on Sunday, April 15—details at BLO.org/events.

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BERNSTEIN’S FESTIVAL, 1952: PHOTOS FROM THE BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

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n June of 1952, Brandeis University launched its first Festival of the Creative Arts. Directed by Leonard Bernstein, who served on the Music Department faculty at Brandeis from 1951–56, the inaugural Festival welcomed guests artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer Aaron Copland, and soprano Phyllis Curtin, and featured the World Premieres of Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti as well as the Marc Blitzstein translation of The Threepenny Opera.

These images, reproduced in partnership with the Brandeis University Archives, present an inside glimpse to that legendary first Festival and those two operas, both in rehearsal and performance, with Bernstein himself at the helm.

From left, Bernstein in rehearsal for Festival performance; the concert performance of Marc Blitzstein’s Threepenny Opera translation—Lotte Lenya, as Jenny, singing on the left; scene from Tahiti; original flyer for the Festival of the Creative Arts. Below, Leonard Bernstein speaking with a Brandeis student during rehearsal for Tahiti.

THE VISUAL WORLD OF TOSCA

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PHOTOS ARE COURTESY OF THE ROBERT D. FARBER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY.

SNEAK PEEK:

SO WHY WRITE THREEPENNY? GERMAN FEDERAL ARCHIVE

BY JOHN CONKLIN

“B

RECHT hated opera”—a bit simplistic and overstated, granted, but perhaps not entirely inappropriate for dealing with the polemical, articulate, and highly opinionated mind and beliefs of this protean playwright, poet, composer, director, actor, producer, designer, performer, and theoretician. Certainly Brecht despised opera productions and audiences of his day as the complacent, corrupt, corrupting, and falsely “artistic” manifestation of an elitist, greedy, capitalistic society. He wrote, “We see entire rows of human beings transported into a peculiar state of intoxication, wholly passive, self-absorbed, and according to all appearances, doped.”

But upon further examination, the situation becomes more ambiguous. (At this point, let me acknowledge my reliance for much of this material—here so briefly touched—on Joy H. Calico’s excellent, detailed, and very stimulating book, Brecht at the Opera.) Indeed, as Calico points out, “opera’s continued presence is one of the few constants in a life marked primarily by upheaval and flux.” And Brecht’s contentious engagement with Wagner’s theories on theater and opera—he railed against the composer’s baleful, narcotic use of “endless melody” and unresolved chromatic harmony (and the hiding of the mechanics of musical production with the covered orchestra pit) in order to seduce an audience into total submission—shaped Brecht’s own development of his ideas on Epic Theater and the desired active role of the spectator in the performance event.

In the 30 years between 1926 and his death in 1956, Brecht took on roughly two dozen opera projects. Most familiar are Brecht’s three “completed” operas: The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of 10 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

the City of Mahagonny (both with composer Kurt Weill), and The Trial of Lucullus (conceived as an opera, but completed as a verse radio play with music by composer Paul Dessau). These works have, certainly in the case of the Weill pieces, become staples of the conventional international opera house repertory (perhaps ironically, given Brecht’s intentions). But he also wrote many other variations on quasi operatic forms (The Seven Deadly Sins, for example—another project with Weill that is oft-revived today), as well as bits of abandoned scenarios and librettos and unrealized projects: other operas with Weill, an operetta to be written with Hanns Eisler as a vehicle for Mae West, an African-American adaptation of Threepenny set in Washington, D.C., opera collaborations with Aaron Copland and Carl Orff, and (perhaps most intriguingly) a film version of The Tales of Hoffman pitched to Hollywood director Lewis Milestone in 1947. In the final year of his life, Brecht discussed with Dessau an opera about Albert Einstein. And most certainly, music, particularly song, played a crucial role is all his dramatic work from the beginning.

The influence of Brecht on theater and performance today—and the pervasiveness of the term “Brechtian” (perhaps to the point of meaninglessness)—cannot be overstated. “Alienation” and “estrangement” are also words that are inevitably associated with his theories…complex words translated (or mistranslated?) from the German, which have in turn “alienated” the public, who have branded Brecht in their view as a tedious, didactic, pleasuredenying bore. But his theories and ideas are perhaps more stimulating, evocative, and, yes, pleasure-giving (on a deeper level) than they might appear. As we have said, Brecht railed against the narcotic effect of Wagner’s music, but also against the apparent “realism” engendered by the imposition of the wellknown “fourth wall” between the audience and the world onstage by playwrights such as Ibsen. Brecht wanted to renew the power of the spectator…to give him back the reality of his own imagination, to take away the visual and psychological elements created by the

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

dangerously soothing illusions of theater, to “clear the underbrush.”

The spectator should always be made aware of and should always recognize the basic superficial falseness of a production, should always see the lights and the mechanics, and the actor acting… it is the task of the theater-makers to make the familiar “strange” in order for the spectator to see into its essence. In the Epic Theatre, then, actors play multiple roles; they break the fourth wall to address the audience directly; placards indicate scenes or locations; equipment is placed in full view of the audience; and so on. Brechtian alienation becomes not something that pushes the audience member away; instead, the spectator is actively engaged, charged with evaluating and understanding the work and its implications for the “real” world outside the theatre walls—rather than allowed to lose oneself in a sea of music and emotion that (Brecht believed) lessened any possibility for action or change.

In two recent productions at Boston Lyric Opera, the director Rosetta Cucchi and I drew, in part consciously, upon the stimulating and challenging spirit of Brecht. We were dealing with the formidable task of presenting two extremely familiar, deeply cherished works—La Bohème in the 2015/16 Season and The Marriage of Figaro in 2016/17. We felt that it was appropriate (and perhaps necessary) at this point to attempt to look at the works in a different context…to, in a sense, “de-sacramentalize” them… to perhaps allow audiences (and members of the production team and cast) to experience them anew. We therefore carefully chose to set Bohème amidst the youthful upheaval of the student riots of 1968 Paris, drawing on images and techniques from New Wave filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (themselves strongly influenced by Brecht). Added to and set against the late 19th-century aural world of Puccini, we introduced the sounds of news broadcasts, political orations, police sirens, and students chanting at violent demonstrations, highlighting rather than erasing that world. We employed title signs and quotations to deliberately fragment and de-familiarize the theatrical

experience. In Figaro we used the overt context and mechanics of a rehearsal—a full view of the backstage, rehearsal-style props, and stagehands present, visible and active in the creation of the narrative. We set the production in the more familiar social hierarchy of the 1950s, drawing on the classic Billy Wilder film Sabrina, although retaining the Italian milieu. On the front curtain was written the title and the phrase “Figaro...A Work in Progress.”

This was clearly a reference to the rehearsal context of the production…but in a deeper sense, it also suggested what Brecht sought in theater (and opera). Theater and opera are not set notes on a page, an inviolate text or a sacred object in a museum, but rather a living experience that exists in the vital intersection of a particular set of performers, in a specific world, with a specific audience…an experience always to be embraced as “a work in progress.”

Left, Bertolt Brecht, 1954 and Threepenny Opera New York cast album, 1954. Above, revolution foments on the streets of 1960s Paris in director Rosetta Cucchi’s setting of La Bohème for BLO, October of 2015. Right, memorial for Brecht near the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, home of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theatre company, sculptor Fritz Cremer, 1988.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 11

SPOTLIGHT:

THE WORLD PREMIERE OPERA SCHOENBERG IN HOLLYWOOD, IN PROGRESS

I “ IT REALLY INTRIGUED ME TO THINK ABOUT WHAT IT WAS LIKE FOR HIM TO COME TO THIS NEW WORLD, EXILED FROM EUROPE, WHILE HIS PEOPLE WERE BEING ANNIHILATED, AND REALIZE EVEN MORE STRONGLY THAT YOUR ART HAS TO DO SOMETHING IN THIS WORLD AND IT MUST MAKE A REAL DIFFERENCE— THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS OF OUR TIME, TOO.” - TOD MACHOVER, COMPOSER

12 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

n November, the team behind Schoenberg in Hollywood—an upcoming World Premiere opera in the 2018/19 Season, commissioned by BLO—met in Boston to workshop the opera-in-progress. Led by composer Tod Machover and conductor David Angus, cast and creative team members spent five days singing through the score, discussing characters, plot, pacing, and drama, and for the first time, hearing its incredible new music in full. For Machover, co-founding professor and Academic Head of the MIT Media Lab whose past operas include Resurrection and Death and the Powers, technology is a crucial part of his compositional pieces. “One of the reasons that I became a composer is that I love the process of creating work in your head, developing music, and it’s all yours while you’re working on it,” said Machover, reflecting on the workshop process. “Since opera and my work using technology are so collaborative, I often have to share it early in the process, which can feel very exposed. But with Schoenberg in Hollywood, I wrote the whole thing without sharing it, using pencil and paper, keeping it all in my head. No one else knew what it sounded like or how it fit together... So the workshop was an invaluable opportunity to step back, to feel what the piece really is, and to see the things that need to be adjusted. And those things are really a pleasure to do over the next few months. It gave us as collaborators the confidence and excitement needed to push the work to its next stage.”

Schoenberg in Hollywood is a searing, intimate, yet often comical portrait of the genius at a pivotal crossroads— after coming to America and being offered the opportunity to compose for Hollywood films, he considers the road that led him here and what his artistic life may be next. The opera has its World Premiere at BLO in November of 2018.

Braham Murray (scenario and stage director, left) and Simon Robson (libretto, right) discuss the work in progress.

Omar Ebrahim, as Schoenberg, has a lighthearted moment in between scenes.

Tod Machover, composer, (left) confers with David Angus, conductor.

PAULA AGUILERA AND JONATHAN WILLIAMS

The entire cast of Schoenberg in Hollywood: Tenor Jesse Darden as Boy, soprano Sara Womble as Girl (both of whom inhabit multiple characters throughout the work), and baritone Omar Ebrahim.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 13

“I

’m knee deep in my opera idea TROUBLE IN TAHITI and loving it,”

wrote Leonard Bernstein in a letter to Helen Coates, his childhood-piano-teacher-turned-personal-secretary. The year was 1951, and Bernstein was happily ensconced in bucolic Cuernavaca, Mexico, seeking inspiration and solitude as he worked on his latest project. “I am discovering the beauty of aloneness,” he continued.

“I’ve cut off my hair, eat like a pig, sit in my beloved Laurel of India tree, and find that there is a lot of life I know nothing about, especially the life inside me.” Aloneness was a rarity for Bernstein. He was a perennially busy man, in constant demand as a conductor, composer, and educator. His multifaceted musical career, combined with his outspoken involvement in politics and general embrace of public life, made him into a person who seemed inseparable from the broader context in which he lived and worked.

The same might be said of his music. Both works in BLO’s new production, Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles, combine autobiographical material with perceptive, sharply critical evocations of the respective historical moments in which they were written. Composed nearly four decades apart—Tahiti dates from 1952, and Arias from 1988—both also feature text by the composer (an unusual choice, as he typically worked with a librettist). Just as Bernstein intermingled individual experience with cultural context in his life, he did so in his art as well.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT COLLECTION)

Bernstein’s talents were extraordinarily wide-ranging. His conducting brought him acclaim from the time of his 1940 debut, throughout his long tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, and up until his final appearance, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, in the summer of 1990. His compositions were plentiful

BY LUCY CAPLAN

14 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

THE PERSONAL, POLITICAL LEONARD BERNSTEIN

in number and emphatically eclectic in style, exploring a musical terrain that stretched from the concert hall to the Broadway stage and everywhere in between. He was also a prodigiously talented educator—Virgil Thomson once called him “the ideal explainer of music, both classical and modern”—and he made copious use of this skill, especially in his Young People’s Concerts with the Philharmonic, broadcast on CBS between 1958 and 1972.

Bernstein also used his platform to comment upon and contribute to a multitude of progressive political causes. He might be found attending fundraising dinners for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee in 1944, marching for civil rights in Alabama in 1965, hosting a (later infamous) soirée for the Black Panther Party at his Park Avenue apartment in 1970, or conducting a benefit concert for victims of AIDS in 1987. These actions aroused the suspicions of Cold War-era authorities: the accumulation of material for Bernstein’s FBI file had begun in 1937 and eventually comprised over 800 pages.

Bernstein wrote Tahiti at a time when his political activities threatened to derail his burgeoning career. Following his graduation from Harvard College in 1939 and receipt of a graduate diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1941, Bernstein’s notable “firsts” began to accumulate: his New York Philharmonic conducting debut in 1943, the Broadway opening of On the Town in 1944, his first TV appearance in 1949. But he also earned a spot in a Life magazine gallery of Communist “dupes and fellow travelers” in 1949, and was effectively blacklisted by both CBS and the State Department in the early 1950s. Eventually, he was forced to sign a non-Communist affidavit, which he later referred to as a “ghastly and humiliating experience.”

Bernstein began Tahiti—his first opera—in April 1951, and continued to work on it during his honeymoon later that year.

The opera tells the story of an ordinary yet miserable day in the life of Sam and Dinah, a young couple living in an unnamed suburb. Their conformist lives fail to bring them happiness; Dinah feels stiflingly trapped in her “little white house” and her loveless marriage to the thickheaded Sam. Many of Bernstein’s biographers have speculated that the characters are based upon either his own marriage or that of his parents (his father’s name was Sam, and his grandmother’s was Dinah).

MARK MATHOSIAN

But Tahiti is less about the particulars of Sam and Dinah’s relationship than it is a critique of the circumstances that make them so unhappy: cookie-cutter suburbia, rampant consumerism, and what feminist thinkers like Betty Friedan referred to as “the problem that has no name,” the pervasive sense of emptiness among well-off suburban women in post-World War II America.

Musical details emphasize Sam and Dinah’s ordinariness, implying that anyone could end up in similar straits. The couple uses unpretentious language that Bernstein called “Americanese,” while the Trio, which he described as “a Greek chorus born of the BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 15

radio commercial,” sings relentlessly cheery tunes that sound like advertising jingles. It’s intriguing to imagine Bernstein composing this music in Cuernavaca, as far away from American suburbia as he could get: alone, in another country, in an atmosphere of unstructured time and self-reflection.

Arias & Barcarolles emerged within an entirely different context.

Written in 1988, it is among Bernstein’s last compositions.

Originally a song cycle comprising a prelude, postlude, and seven songs, it has undergone various transformations. The premiere featured four singers and two pianists (at the first performance, the composer and Michael Tilson Thomas), and it is often performed in a version for two singers and piano four-hands.

Several orchestrators, including Bright Sheng and Bruce Coughlin, have arranged the piece as well. Like Tahiti, Arias is about love, marriage, and interpersonal relationships. Bernstein wrote most of the libretto himself and attributed one song, “Little Smary,” to his mother. The piece is rife with further familial connections: “Little Smary” is dedicated to Bernstein’s sister, Shirley, and the prelude contains music that he originally wrote for his daughter’s wedding.

On October 30, 1988, during the same year that he wrote Arias, Bernstein penned an essay in the New York Times expressing intense frustration with the national political climate, particularly in relation to the upcoming Bush v. Dukakis presidential election. “I’ve been appalled at the passivity of the electorate,” he wrote, “at the degeneration of our language, at the lulling, the brainwashing, the disinformation.” He reiterated his support for the achievements—now under threat—of those who fought “against sweatshops, child labor, racism, bigotry.” And he cautioned readers not to forget the Red Scare and McCarthyism, some of the darkest moments in recent American history. Given his own experience as a target of McCarthy-era blacklists and FBI surveillance, it seems clear that he was referencing not just the nation’s history, but also his own. In short, Bernstein saw the moment as a perilously fragile one, in which the progressive strides of recent decades were at risk of being dismantled.

16 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

This sense of disillusionment pervades the musical language of Arias. The song cycle perches musical charm and sophistication atop a shaky foundation of ambivalence, despair, and regret. In “Love Song,” for instance, the singers begin by stagily describing what they are singing—“Funny the way it falls, this melody”—and then segue into a recitation of the uneasy questions underlying their marriage and the world in which they live. “Why are the nations raging? / Am I aging?” they ask. “How come we’ve stuck together?”

And, ultimately, “Aren’t all these questions pointless?” The duet between two voices is mirrored by a sort of meta-duet between personal and social narratives. Via these characters, Bernstein seems to be looking backward over both the course of his own life and the unfolding of the 20th century.

Another, more abstract question arises: why use family stories to express a social critique? Perhaps by doing so, Bernstein reveals another way in which these works are products of their time. The idea that “the personal is political” was a key slogan of the progressive social movements that Bernstein supported.

Originating in second-wave feminism, it was equally applicable to other identity-based social movements, including those fighting for racial justice, gay rights, and the rights of other marginalized groups. (And as a Jewish, non-heterosexual leftist, Bernstein certainly had an acute understanding of the experience of social marginalization.) In Bernstein’s music, this political strategy becomes an artistic strategy, too.

Simultaneously personal and political, Trouble in Tahiti and Arias & Barcarolles both illuminate the complicated interplay between art, artist, and society, and show how autobiography and history blend into one another.

One wonders, especially in this tribute-filled centennial year, what sort of music Bernstein would have composed in our own time. Once again, family might offer an answer. In a recent article in the Huffington Post, Bernstein’s daughter, Jamie, offered her opinion on what issues would have concerned him, if not how he would have translated that concern into an opera.

“I know if my parents were alive today, their tyranny alarms would be waking up the whole neighborhood by now,” she wrote. “At the very least, they would both, most somberly, be taking a knee.”

Previous page left, Leonard Bernstein in 1971; right, Levittown, a suburb of New York City on Long Island, in the 1950s; above: Pontiac car ad from the 1950s.

“

Scott Merrill as Macheath in the Theatre de Lys production; inset, Ella Fitzgerald’s iconic, inventive live album Ella in Berlin, 1960.

A DOUBLEEDGED BLADE: THE CURIOUS HISTORY OF

” E F I N K E H T K C A “M

BY LAURENCE SENELICK

“Harald Paulsen was vain, even for an actor.” So said Lotte Lenya, who was playing Jenny Diver in Berlin’s new musical play Die Dreigroschen Oper (The Threepenny Opera). A former dancer who had made his name acting “bon vivants”, Paulsen had been cast in the lead as the gangster Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife).

Dreigroschen was a rethinking of The Beggar’s Opera, a 1728 English satire of Italian opera by the poet John Gay. Elisabeth Hauptmann had translated the work, thinking it appropriate to a Germany roiled by post-war economic depression, conspicuous depravity and political turbulence. The left-wing poet Bertolt Brecht gave it a make-over, setting it in a mythical Victorian London, and providing his own sardonic lyrics. The jazz-flavored music was by Lenya’s husband, the distinguished composer Kurt Weill.

In The Beggar’s Opera, Macheath is a womanizing highwayman, a rollicking, amoral rogue. Brecht’s Mackie Messer is rather more ruthless, archetypal of the modern capitalist. Paulsen had devised

his own foppish costume: spats, a sword-stick, a light-colored derby and a sky-blue butterfly tie that matched his eyes. Shortly before the show was to open, he demanded an entrance song that would announce his character. Brecht decided to compose one that would counteract the dandy image, and so penned Die Moritat von Mackie Messer.

A Moritat is a murder ballad—from the Latin, mori, of death, and the German tat, deed, especially dastardly deed. A Moritat was traditionally intoned by street singers and illustrated by lurid pictures on a pole or easel. In Brecht’s verse, Mackie is not directly accused of the song’s list of crimes, as if the streetsinger feared the consequences; they are imputed to him. And

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 17

nothing like them occurs in the course of the action. (Curiously, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, neither Gay’s Macheath nor Brecht’s Mackie is shown to be successful in either his romantic or his criminal activities.) The first verse, couched deliberately in a crude and repetitive idiom, goes: Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne, And the shark, he has teeth, Und er trägt dem im Gesicht, And he wears them in the face, Und Macheath der hat ein Messer, And Macheath, he has a knife Und das Messer sieht man nicht.

And the knife nobody sees.

When Die Dreigroschen Oper opened in 1928, the Moritat was assigned to the portly Jewish cabaret comedian Kurt Gerron who doubled the roles of Street Singer and Police Chief Tiger Brown.

Weill set six verses of Brecht’s nine total, with alto, soprano and tenor saxophones, trumpet, drum, percussion, harmonium, banjo and piano. Since the music was notated “in the style of a barrel organ,” the first two verses were accompanied by the harmonium, but the murder ballad evolved into an elegant foxtrot. This fashionable dance music introduces the audience to the play’s musical atmosphere, just as the lyrics introduce the leading character.

The song was widely disseminated by recordings and G.W. Pabst’s film version of 1931; however, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Die Dreigroschen Oper was banned in Germany. Brecht, Weill and Lenya fled, ultimately ending up in the U.S. Gerron was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and then to Auschwitz. Paulsen stayed in the Third Reich and acted in antiSemitic movies; when the war ended, he carried on his career— Mackie as a survivor, indeed.

18 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

Josephine Huston as Lucy Brown and Robert Chisholm as Macheath in the 1933 Broadway production.

The Moritat, like its creators, crossed the Atlantic, but its fortunes in America were rocky. The Threepenny Opera with English lyrics by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky opened on Broadway in 1933, but lasted only ten performances. The unlikely come-back venues for Threepenny turned out to be institutions of higher learning. In 1941 Lenya and Weill presented the Moritat at a war-bond drive at Hunter College. Desmond Vesey’s 1937 British translation of the opera, as revised by Eric Bentley, was staged at the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1946. In it Jenny Diver delivered the Moritat accompanied by an organist and a fortissimo choir: And the shark he has his teeth and There they are for all to see.

And Macheath he has his knife but No one knows where it may be.

(Very genteel that last line.) Weill considered this translation unsingable, but it was revived with great success at Northwestern University in 1948.

Legend has it that Leonard Bernstein urged Marc Blitzstein to translate the piece; he conducted a concert version at Brandeis University, with Lenya reprising her role as Jenny, in June, 1952 (see page 8 & 9 for images). A fully-staged rendition of this version later opened at the small Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village, again with Lenya as Jenny and Gerald Price as the Street Singer. Blitzstein’s The Threepenny Opera went on to run until December 17, 1961, its 2,611 performances making it the longest running musical in New York to that time.

The success was due in part to Blitzstein’s revisions. He had toned down not only Brecht’s political message but the account of Mackie’s grislier depredations. “Mack the Knife”, as he was now called, no longer murders or rapes; he is simply a roguish chickmagnet, more Jack the lad than Jack the Ripper.

PRODUCTION PHOTOS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE AUTHOR

OH, THE SHARK HAS PRETTY TEETH, DEAR, AND HE SHOWS THEM PEARLY WHITE JUST A JACK-KNIFE HAS MACHEATH, DEAR AND HE KEEPS IT OUT OF SIGHT.

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear, And he shows them pearly white Just a jack-knife has Macheath, dear And he keeps it out of sight.

The German relative pronoun der is transformed into the cosy “dear”, making the listener complicit, while a “jack-knife” is not far from a Boy Scout knife. Brecht’s lyric was poker-faced; Blitzstein’s pokes us in the ribs.

It didn’t take long for “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” to become a jazz standard. Louis Armstrong recorded an upbeat version on September 28, 1955. Since Lenya was in the studio during the session, he added her name to the list of Mack’s conquests. The following year there were five separate versions, with Bing Crosby and Lawrence Welk among the perpetrators, pushing it to number 14 in the Billboard weekly top 100.

Bobby Darin saw the show at the Theater de Lys and began singing the ballad in his nightclub act. His friend Dick Clark advised him not to record it lest he spoil his teen idol image, but Darin’s swing-inflected single LP sold 3.5 million copies and won a Grammy award. It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2016.

Interpreters felt free to improvise and scat-sing, altering lyrics and rhythm, interpolating words and phrases at will. Perhaps the strangest was Ella Fitzgerald’s performance in Berlin in 1960; she had tried to memorize the song on the plane and then forgot the words on stage. So she improvised: Oh what’s the next chorus, to this song, now This is the one, now I don’t know But it was a swinging tune and it’s a hit tune So we tried to do Mack the Knife.

Oh Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong They made a record, oh but they did And now Ella, Ella, and her fellas We’re making a wreck, what a wreck of Mack the Knife.

See the shark with teeth like razors All can read his open face And Macheath has got a knife, but Not in such an obvious place.

In its clunkiness, that last line is deadlier than Mack himself. Even so, these new lyrics were recorded by Lyle Lovett and Sting, and showed up in the 1989 film Mack the Knife.

In 1989 Sting returned, this time as Mack, in another Broadway stab at Threepenny. John Dexter’s production featured the drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger as the Street Singer. Here the translation was by Michael Feingold of the Village Voice: Oh, the shark’s teeth, You can see them Always ready to attack; But you won’t see Mackie’s knife blade Till you feel it in your back.

Yet another version, which moved to London’s Donmar Warehouse in 1994, used English lyrics by Robert David Macdonald and Jeremy Sams, two extremely experienced translators. The critic Kim Kowalke complained they were “bland and unsingable,” but they have a certain cheekiness.

Though the shark’s teeth may be lethal Still you see them white and red But you won’t see Mackie’s flick knife Cause he slashed you and you’re dead.

What began as a last-minute interpolation in a musical play many predicted would be a dismal flop has become so familiar that most listeners are unaware of its context. Divorced from Brecht’s caustic verses and Weill’s witty orchestration, “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” still has the durability and the elasticity of a true folksong.

Ruben Blades performed it in Spanish as Pedro Navaja; Liberace offered it in five variant piano styles; and Frank Sinatra finally got around to it in 1984. Evidence that the song had entered the American cultural mainstream was offered three years later when McDonald’s introduced Big Mac Tonight—with a recognizable song of introduction.

Meanwhile, there were many who believed that Blitzstein had gone too far in adapting the play and its music to a Tin Pan Alley sensibility. A new Broadway production, directed by the experimental Richard Foreman, employed a translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, who claimed to fit every syllable to every note in the score. Unfortunately, for all their vaunted fidelity, they had tin ears.

Harald Paulsen, the original Macheath; Bobby Darin’s 1959 No. 1 single version of “Mack the Knife.”

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018 | 19

COMING THIS SPRING: NEW COMMUNITY CONCERT SERIES IN PARTNERSHIP WITH CASTLE OF OUR SKINS!

CROSSING THE LINE TO

FREEDOM A MUSICAL NARRATIVE BOSTON LYRIC OPERA and CASTLE OF OUR SKINS join forces to showcase the lives and stories of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Paul Robeson through the music of opera. Paired with spoken word, art song, spirituals and history, their lives—and those of other legendary liberators—take center stage.

Featuring the music of composers such as Nkeiru Okoye, Adolphus Hailstork, Dorothy Rudd Moore, and Undine Smith Moore.

• THURSDAY, MAY 31 AT 6PM | Codman Square BPL branch, Dorchester • FRIDAY, JUNE 1 AT 12:30PM | Central Library, Copley Square | Concerts in the Courtyard series • THURSDAY, JUNE 7 AT 6PM | West End BPL branch, Boston All events are free and open to the community!

LEARN MORE AT BLO.ORG & CASTLESKINS.ORG About Castle of our Skins: Born out of the desire to foster cultural curiosity, Castle of our Skins is a concert and educational series dedicated to celebrating Black artistry through music. From classrooms to concert halls, Castle of our Skins invites exploration into Black heritage and culture, spotlighting both unsung and celebrated figures of past and present.

20 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2018

SPRING CODA CONTRIBUTORS v Lucy Caplan (page 14) is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on African American opera in the early twentieth century. She is the recipient of the 2016 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism.

v John Conklin (page 10) is an internationallyrecognized set designer and dramaturg. He has designed sets on and off Broadway, at the Kennedy Center and for opera companies around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Bastille Opera in Paris, the Royal Opera and the opera houses of Munich, Amsterdam, and Bologna, among many others. Mr. Conklin is on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School and has served as the Artistic Advisor to BLO since 2009. v Richard Dyer (page 5) is a distinguished writer and lecturer. He wrote about music for The Boston Globe for more than 30 years, serving as chief music critic for most of that time. He has twice won the Deems Taylor/ ASCAP Award for Distinguished Music Criticism. v Harlow Robinson (page 2) is an author, lecturer and Matthews Distinguished Professor of History at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography, Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians, and The Last Impresario: The Life, Times and Legacy of Sol Hurok. He is a frequent lecturer and annotator for The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera Guild, Lincoln Center and Aspen Music Festival. v Laurence Senelick (page 17) is the Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. He has been named a Distinguished Scholar by both the American Society of Theatre Research and the Faculty Research Awards Council of Tufts University. Senelick is the author or editor of more than 2​ 5 books, including the recently published Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture.

ROBERT HONEYSUCKER (1943–2017)

A beloved Boston-based baritone who garnered acclaim on stages throughout the world and who passed away in October, Mr. Honeysucker performed the role of Stephen Kumalo in Lost in the Stars, by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, during BLO’s 1991/92 Season.

CURTAINS

A LOOK BACK AT BLO’S PAST PRODUCTIONS

PHOTO FROM THE BLO ARCHIVES.

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Coda

noun \ co·da \ ‘ko¯-d \ symbol O \ (1) a concluding musical section that is formally distinct from the main structure (2) something that serves to round out, conclude, or summarize and usually has its own interest.

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