"Mack the Knife" in Ascending Degrees of Psychopathy
“Mack the Knife,” the character, is closing in on his 300th birthday. English dramatist John Gay introduced him as Macheath to British audiences in 1728 in his satirical ballad musical The Beggar’s Opera.
Macheath is depicted in The Beggar’s Opera as a “highwayman.” That essentially means he was a traveling thief. Gay partially based Macheath on Jack Sheppard — aka “Honest Jack” — a rogue bandit who was known for escaping prison four times, until he was finally caught and hung at in 1724 the age of 22.
Like Sheppard, Macheath was an antihero whose antics garnered him affection among the lower classes. Both were also serial womanizers who enjoyed spending some of their ill-earned shillings at local houses of prostitution. The real-life Sheppard and the fictional Macheath also eschewed violence — Sheppard reportedly abhorred it, having absolutely no stomach for murder.
In The Beggar’s Opera, Macheath is almost as admired by the populist hordes, not to mention his seduced, as he is despised by the law. Nevertheless, he’s imprisoned by the local anti-theft brigade headed by one Mr. Peachum, even though Macheath had secretly married Peachum’s daughter Polly. Macheath manages to escape Peachum’s clutches thanks to another girl, Lucy, who Macheath has promised to marry. By the end of the play it’s revealed Macheath has actually fathered children by four different women.
The Beggar’s Opera was a certified hit in its day, with 62 straight performances at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, which was a lot in 1728. Historian Marvin Carlson called it “the most popular play of the 18th century.” Still, the character of Macheath might have faded through ensuing centuries, were he not resurrected almost 200 years later and commemorated with one of the most recognizable pop tunes of the first half of the 20th century.
And that might not have happened if it weren’t for a terrible bow tie.
Composer Kurt Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht adapted The Beggar’s Opera into a German work titled The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper in German) in 1928. Both Weill and Brecht sought to create a continuous musical narrative that spoke more directly to the populist sensibility than the aristocratic opera form did. Weill wanted to counter the lofty distance between opera and the common population, most exemplified by the garishly epic work of Richard Wagner. Brecht, on the other hand, hated all opera, and wanted to take the whole genre down a peg.
The Beggar’s Opera, with its origins as a social and political satire — not to mention a direct rebuke to Italian opera — seemed the perfect vehicle for Weill and Brecht to bring extended narrative to the German citizens of the Weimar Republic, who were a little dazed and confused at the time and not far off from getting much, much worse.
The Threepenny Opera recreated The Beggar’s Opera quite faithfully. But Weill and Brecht gave Macheath a more sinister, psychopathic edge, thanks to a song they composed almost as an afterthought in response to an extraordinary difficult actor.
The actor who played Macheath in The Threepenny Opera, one Harald Paulsen, developed the character in a rather colorful way, one which perhaps didn’t fit the profile of the gangland leader he was supposed to be. Weill biographer Ronald Sanders writes that Paulsen's vision of Macheath:
“sported a ‘double-breasted lounging jacket cut in the turn-of-the-century style, tight trousers with suspenders, patent-leather shoes with white spats, a thin sword-cane in his hand, a bowler on his head.’ To this he had added a huge bow tie of bright blue-colored silk.”
It was the blue bow tie that did it. Brecht didn’t care for it. Paulsen (who later welcomed his new Nazi overlords and acted in anti-Semitic propaganda films while Weill and Brecht fled to America) wouldn’t back down. On top of that, Paulsen insisted that his character be properly introduced with his own song.
Instead of extending the fighting, Brecht decided to heighten the difference between Macheath’s slapstick, dandified presence and the horrid character he actually was. At just about the last possible minute before the curtain went up on The Threepenny Opera, Brecht scrawled out a new lyric. Weill composed the accompanying music in a single night.
The final result was a Moritat, a German song form that was popular in public street fairs and informal gatherings: a murder ballad. Brecht and Weill wrote “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”) as a counterpoint to Paulsen’s get-up. Adhering to the minstrel origins of the Moritat, the song is sung by a street singer.
The Threepenny Opera was a hit in Berlin. Its first film adaptation, directed by G.W. Pabst, features “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” as performed by actor Ernst Busch.
Obviously the original version is pretty grim, an account that moves Macheath’s evil far beyond that of a Lothario and a hitchhiking thief. Brecht turned him into a murderer, a sexual predator, and an arsonist who keeps eluding capture. Still his character is more of an antihero than a villain. He’s jailed several times yet still passionately loved by a fair share of the masses. As in the original Beggar’s Opera, at the end of The Threepenny Opera (spoiler alert) Macheath is minutes away from execution, only to be pardoned by the Queen of England and rewarded with his own castle, a title, and £10,000.
After an unsuccessful American premiere on Broadway in 1933, The Threepenny Opera re-crossed the Atlantic in 1952, two years after Weill’s death. This time the English translation of the lyrics was handled by Marc Blitzstein, author of the influential “play in music” The Cradle Will Rock which was dedicated to Brecht. The American Threepenny Opera was first produced as a concert at Brandeis University, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the orchestra, and Weill’s widow Lotte Lenya reprising her original stage role as Jenny.
A full-on stage adaptation was readied in 1954. Lenya again played Jenny and advised the troupe on Weill’s and Brecht’s many stylistic vagaries and speak-singing. The show opened at the off-Broadway Theatre de Lys. Senator and tunnel-visioned Commie hunter Joseph McCarthy caught the show, and called it “a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda which exalts anarchical gangsterism and prostitutes over democratic law and order.” Oh, Joey, you’re adorable. After an initial 12-week run, The Threepenny Opera went on hiatus, then returned in 1955 where it became a monster success that ran for seven years and reshaped off-Broadway theater.
For the American production, Blitzstein reworked “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” into a far less dangerous song: “Mack the Knife.” Blitzstein dialed back some of the more lurid parts, focusing instead on Macheath’s handiness with a jack-knife rather than his less genteel criminology. It’s not explained why Blitzstein made “Mack the Knife” less graphic, but one may assume American audiences would have been alienated by some of Macheath’s more insidious acts.
Blitzstein’s lyrics are the words you’re most familiar with. They were the ones used by Bobby Darin, effectively exchanging Macheath’s crass blue bow tie for a sharkskin suit and using the benevolent interjection “babe” a lot. Darin’s version (a harmless slice of vulgarity I’ve never been a fan of) hit #1 on the pop charts in 1959, locking it in as a swingin’ lounge standard just in time for the ascendancy of Las Vegas as an entertainment destination.
I prefer Louis Armstrong’s far more tolerable, less unctuous 1956 recording, the first version of “Mack the Knife” to attract American attention and one that reached #20 on the pop charts. Lenya was present at the recording session, so Satchmo gave her a shout-out on the record.
“The familiar Blitzstein version (of The Threepenny Opera) sanitized and popularized, defanged and, at times, even traduced the Brecht original,” wrote Clive Barnes in the New York Times. “It had been made far more socially acceptable; the scatological references had been removed, for example, and also it was politically far tamer.”
The occasion for Barnes' analysis was the Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera, put on by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 1976. This staging starred Papp protegé Raúl Juliá as Macheath, with new English lyrics translated by John Willett. This version of the play subsisted for much of the next two decades, and may have played an instrumental part in a Kurt Weill revival that trickled through the music and theater worlds from the mid-80s through the early 90s.
True to Barnes' assertions, the 1976 version of "Mack the Knife," sung by Roy Brocksmith (and admirably covered by Sting), restores some of the teeth of the original content, with slightly more florid accents.
Then there’s the version of The Threepenny Opera as staged by the Donmar Warehouse, a non-profit theater in London’s Covent Garden, in 1994. The Donmar was in the midst of a renaissance at the time under artistic director Sam Mendes (director of the movies American Beauty and 1917, among others). The theater rejuvenated itself by presenting dramatic, somewhat disorienting re-conceptualizations of musical classics, namely modern takes on Oliver! and Cabaret.
The Donmar’s version of The Threepenny Opera was the most substantial modification in the show’s history, using new lyrical translations by Jeremy Sans. The setting was changed from Victorian London to a “not-too-distant future” where Prince William is about to ascend the throne. In its review of the cast album, All-Music Guide called the Donmar presentation “the most vulgar translation since the 1976 Broadway revival, nearly matching that version in scatological references and far exceeding it in use of the ever-popular ‘F’ word.”
The extremely twisted reworking of “Mack the Knife” — retitled “The Flick-Knife Song” and sung by the character Jenny at the end of Act I — is so vividly disturbing, it makes it almost impossible to hear the earlier takes of the song the same way again. The Blitzstein covers, especially, sound limp now. The Donmar version exposes Mack the Knife as a nihilist with blood-drenched, hideous imagery (“He’s a sadist, he’s a rapist/And they haven’t caught him yet”).
Trigger alerts up the yang for this version. All the trigger alerts. It’s seriously upsetting, and I don’t easily get upset.
There you have it: "Mack the Knife," Victorian miscreant, Rat Pack-adjacent, unfluffed and homicidally deranged, laid out in four different interpretations very representative of their times, from troubled to anesthetized to full-on sociopath.
Though, perhaps, never as sociopathic as this version: