The evening of 31 August 1928 has gone down in dozens of memoirs of Berlin in the 1920s as "the first night of Die Dreigroschenoper" - if all the people had been there, who later claimed to have attended, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm would have been overflowing. This work, known in English as "The Threepenny Opera", has come to symbolise the musical theatre of the Weimar Republic, so it is suitably ironic that its setting is Victorian London, and itwas mostly written and composed in the elegant Cote d'Azur town Le Lavendou. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Kurt Weill (1900-1950), had first begun to collaborate on their large-scale opera Aufstieg and Fall der Stadt Mahagonnyin the spring of 1927. As part of the work-in-progress, Weill set a group of Brecht's poems as the Mahagonny Songspiel, which was given at the BadenBaden Festival in July 1927. Both Brecht and Weill were up-andcoming young lions in the artistic and theatre world of Berlin - a milieusince both romanticised and made legendary because of many works of fiction (by Isherwood, Mann, Nabokov and Brecht himself), and because of its swift destruction atthe arrival of Hitler in 1933. The success of Mahagonny led to a commission from Ernst Auftricht, the impresario of the Schiffbauerdamm theatre, for the two to produce a translation or adaptation of John Gay's Beggar's Opera. This had just enjoyed an immensely successful revival in London, atthe Lyric Hammersmith, and Auftrichtwanted to duplicate this success. What Weill, Brecht, and Brecht's assistant, the poet Elisabeth Hauptmann, produced was not a translation, but a whole new show, which although it kept to the outline of Gay's story, over laid itwith a bitingly modern satire, augmented by Weill's songs, mixing a parody of 18th century opera with Berlin cafe music and strains of American dance-band jazz. The Dreigroschenoper records Since "The Threepenny Opera" has been performed in so many different ways, by actors, by singing-actors, by opera stars and film stars, in German, French, English, Swedish, Yiddish and Japanese, it is more than unusually instructive and fascinating to hear recordings of the artists who created it-performance practice captured in action. Harald Paulsen (1895-1954), the original Mackthe Knife, as one can hear, was an operetta singer in the classic tradition of Strauss and Lehar, not at allthe "Berlin bark" type. Although the role of Mackie is usually assigned to a tenor, Paulsen was a light baritone. The two-side 78 pot-pourri features Carola Neher, who was always intended to sing the role of Polly, though she was not in the cast on the first night, for personal reasons. Her performance was enshrined on film in the Germanlanguage version of G.W. Pabst's classic Dreigroschenopermovie, but as one can see and hearthere, hervoice was notthat of a singer; on this disc she is joined by Kurt Gerron, the original Tiger Brown. The much longer selection, recorded in 1930 with the Lewis Ruth Band, under Theo Mackeben (1897-1953), who was the conductor atthe first night, was made to coincide with the film version. Lotte Lenya (1898-1981) was Weill's wife, and laterthe original interpreter of his music, and largely responsible for its revival and reassessment after the composer's death. Controversy surrounded and continues to surround all her performances. She was a dancer who became an actress and then a singer. "I sang, if you can call it that" was her own comment on one of her later appearances. At the first night of Dreigroschenoper, she sang the role of Jenny, later on switching to that of Lucy. On these records, however, she takes the main role of Polly, confusingly adding a verse of Jenny's TangoBallade. In the film, she is back with her original role of Jenny, but pinches Polly's Piratesong-and mostsingers ofthe role have kept a tight hold on this great number. Brecht's own recordings of two songs remind us that his career in Berlin had started when he sang to his own guitar accompaniment at the Wildebuhne cabaret in the early 1920s. Klemperer gave the first performance of the suite for wind instruments at a party atthe Berlin Opera in February 1929. His recording, made in the 1950s, is much less sprightlythan the selection here. From HappyEndto Silbersee HappyEnd, set in the Chicago of gangsters and Salvation Army bands, was intended as a followup to the success of Die Dreigroschenoper, but it turned into a terrible flop. Not because of Weill's songs, but because of the weakness of Brecht's text, most of which had been written by Elisabeth Hauptmann, under the pseudonym Dorothy Lane. Lotte Lenya never appeared in this show, but she frequently sang the songs from it-this 1930 "Bilbao Song" is her earliest version. Lenya did appear in the Berlin premiere of Aufstieg and Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in 1932. This had been given in an opera-house production in Leipzig, in 1930. Though Weill had hoped for a Berlin production at Klemperer s Kroll opera house, by 1932 the political situation was so adverse that this proved impossible, so Weill consented to a cabaret-style staging, produced by Auftricht. He adapted the role of Jenny to suit Lenya's diseusestyle, and this 2-sided disc gives one a good hint of what it was like. Weill's last work to be performed in Germany before the Nazis banned his music was Der Silbersee, a large-scale theatre work by Georg Kaiser. Itstarred the popular actor Ernst Busch, who had created the part of the Streetsinger in Die Dreigroschenoper. The orchestra on these discs is conducted by Mauric eAbravanel, the young conductor who was a protege of Weill's, and who was later to conduct many of his most important works. America and its superstars After fleeing Germany in March 1933, Weill at first thought to settle in France, and indeed there he composed two of his most important works, the ballet Die sieben Todsunden, and his Second Symphony. After a brief spell in London in 1935, he and Lotte Lenya went to America. Since so much of his music had been influenced by American popular song, and indeed Happy End, Mahagonny and Die sieben Todsunden are all set by Brecht in a mythical America, Weill immediately felt at home there. He was completely unknown, except to a small group of influential theatre and music people, yet his success was immediate. Between 1936 and 1938 he composed his first Broadway show, Johnny Johnson, his first Hollywood score, you and Me -for a film starring George Raft and Sylvia Sidney -.as well as other projects, the largest of which was Max Reinhardt's production of Franz Werfel's pageant The Eternal Road, telling the story of the Children of Israel. When Weill applied for Amer-ican citizenship, against Nationality he wrote 'None: Formerly German'. It was thus fitting that his first big Broadway success should come with a musical play aboutthe foundation of New York City-Maxwell Anderson's Knickerbocker Holiday. This starred the veteran Walter Huston as the wily Peter Stuyvesant, and Weill wrote his most famous hit "September Song", for Huston's non-singing, all-speaking style. The other two Broadway shows featured here were both tailored for the talents of great stars. Weill had probably seen Gertrude Lawrence with Noel Coward in their programme of one-act plays Tonight at 8.30 at the National Theatre, New York in the late part of 1936; his verdict on Lawrence's singing voice was "The greatest range between C and C-sharp". Nevertheless, with Ira Gershwin's lyrics, he composed a sequence of songs for her which gave her the biggest hit of her Broadway career. As Liza Elliott, a hard-bitten fashion magazine editor, Lawrence had a pair of leading men, Danny Kaye and Victor Mature, both of whom were later to become great Hollywood stars. Weill's skill as a songwriter was tied up with his abilityto collaborate with the finest lyricists. In Europe, Brecht and Kaiser, on Broadway Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin and -for One Touch of Venue- Ogden Nash. This adaptation of F.J. Anstey's The Tinted Venus, in which a New York barber is pursued by the goddess Venus, broughtto life from a museum statue, featured Mary Martin as the Roman deity. Martin wrote that she considered these records to be the best she had ever made -and that it was because of Weill's music. For all the many singers who have followed her, no one has ever intoned "That's him" with such subtle innuendo. During their 15 years together in America, before Weill's death, Lotte Lenya knew little success. Her simple, ironic Berlin style was beyond the grasp of American audiences. Encouraged by musicians including Leonard Bernstein and Marc Blitzstein, in the 1950s Lenya made a sensational comeback singing Weill's music, and the postMcCarthy, post-Korean war young generation took her to its heart. For Weill, Lenya was the most important thing in his life, "right after my music" he said. In 1942 he arranged six songs for her to record, and although no pianist is credited on the record labels, Lenya assured her biographers that it is Weill himself. In these songs, two each in English, French and German, one can hear the essence of Weill style. "There is no tradition," Lenya said shortly before her death, "I am the tradition." PATRICK O'CONNOR