On May 31, 1959 – four years after Senator McCarthy’s televised anti-communist hearings—the fresh-faced heartthrob Bobby Darin debuted his latest single on the Ed Sullivan show. The song—about a ruthless murderer and gangster—had originally been composed to critique the inherent corruption and hypocrisy of a capitalist society. An odd career choice, perhaps, for a ’50s American pop star?
To be fair to Darin, by the time he was finger-clicking his way through his slick performance, the lyrics to “Mack the Knife” had been somewhat tamed down from the original. In his version we only get hints of our protagonist’s crimes—the jackknife he carries; someone bleeding on the sidewalk; the appearance of a cement bag (intended, no doubt, to weigh down the body of one of his victims, destined to “swim with the fishes”). The catalogue of crimes attributed to the villain in the original Brecht/Weill song Die Morität von Mackie Messer from their 1928 musical Die Dreigroschenoper, was far more candid: the stabbing of Jenny Towler; an arson in Soho claiming the lives of seven children; the rape of a young widow. How did such a cruel, ruthless criminal become the subject of a Grammy award-winning hit single?
For the start of Mack the Knife’s bizarre journey to pop stardom we have to go way back – past Bobby Darin’s postwar American dream, past Brecht’s Weimar Republic Berlin, all the way back to Georgian England. For his origin can be found in Captain Macheath, the protagonist of John Gay’s 1728 satirical drama The Beggar’s Opera. Macheath is the charismatic, womanising captain of a gang of robbers, probably based on the real-life gentleman highwayman, Claude Duval. Although there had certainly been flawed fictional characters before him, it could be argued that, in Captain Macheath (with his alluring blend of charm and moral ambiguity), Gay created one of the earliest examples of a populist anti-hero. The original idea for The Beggar’s Opera came from Gay’s friend, Jonathan Swift, who suggested it might be interesting to pen a “Newgate pastoral” set amongst the criminal underclass (Newgate was a notorious London prison at the time). Gay decided on a biting satire, contrasting the open criminality of Macheath and his gang with the concealed corruption of politicians, judges, and the nobility. Gay’s play was a hit; but, understandably, caused a certain amount of consternation amongst the ranks of the elite he was satirizing. There was also some moral panic over the negative influence of Macheath, with the fear that young men might want to imitate his “charms of idleness and criminal pleasure”.
Fast forward two hundred years. It’s 1928, and in Weimar Republic Berlin, Bertolt Brecht is presented with a German translation of The Beggar’s Opera by his long-time collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann. Gay’s satire on the corruption and hypocrisy of the elite instantly resonates with the Marxist playwright and, along with Hauptmann, he immediately sets to work on a German adaptation, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) with the gifted composer Kurt Weill supplying the score. Although sticking closely to the original plot, Brecht moves the action forward to Victorian London, widens his satirical focus to include the bourgeoisie, and winds up the dial on Macheath’s cruelty, giving him the threatening sobriquet Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) into the bargain. But Brecht’s mission wasn’t just to satirize. As the father of “Epic Theatre”, he believed the aim of drama should be to induce political and social change. Using various dramatical techniques, he created what he christened Verfremdungseffekt (the distancing/alienation effect) in order to deter the audience’s emotional engagement with the characters in the play, so that they might better reflect intellectually on its political message. In his staging of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht utilized minimalist sets with visible stage machinery, had the actors repeatedly break the fourth wall, and created a jarring effect by pairing Weill’s jaunty songs with ironic and cynical lyrics. He also ramped up the moral ambiguity of Gay’s original characters, blurring the lines even further between the heroes and the villains.
But it seems Brecht’s attempts to discourage the audience’s emotional engagement with Macheath were not wholly successful. Mackie Messer quickly became a cultural icon. In G.W. Pabst’s excellent 1931 film version (one of the inspirations for my crime novel Midnight Streets—a dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho, which should appeal to fans of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson), Rudolf Forster’s depiction of him—with his sharp, tailored suits, elegant cigarette holder, and derby hat set at a rakish angle— is the epitome of Weimar Republic cool. The film’s editor, Jean Oser, once remarked that The Threepenny Opera “… formed the entire pre-Hitler generation until 1933; for about five years every girl in the country wanted to marry a man like Mackie. Apparently, the ideal man was a pimp!” Hitler was less of a fan, citing Die Dreigroschenoper as an example of “degenerate art”. Looking back now on Brecht’s menacing, charismatic villain, perhaps we see a clearer template than Gay’s for the morally ambiguous anti-heroes who were to follow—such as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, or Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, or even Hannibal Lecter?
But let’s get back to that song, Die Morität von Mackie Messer—traditionally, a Morität was a murder ballad, performed by a strolling minstrel. Apparently, the song was a last-minute addition to mollify the ego of Harald Paulsen (the original production’s Macheath), who thought his role too small. Brecht had it performed as the opening number by a street-singer accompanying himself on a barrel-organ (his version of the strolling minstrel). As luck would have it, on the opening night the barrel-organ failed and the jazz band in the orchestra pit had to improvise an accompaniment. The Threepenny Opera was a huge hit, garnering Brecht and Weill both popularity and financial security. They went on to enjoy a number of further successes with their innovative approach. But, just like the Weimar Republic itself, it wasn’t to last, and by the end of 1933, they had both fled Germany to escape the Nazis. And Mackie? Well, he had to retreat back into the shadows, to sharpen his messer and bide his time.
Twenty-one years later—after the world had been exposed to the crimes of quite a different class of German villain—our anti-hero was back to grace the stage with his rakish swagger in an off- Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village. This new staging used an English translation by Marc Blitzstein and boasted the inimitable Lotte Lenya—who’d been married to Kurt Weill—revisiting her original role as the prostitute Spelunken-Jenny (Dive Bar-Jenny). Although some criticized Blitzstein for sanitizing Brecht’s acerbic wit, the revival was a huge commercial and critical success—although not with the aforementioned anti- communist bully McCarthy, who called it: “a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda which exalts anarchical gangsterism and prostitutes over democratic law and order.”
Despite the senator’s opinion, the show ran for a total of 2,707 performances and went on to earn Lenya a well-deserved Tony. One of its wowed audience members was George Avakian, a producer at Columbia Records. He came out of the theatre convinced that the song “Mack the Knife” had the makings of a hit and presented the idea to the legendary Louis Armstrong. Having grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, Armstrong got Mackie straight away. “I knew cats like this in New Orleans. Every one of them, they’d stick a knife into you without blinking an eye!” Using Blitzstein’s translation, Armstrong and his All Stars recorded a swinging cover version which became a huge international hit. Weirdly, Lotte Lenya happened to be booked into the same studio on the day of recording—Armstrong namechecked her on the track; they also recorded an alternative duet version together. It was Armstrong’s 1955 jazz rendition which served as Bobby Darin’s source material for his own hugely successful cover version.
At the end of Die Dreigroschenoper, Brecht attributes Mackie Messer’s downfall to fact that he had fallen for the trappings of capitalism; craving fame, wealth, and a life of ease. Our anti-hero, dear reader, is punished by his creator because he is proven, at heart, to be nothing better than a hopeless bourgeois. Darin’s single stayed at No.1 in the USA for nine weeks, won him two Grammys, and was voted the 14th most popular single in Billboard’s HOT 100 History. Louis Armstrong’s recording was inducted by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry. The song “Mack the Knife” has become a standard, continually performed and recorded by numerous major artists across the globe. Maybe Mackie Messer got the last laugh after all, eh?
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