The Threepenny Opera (Style)

Style

Opera or Musical?

An opera is a play that contains music (instrumental and/or vocal) as well as dialogue, and the music is just as important to the piece as is the action and spoken words of the characters. The style of singing is known as recitative, which means that the sung words are slightly modified from normal speech, just enough to make them melodic. In operas, the characters sing in the recitative mode during the action of the drama, occasionally launching into a more definitive song, during which the action temporarily stops. It is not a true opera if the lines are spoken instead of sung.

In a musical, the players do not sing their lines but rather speak them normally. The players do, however, break into song and dance at certain points in the play. The action is punctuated by these musical interludes. In an opera, the songs are somewhat more integrated into the recitative singing in the rest of the drama (for the most part, the vocal activity in opera takes the form of singing). In addition, the artistry of an opera lies in the virtuoso singing performances of the performers, not in their qualities as actors or dancers. By contrast, the songs of a musical, while they may showcase the musical abilities of the actors and actresses, are not the raison d’etre (justification for existence) of the musical. The musical is a composite of song, dance, music, and drama in which each element contributes equally. In some cases (particularly cinematic musicals) one performer will record or “dub” the vocals while an actor (who may have no musical ability but can act) performs the speaking parts and lip-synchs to the pre-recorded singing. This practice would be unheard of in an opera, where the performance of the singers is paramount.

Following these guidelines, The Threepenny Opera is an opera in name only; its form of spoken and sung vocal parts defines it as a musical not a traditional opera. The musical was an American invention of the early twentieth century, a natural outgrowth of vaudeville, in which unrelated acts of singing, dance, jazz, juggling, mime, and stunts were performed. American musicals were pure entertainment. Jazz music and the “cabaret” style of entertainment were hugely popular in Germany during the 1920s. Brecht transformed the musical comedy and cabaret music into an instrument of satire, which is not unlike what John Gay did with opera when he wrote The Beggar’s Opera in 1728.

Gay fused together a satire on Italian opera (the form which is most commonly identified with the definition of opera) and the common ballad that had been popular on London streets for many decades. Thus, his invention was called a ballad opera. The ballad opera took the music from familiar ballads and set new words to them, incorporating dozens into the fabric of a loose plot. Gay’s work playfully ridicules the pretensions of society, aristocracy, and Italian opera. Brecht, on the other hand, intended his play to effect actual social change, but the extraordinary music by Kurt Weill led many viewers to perceive the work as entertainment.

Epic Theater

Epic theater (sometimes called “open” theater) was the unique invention of Brecht. He designed epic theater as a “dialectical” (educational) experience: to deviate from the theater’s base goal of entertainment to turn the spectator into a judge. Brecht’s drama is designed to stir the audience into action. He attempts to accomplish this by disrupting the viewer’s passive stance toward the play in order to generate a mode of “complex seeing,” wherein the viewer follows the action, but also thinks about the construction of the play and the fabrication of its characters at the same time. Brecht wanted to develop the viewer’s critical consciousness, the part of the observing mind that holds the drama at arm’s length and judges not the action of the story but the reasons for presenting the characters.

Brecht frustrates the viewer’s usual passive stance toward the drama in a number of ways. One is through the performers’ direct asides to the audience, where the character steps out of action momentarily to address the audience with his or her own observations about the proceedings. For example, Peachum asks the audience “what’s the use” of touching Biblical sayings if people are going to become jaded by them. The songs also serve to disrupt a complacent reading of the story, because they amplify or deny the themes presented by the action. The song Macheath and Polly sing after their wedding is a stinging cynical commentary that taints any shred of romanticism in the couple’s marriage ceremony when it says that “love will endure or not endure / no matter where we are.”

Although Brecht’s ideas about theater had a profound influence on later playwrights, his immediate effect on audiences was not as successful. Spectators sometimes developed empathy for his characters in spite of his “alienating” techniques. This initial failure was due in large part to Weill’s music, which many theatergoers found alluring; the intoxicating music often gave viewers the impression that the play’s events were a fantasy and thus removed from their own world. Critics have also pointed to the characters’ rakishly amusing behavior, the love story — albeit twisted — between Macheath and Polly, and Macheath’s happy ending as reasons for audiences to misinterpret the play as light entertainment.