Threepenny Opera

The power of the first great slums of the modern world came from the fact that they were seen by artists who were still artists. Today the ideological painter follows the social theorist into rundown areas and illustrates his statistics. Picasso shows men turned into beasts by too little bread and too many bombs. But the first artists of the “social conscience” followed the reformers into the slums and discovered the strange and terrifying fact that men remain men under the most brutalizing pressures.

One of the most interesting products of the London street scene, Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, has kept an off-Broadway theater crowded for three years. Weill wanted to be a modern artist and preach social themes. In America he was able to do this: his musical deftness never rising into a structure, his pathos never reaching the pattern of tragedy, he wrote viable musicals on the Negro and the slums. But there was enough of the artist in him to respond to the magic of Berlin decadence in the twenties and to find this magic reflected in John Gay’s picture of eighteenth-century London.

GW

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Garry Wills

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The power of the first great slums of the modern world came from the fact that they were seen by artists who were still artists. Today the ideological painter follows the social theorist into rundown areas and illustrates his statistics. Picasso shows men turned into beasts by too little bread and too many bombs. But the first artists of the “social conscience” followed the reformers into the slums and discovered the strange and terrifying fact that men remain men under the most brutalizing pressures.

One of the most interesting products of the London street scene, Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, has kept an off-Broadway theater crowded for three years. Weill wanted to be a modern artist and preach social themes. In America he was able to do this: his musical deftness never rising into a structure, his pathos never reaching the pattern of tragedy, he wrote viable musicals on the Negro and the slums. But there was enough of the artist in him to respond to the magic of Berlin decadence in the twenties and to find this magic reflected in John Gay’s picture of eighteenth-century London.