Odyssey of Mack the Knife

In Hamburg, Germany, anyone can dial 4166 and hear hit records of the week. Most startling selection: Louis Armstrong playing and croaking a catchy 4/4 time ditty called Mack the Knife:

Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear

And he shows them a-pearly white,

Just a jackknife has Macheath dear

But he keeps it out of sight . . .

The appearance of this song as an American jazz hit marks the end of a remarkable odyssey; Mack the Knife, originally the prologue of Kurt Weill's famed Threepenny Opera, was first heard in Berlin 28 years ago. It also marks a remarkable revival, on records, of Kurt Weill's other music--the legacy of a strange, half-angry, half-sentimental genius.

Underdog Snarl. Most of Weill's early opera music was the song of Berlin between the wars, the city that Christopher Isherwood wrote about in the Berlin Stories--starvation side by side with luxury, Nazi and Communist bullyboys in the streets, cynicism as heavy as the makeup on the faces of the omnipresent prostitutes. The Threepenny Opera echoed that city. Vaguely based on John Gay's 18th century original, the German libretto by Poet Bert Brecht (now a propaganda wheel in East Germany) had a vicious underdog snarl ("First fill our bellies, then talk morality") and magnificent, vulgar humor. Like the rest of the work, Mack the Knife* was a bitter satire of society and of schmalzy, popular music; it gave a ragtime catalogue of murder, arson and rape.

There are now no less than 17 recorded versions of Mack the Knife spinning across the U.S., and most of the horror has gone out of it. U.S. Composer-Author Marc Blitzstein has effectively translated the Berlin slang into American, but as Satchmo growls the words, the listener is amused rather than chilled by the corpse sinking into the river, weighted down by what Armstrong insists on calling "ceee-ments."

Other versions are even farther away from the original. Les Paul (Capitol) gives it a zithery sound, Tito Puente (Victor) a Latin beat, and Billy Vaughan (Dot) features an off-key whistler. But most versions retain the original's deliberately poverty-stricken melody--five of its eight phrases end on the same querulous note.

Vintage Rotgut. For those who want to hear the original version, there is a new Threepenny Opera album in German (Vanguard), fascinating largely because it shows how difficult it is for vintage rotgut to travel. The "chamber orchestra" of the august Vienna State Opera bravely buckles down to the hurdy-gurdy score with its plinky-plink banjos, but it is played with excruciating slowness. The star is a charming Viennese nightclub chanteuse named Liane, who sounds less like Polly Peachum than an operetta shopgirl mooning over an archduke. The record does have its high spots, notably the duet between the prostitute Jenny and her pimp. To a wistful tango melody they coo:

We won't forget, wherever we may roam

The dear old whorehouse where we made our home . . .

On a Columbia LP, Lotte Lenya sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill; the composer's widow does Mack the Knife and other Threepenny ditties as they should be done. Fiftyish, and after two years of starring in a successful New York revival of the work, Lotte Lenya still sings with a smoky, strangely appealing quality that always suggests the waif beneath the cynic.

Alabama Mama. The record includes songs from other Weill musicals that are virtually unknown in the U.S., most of them close echoes of Threepenny Opera tunes. Composer Weill (who died in the U.S. in 1950) grew lyrical, sentimental and popular in such musicals as Lady in the Dark and Lost in the Stars. But in this album he is still the unreconstructed composer of gutter nihilisms. In one ditty. Singer Lenya is a bitter, jilted girl who snarls at her indifferent lover: "Take that pipe out of your kisser, you dog!" In the chilling Berlin Requiem she sings the horrifying vision of a drowned girl whose body is decomposing, limb by limb, as "God gradually forgot her, first her face, then her hands and finally her hair." Funniest for U.S. listeners is a moaning ragtime song written in a German's conception of American English:

Oh, show us the way to the next whisky-bar . . .

For if we don't find the next whisky-bar , . .

I tell you we must die-- I tell you we must die . . .

Oh! Moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mama

And must have whisky

Oh, you know why!

* Originally called "Moritat" (literally, a murderous deed), a song style used by 17th and 18th century street-fair singers, who tearfully presented the latest atrocity in ballad form on the streets of Germany.

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