('Die Dreigroschenoper')
A play with music in a prologue and eight scenes by Bert Brecht after the English of John Gay
Music by Kurt Weill sung in the new French adaptation by Andre-Paul Antoine and Maurice Tbiriet
From the Monte Carlo Opera
Introduced by Philip Hope-Wallace
In 1928, two hundred years after John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was first produced in London, a German version by Bert Brecht was given in Berlin; this was based on a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann, and it bad music, in which jazz rhythms were used with subtlety by Kurt Weill. Only one melody, at the beginning of Act 1, was taken from rhe original Beggar's Opera (in which it was sung to the words ' Thro' all the employments of life ').
The Berlin production was outstandingly successful, and performances soon followed in other .opera houses in Germany and in many other European countries. In 1933 i< was produced in New York as The Threepenny Opera; two years later a concert performance, in an English translation by C. Denis Freeman, took place at Queen's Hall, London. It is now being given in a new French version, and Philip Hope-Wallace recently visited Paris to see it in course of production H.R.
Cast:
Street bandits, beggars, police
Chorus of the Empire Theatre, Paris
Orchestra of the Monte Carlo Opera
CONDUCTED BY RICHARD BUREAU
The action takes place in a market in Soho, the beggars' hide-out, a stable, a brothd in Turnbridge, and a prison in the Old Bailey