ABSTRACT
Der Dreigroschenoper was grossly over budget, and threatened to put Ernst Aufricht, in his first outing as producer, into debt. He had already benched a sick lead and fired another, but was most concerned with a program misprint. Brecht felt eclipsed by Weill’s success, but he was guilty of erasure himself. The original idea to translate and adapt John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera, came from his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hauptmann, who deftly augmented the score with lyrics from Rudyard Kipling and the fifteenth-century criminal-poet François Villon. Where the bourgeois worldview held capitalism as the best system and any resulting societal ills as sad but inevitable, Marxism viewed capitalism as one of many economic systems with myriad contradictions. The nationalist press panned the piece, branding the production “cultural Bolshevism”. The ebullient, unsinkable Lotte Lenya withdrew from public life, refusing to perform, and threw all her energy into managing her late husband’s estate.
