The valuable lesson taught by 'The Threepenny Opera'

Na Sung-in

The author is a music critic and director of the classical music brand Poongwoldang. 

There is an opera cheaper than any other: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” (1928). Its orchestra has just seven musicians, playing 25 instruments in a deliberately rough manner. With no string section, even the sound seems cheap, stripped of the lush sonority normally associated with opera. There are no grand scenes to overwhelm the audience. Its simple, repetitive songs make little attempt at lyrical beauty. Instead, they carry a dense burden of information, much of it deliberately uncomfortable.

As members of “respectable” civil society, we normally find it difficult to identify with gangsters and murderers, pimps and vagrants.

Take “Zuhälterballade,” or “Pimp’s Ballad.” It is sung by knife-wielding Macheath and Jenny, the prostitute who betrays him, as they recall better days now gone. In return for protecting her, Macheath lives off the money she earns selling her body. When the money runs out, he beats Jenny, shouting, “Hey, sell your underwear!” The arrangement between them is exploitative and violent, and the song is hardly comfortable listening.

Yet in the refrain, the two finally join their voices in duet: “Those six months really were beautiful.” Those were the six months when Jenny was pregnant with Macheath’s child, when they hoped a new life might be possible with the baby. But the child died and their dream collapsed. Had the baby lived, might their lives have turned out differently? Amid the discomfort, however, a measure of human sympathy and understanding begins to emerge. The people we instinctively recoil from suddenly appear capable of grief, hope and attachment.

All these features keep the audience from becoming absorbed in the drama and instead place it in an unfamiliar position. Rather than allowing us simply to surrender to emotion, they compel us to reconsider prejudices we may not even know we carry. The opera’s crudeness, discomfort and absurdity are therefore devices meant to break the spell of emotional immersion and awaken the audience’s critical faculties. Its cheapness is not a flaw, then, but part of its design.

At the very end, the author intervenes. Everything we have just seen, he tells us, was only acting. Reality is more miserable still. So do not be too quick to condemn the poor and the wicked. Fairness demands that you first imagine yourself in the same gutter before passing judgment.

That is the valuable lesson offered by this cheapest of operas.