Cabaret

Rudolph Nelson
Kurt Tucholsky
Satire
Berlin cabaret provided the artistic link between nineteenth-century comic
opera and the political song-plays of Brecht and Weill. This new genre
generally followed the musical and theatrical patterns fixed by Rudolph
Nelson, the composer-pianist, who cast the traditional conferencier in the
novel role of intermediary between stage and audience. The attitudes and
techniques developed by Nelson and his increasing competitors affected
Berlin operetta and the lavish Broadway-type shows of the later Twenties no
less than the political theatre of the artistic left.
Kurt Tucholsky, a leading exponent of satire in song, espoused the
adoption of the word Kabarett. Unlike cabaret, whose prime function
was to entertain, the Kabarett, in Tucholsky’s view, had a duty to
maintain an adversarial stance in order to change society: “Nothing is
harder and takes more character than to stand in open opposition to
one’s time and loudly say: No!” (“Political Satire,” Weldthüne, 9
October 1919). In his view, there were no bounds to satire, whose
mandate stretched to everything under the sun.
Lotte Lenya, wife of composer Kurt Weill, once
noted “I think cabaret satire is more a European
than an American form. Americans have a great
sense of humor, but…I think television has taken
part of the snap out of satire, because it has to
appeal to more of a varied audience. In Berlin in
the Thirties, the audience was presold. They knew
what to expect. The audience was won over from
the beginning. And it was more than just gags”.
The Threepenny Opera, one of the most famous works of satire written
by playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and composer Kurt Weill
(1900-1950), was first performed in its original German as Die
Dreigroschenoper at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August
31, 1928, with Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, in the role of Jenny Diver.
Commenting on The Threepenny Opera in the program notes of a 1928
performance, he said that the work confronted “the same sociological
situation as The Beggar’s Opera: Just like 200 years ago, we have a social
order in which virtually all strata of the population, albeit in extremely
varied ways, follow moral principles—not, of course, by living within a
moral code but off it.” On the other hand, as Weill scholar Stephen
Hinton observes in his book Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, “If the
work exerts any socio-polemical impact, which [Ernst] Bloch and
[Theodor] Adorno claimed, it is at best indirect. Unlike in The Beggar’s
Opera, the outrage expressed in The Threepenny Opera is general, not
particular … Gay’s satire contains scarcely camouflaged barbs against the
Walpole administration, whereas Weill and Brecht’s satire lampoons
conventional bourgeois morality, both in and out of the theater.”
Lotte Lenya
Poster for “The Threepenny
Opera”
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