SONGS FROM BERTOLT BRECHT’S THE THREEPENNY OPERA: FUNCTIONING WITHIN THE DRAMATIC TEXT AND BEYOND IT

Abstract

The history of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera ("Die Dreigroschenoper", 1928) reception has been used to analyze the literary and musical genre of song, its specificity for the German cultural space of the time, attachment to the new American and long-standing German song tradition, its dependence on the manner of performance, voice performability, gesture character and aesthetic requirements of epic theatre. Based on the theoretical considerations of the German playwright and his own experience of performing, songs are viewed both as an element of "play with music" with an emphasis on their innovative functioning within the text and as independent art phenomena which played an essential role in popularizing The Threepenny Opera in general and its specific ideas and ways of their implementation in particular. A significant characteristic of Brecht's songs has been highlighted – their focus on impacting the public, which resulted in their great popularity. In this respect, a connection with the aesthetic experience of street musicians should be mentioned as the founding element in the aesthetics of Brecht's songs, with an accent on the link with jazz as a popular performative art; on the importance of the voice of performer, which was supposed to reflect interactions with the author, character, and composer; on the masterful music created by Kurt Weill for the songs. A new link between text and music, defined by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill as "gestic music", has been characterized. A claim is made that songs like texts designed for singing, where the form and language are aimed at making an impact on the listener, which serve as an attraction in the general performance, work successfully due to relevance, ballad nature, cognizability, repetition, external simplicity and even banality, aphoristic nature, satiricalness, indexicality and performability of the ideas they contain. Analysis of the most popular songs ("Mack the Knife", "Pirate Jenny") involves ideas of the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch.