When the shark bites, with his teeth, dear,
Scarlet billows start to flow,
just a jackknife has Macheath dear,
And he keeps it, out of sight.
----- by Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht, 1928 -----
Despite being fictional, Mack the Knife continues
to haunt the darker alleys of our minds. A large reason why is the schism between lyric and score. Weill’s jaunty score clashes with the sophisticated bystander pose of Brecht’s lyric. It takes
a few moments of listening to realize the song is about murder as a career.
Mack the Knife is a cold-blooded architype of merciless urban predator. For him, killing is business, nothing personal, only an easy way to get money. When finished, he pockets the cash, folds his jackknife, and walks away as though nothing happened. Sharks do much the same, except for the incriminating cloud of blood.
Oh the shark has pearly teeth, dear,
And he shows them pearly white,
Fancy gloves though, has Macheath, dear,
So there’s never a trace of red.
Mackie Messer (a.k.a.) Mack the Knife is the most disturbing kind of killer - the kind that thinks. Unmoved by passion, he plots, stalks, kills, and robs - with never a trace left behind.
He is known, yet, unknown - at least not provably. The locals don’t need proof, they know what’s going on. They shrug off the occasional murder/robbery as just the way things are. They know the ways of this predator and give him no reason to prey on them.
On the sidewalk, Sunday morning,
Lies a body oozin’ life, Someone’s sneakin’
‘Round the corner, Could that someone,
be Mack the knife?
Louie Miller foolishly let it be known that he had cashed-in, which led to Mack the Knife’s cashing him out. There is no sympathy for Louie. “He should’a known better”. Life is tough!
Louie Miller, disappeared, dear,
After talking out, all his cash,
Now Macheath, dear, spends just like a sailor,
Did our boy, do something rash?
“Did our boy, do something rash”? It’s a line intended to be cynical and sarcastic. It reveals more. It implies the neighborhood thinks of Mackie Messer as one of their own. Sure, he can be a little rough sometimes, a little impulsive, rash even, but the coppers got nothin’ on ‘em. Maybe he didn’t even do it. Besides, he’s a generous bloke, “Barman, a pint for everyone”!
No evidence of crime, no charges made, nice guy, always ready to slip a few quid to a pal in need, an’ if he don’t have the money on him, he’ll ‘ave it next day, sure. I ‘eard the gabble at the pub. Loose-talk. Don’t mean nothin’. No body, no crime.
From a tugboat, on the river,
A cement bag, is dropping down,
The cement’s just, for the weight, dear,
Betch’a Mackey’s, back in town.
Girls love bad boys. They think their bad boy is reformable. He just hasn’t met the right sort of woman, a women like themselves. Years of evidence show how reliably wrong they are. They don’t care. It’ll be different this time. They’re very sure of that.
Sukey Tawdry, Jenny Diver,
Polly Peachum, Miss Lucy Brown,
Oh the line forms, on the right, dear,
Now that Mackey’s, back in town.
-------------
Mack the Knife is the best-known song from The Threepenney Opera. Both lyric and tune reflect what is timelessly human. New arrangements will sprout up forever. Like most great art the song, and the opera, reach deeper levels than Brecht intended.
Bertolt Brecht was a committed Marxist. He set
The Threepenney Opera in the slums of Victorian London
because he wanted to use the squalor and criminality of that time and place as a socialist critique of capitalist evils.
Brecht sincerely wanted to write effective propaganda, but time and again, all he managed to produce was great art. His Soviet friends were very disappointed. The rest of us are grateful.
Bobby Darin’s vapid finger-popping version may be the only version of Mack the Knife most people know.
Unfortunately, Darin’s version turns art into triviality.
The version that best captures the dark elegance of Brecht’s lyric is sung by German actress and chanteuse, Lotta Lenya.
She sang the most authenic version ever recorded.
Lotta Lenya was married to Kurt Weil at the time Mack the Knife was written. She played the part of Jenney Diver in
the original production. She was steeped in the degenerate angst of the Weimar Republic, post WWI Berlin - which is the real model for The Threepenney Opera.
The slums of Victorian London seem almost innocent
by comparison.
“Street’s not safe, stay alert, Mackey’s back in town”.