The Threepenny Opera

One of Bertolt Brecht’s best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble).

Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.

With Kurt Weill’s music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world.

This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein’s classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.