Poster for the premiere of the Brecht-Weill Dreigroschenoper at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin, August 1928.
"What think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?” Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in 1716, an exchange that inspired their mutual friend John Gay's satirical musical The Beggar's Opera.
In 1928, Berthold Brecht appropriated a German translation of Gay's play by his lover Elisabeth Hauptmann, claiming it as his own, and turned it into the Dreigroschenoper, with music by Kurt Weill.
Hauptmann reportedly wrote a lot of the great Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny, too, and—credited this time—was also the main author, with Weill and Brecht, of the musical Happy End, which Paul McCartney and I saw at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1965.
We sat side by side in the crush bar during an interval, drinking our lagers and studiously ignoring the semicircle of his admirers behind us. Neither of us said a word—he clearly didn't recognize me.
I had another such narrow brush with celebrity at a performance of Mahagonny at Sadler's Wells, where I exchanged sympathetic looks with Kurt Weill's widow Lotte Lenya, who was being harassed by paparazzi, having recently married the American painter Russell Detwiler, who was twenty-six years younger.
What next, I wonder, has fame in mind to brandish at me in the years to come!

Costume design for the role of the Nurse in Richard Strauss's opera The Woman without a Shadow (Die Frau ohne Schatten), premiere at the Vienna State Opera, 1919.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
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