Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera by Stephen Hinton, and: Alban Berg: Lulu by Douglas Jarman (review)

Book Reviews Leonard. Still, his survey chapters contain interesting mini-essays, such as that on Thomas Kilroy (pp. 51-62), which call attention to artists whose stature has not yet been properly measured. Etherton is an optimistic cultural materialist who privileges perfonnance over print and collectively produced over author-driven drama. He values playwrights who, like Kilroy and Friel, dramatize the parallel between linguistic and social change and who, he claims, write with the purpose of provoking social change. But often enough he plays Palanins, forgetting his theory in practice. Committed to the analysis of dramatic texts as perfonnance, he gives a three-page synopsis of Molloy's Petticoat Loose without a word on the relationship of script to community or a thought on the feminist implications of the action. Furthermore, he never discusses lhe actual staging of any scenario or records any audience response to a perfonnance. Etherton is a lively writer but not a wholly accurate one. He never gets the real name of Shivaun O'Sullivan right. He places the Nonnan invasion of 1169 in the eleventh century. He attributes School for Scandal to Goldsmith. In the index he misprints the title of Tom McIntyre's The Great flunger. And, Saints Alive! he calls a pattern (d. OED def. 12) a "patten." Lastly, he sees Irish English as a language not only imposed by Gall on Gael, but one that historically has "most easily expressed the rhetoric of political domination" (p. 126). NINlAN MElLAMPHY, THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO STEPHEN HINTON. Kurt Weill: The ThreepefillY Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press t990. Pp. xv, 229, illustrated. $39.50; $14.95 (PB). DOUGLAS JARMAN. Alban Berg: Lulu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991. pp. xiii, 146, illustrated. $39.50; $18.95 (PB). These small volumes are the latest in a Cambridge University Press series about composers and their works, each oeuvre treated in a separate book. Hinton and Jarman provide the fascinating background history to the gestation of Weill's The Threepenny Opera and Berg's Lulu, respectively. as well as an interpretation of the librettist's plot and the music itself. The musicological analysis is sensibly aimed at showing the synchronicity between stage action and musical dynamics, meant to underscore the dramatic highlights. In their conciseness, both volumes are well crafted, and they are doubtless of value to musicologists as well as to general historians of culture. Hinton dwells on the tortuous evolution of The Threepenny Opera, a plot whose libretto by Bertoh Brecht was based on John Gay's Beggar's Opera. The scenes, from the world of petty criminals and prostitutes of London, were moved to the twentieth century so that Brecht and Weill could justify their overt criticism of what they perceived as social injustices engendered by modern capitalism. This opera, which was first perfonncd in Berlin in 1928, had only a short run in its home country Gennany, because in 1933 the National Socialist regime banned it from every stage. Its world Book Reviews success came decades laler, after Weill's death (1950) in New York, via international stage productions and several adaptations for film. After the mid· I 950S, in New York, the melodrama became the JongesHunning musical in history (0 that time. Hinton's own very painstaking chronicle of the genesis of this opera and ils first perfonnanccs is supplemented by a trenchant account of its subsequent fai lures and successes internationally, with particular emphasis on the United States, authored by Kim H. Kowalke, the well known expert on Kurt Weill. Apart from the fascinating details about the opera itscJf, what both Hinton and Kowalke make clear is the severity of the falling-out between Brecht and Weill after the opera's completion , an estrangement of, eventually, two emigres themselves estranged from their origins and barely able to strike roots elsewhere. In this increasingly acrimonious relationship, Brecht appears by far the more vicious. indeed vindictive. of the two artists. Jannan's account of the Austrian Berg and his last work, Lulu, is a different tale. Berg wrote his own libretto, in this case based on a play by Frank Wedekind, and through it the upper-class composer wished to express his sympathy with...