Over a century since it was written, The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill continues to dazzle audiences worldwide and occupy a singular place in the musical landscape. In this course, celebrated composer Stephen McNeff unravels the collaborative magic between lyricist and musician that produced this masterpiece. 

Now universally regarded as a work of genius, Bertholt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera was at first a commercial and critical failure. Like The Beggar’s Opera, the 1728 musical satire on which it was based, it was an “anti-opera,” using popular tunes in place of grand, sweeping orchestration, and popular themes of drinking, sex, and the struggles of poverty, in place of epic loves and tragedies.

Brecht and Weill’s version, the source of beloved standards like “Mack the Knife” and “Pirate Jenny,” premiered in Weimar Germany — a period of grinding poverty and depression — as a bawdy, darkly comic critique of capitalism. The now-legendary Lotte Lenya played the starring role of Jenny. In spite of an weak initial reception, the play soon found its audience and went on to have over 400 performances, until Weill and Brecht were forced to flee Germany after the Nazi rise to power. 

Your guide in this course, Stephen McNeff, is an Irish-born, Welsh-raised composer of operas and instrumental music and an instructor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, who wrote the chapter on The Threepenny Opera in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. 

McNeff is a lifelong student of Weill and Brecht, whose own work is notably influenced by theirs. For him, there is mystery and magic in the collaborative process, especially that between composer and librettist — and nowhere is that strange alchemy on display more prominently than in The Threepenny Opera.

In this exciting, artist-led journey of discovery, you’ll peek behind the curtain of the act of creation, learning about the making of this work of genius, the musical and lyrical inventions that make it inimitable, and the nature of creative collaboration itself.

For full details please see the Roundtable website here.