Re: Mack the Knife Mailbag Answer
Fascinating. I had always wondered about that. Great job, Songbird!
I was going to put in a line about the Far Side cartoon, but I can’t remember the names of the spoon and fork.
In any case, great column.
RR
One of my favorite songs. I have a version on a Kurt Weill tribute CD where Sting sings the more accurate lyrics.
The film “Quiz Show” features the this version during the end credits. It is titled “Moritat” and sung by Lyle Lovett.
JpnDude
Just my 2-yen’s worth.
Yeah, I got that one to… on Smile, a collection of Lyle’s songs from the movies. Sting’s version is very similar to Lyle’s.
Mack the Knife is my standard karaoke song. I did a mean performance of it last Friday, which the DJ sandwiched in between “Hey Ya” and something by LL Cool J, I think.
Jimmy Dale Gilmore does a cool laid-back country version of the tune as well.
What / who are the names mentioned at the end (of, at least, the Bobby Darin version)? Lotte Lenya is obvious; but who are Lucy Brown, Jenny Diver, and (what sounds like) Sookie Tawdry?
In The Beggar’s Opera Sookie Tawdry and Jenny Diver are common prostitutes. There is no Lucy Brown in TBO but there is a Lucy Lockit, who is MacHeath’s mistress. Miss Polly Peachum is MacHeath’s “common law wife” according to the dramatis personae.
I haven’t read or seen The Threepenny Opera but I’ll guess that Brecht employs these characters somehow, and probably changes the Lucy Lockit character to Lucy Brown.
Oh, and I meant “Suky,” not “Sookie.”
I was always under the impression that Peachum was the Walpole figure.
I recently read The Three-Penny Novel, written by Bertolt Brecht, and found it a bit disappointing, though it does flesh out the characters from the play.
By the way, you’ve never heard “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” till you’ve heard it sung by Ute Lemper!
Eve - Would you be willing to summarize how Brecht fleshed out the characters of Crookfinger Jake and Smith? It’s entirely selfish on my part; I’m in a production of the play and those are my roles.
Ooooh, dear, I really don’t remember—who were those characters? They may have been renamed in the book, or even eliminated; what did they do? The novel characters that were really elaborated on were Mack, Jenny, Polly, Mr. Peachum, and the soldier who works for Mr. Peachum.
That’s understandable. They’re both minor characters.
Jake is just a member of Macheath’s gang and Smith is the prison warden.
Sorry, don’t remember them. I wasn’t overly impressed by the book, which Brecht wrote in 1934, probably to cash in on the success of the play and movie.
The image I get from the song was as background music during many of the skits on the Ernie Kovacs show. They used a German version by Wolfgang Neuss, I believe.
Your article doesn’t say what a “moritat” actually is. As it took me a while to find out (my Langenscheidt German dictioanary didn’t have it), I thought I’d let you know. A moritat was a type of street entertainment with a sung narrative (usually accompanied by a hurdy-gurdy, i.e. a hand-cranked barrel organ) and illustrated with placards painted with pictures of the story. The stories were frequently gruesome but not always. The accompaniment to “Mack the Knife” is intended to imitate a hurdy-gurdy.
Your article doesn’t say what a “moritat” actually is. As it took me a while to find out, I thought I’d let you know. (My Langenscheidt German dictionary didn’t have it so a nice German gentleman on the web explained it to me). A moritat was a type of street entertainment with a sung narrative (usually accompanied by a hurdy-gurdy, i.e. a hand-cranked barrel organ) and illustrated with placards painted with pictures of the story. The stories were frequently gruesome but not always. The accompaniment to “Mack the Knife” is intended to imitate a hurdy-gurdy.
I suppose the “Muss i’ den” scene in “G.I. Blues” is has its roots in the custom.