麻豆社

Berlin in the summer of 1928 was party town. People were out all the time at the theatre, the cinema, the brightly lit dance halls: perhaps Berliners believed that if they partied hard enough, the humiliation of the Great War and economic collapse could be forgotten (as could the dark political undercurrents running so close to the surface...).

It was against this backdrop that the young writer Elisabeth Hauptmann suggested content for a biting new political satire to her friend, the radical young poet, playwright and director Bertolt Brecht and his collaborator, the composer Kurt Weill. It was to be an adaptation of John Gay鈥檚 The Beggar鈥檚 Opera, which had premiered in London exactly 200 years before. Hauptmann made a quick translation into German while Weill set a few of the numbers to music, writing to his publisher of his confidence that a few of the songs would become popular very quickly.

When the show started, the audience sat in rather stony silence for the first few numbers: the fake baroque overture, the catchy street song of Mack the Knife, the mock Lutheran chorale sung by Mr Peachum, the shocking ballad of Pirate Jenny... It was only when the Cannon Song (a raucous duet sending up macho militarism) struck up that the ice was broken. The audience livened up and cheered for an encore.

The rest of the night was a riotous success and passed into legend. Leading lady Lotte Lenya later said: 鈥淧eople who had scornfully passed up that opening night began to lie about it, to claim to have been there.鈥�

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This archive recording is by the 麻豆社 Philharmonic with soloist and conductor HK Gruber.

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