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The Smile and the Knife: Brecht and Weill at Gärtnerplatz München
Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz
07/03/2026 - & July 5, 8, 23, December 6, 11, 15, 19, 2026
Kurt Weill: Die Dreigroschenoper
Erwin Windegger (Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum), Dagmar Hellberg (Celia Peachum), Anna Overbeck (Polly Peachum), Daniel Prohaska (Macheath), Alexander Franzen (Tiger Brown), Laura Schneiderhan (Lucy Brown), Brigitte Hobmeier (Jenny), Christian Schleinzer (Trauenweiden-Walter), Holger Ohlmann (Hakenfinger-Jakob), Alexander Paul Findewirth (Ede), Frank Berg (Säge-Robert), Jeremy Boulton (Münz-Matthias), Juan Carlos Falcón (Jimmy)
Chor des Staatstheaters am Gärtnerplatz, Dovilė Siupėnytė (chorus master), Orchester des Staatstheaters am Gärtnerplatz, Eduardo Browne (conductor)
D. Hellberg, E. Windegger (© Anna Schnauss)
Set in a corrupt, semi-mythical Victorian London, Die Dreigroschenoper unfolded around the criminal Macheath, the charismatic gangster who secretly married Polly Peachum, daughter of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum. Peachum, himself no less a capitalist than any respectable businessman, had built an enterprise upon the organised exploitation of London’s beggars, transforming destitution into a profitable commodity. Incensed by his daughter’s marriage, he resolved to have Macheath arrested and hanged. Macheath initially eluded capture through the protection of Tiger Brown, the city’s police chief and his former military companion. Warned of Peachum’s intentions, he disappeared into hiding, entrusting Polly with the management of his criminal empire. Yet his habitual weakness for women proved his undoing. Betrayed by the prostitute Jenny, he was arrested and imprisoned.
Within the prison walls, Polly confronted Lucy Brown, another claimant to Macheath’s affections. Although Lucy briefly facilitated his escape, Peachum’s relentless machinations soon ensured his recapture. As the hour of execution approached, neither bribery nor influence appeared capable of averting the inevitable. Then, with deliberate absurdity, Brecht shattered any remaining pretence of realism. A royal messenger arrived bearing news of the Queen’s clemency: Macheath was not merely pardoned but ennobled, enriched and rewarded with a castle. The grotesquely improbable conclusion mocked operatic convention while exposing the artificiality of theatrical justice. Rather than resolving the work’s moral contradictions, it reminded the audience that such miraculous interventions remain the exclusive privilege of fiction.
More than a tale of crime, Die Dreigroschenoper remained a devastating satire upon capitalist society itself. Brecht juxtaposed respectable commerce and organised criminality until both appeared to operate according to precisely the same principles of exploitation. Weill’s unforgettable songs constantly undermined their own lyrical appeal, refusing sentimental consolation and inviting the audience to scrutinise conventional assumptions about morality, justice and social order rather than identify comfortably with any individual character.
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht conceived Die Dreigroschenoper as an act of aesthetic sabotage. It masqueraded as popular entertainment while quietly dismantling the moral architecture of bourgeois society, exposing capitalism not as an aberration but as a system in which criminality merely changed its attire. Any contemporary production therefore faced an uncomfortable choice: either to embalm the work as a cherished period piece or to rediscover its capacity to unsettle. The current presentation at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, conceived as a concert staging, wisely rejected that false dilemma. Rather than competing with the elaborate visual reinventions that have proliferated over recent decades, it entrusted Brecht’s corrosive wit and Weill’s astonishing musical language with carrying the evening’s dramatic burden.
That decision proved more radical than it first appeared. Stripped of theatrical excess, the score emerged with remarkable clarity. Weill’s uncanny synthesis of cabaret, jazz, Lutheran chorale, dance‑hall pastiche and operatic gesture was heard not as an eclectic collage but as a meticulously engineered critique of cultural respectability. Every seductive melody contained its own poison pill; every lyrical phrase was shadowed by irony. Under Eduardo Browne, the orchestra embraced precisely this ambivalence, resisting both sentimental luxuriance and exaggerated angularity. The result was music that smiled while baring its teeth.
The concert format also restored an aspect of Brecht that is frequently obscured by overdetermined directorial concepts. His celebrated Verfremdungseffekt was never merely a matter of placards, projections or conspicuous stage machinery. Its deeper purpose lay in cultivating intellectual distance, liberating the spectator from passive emotional identification. By reducing scenic distraction, the audience is paradoxically encouraged to listen more critically. Characters ceased to function as psychologically rounded individuals and instead re‑emerged as social archetypes inhabiting an economy in which charity, law, marriage and organised crime became interchangeable commercial enterprises.
The audience at the Gärtnerplatztheater, composed overwhelmingly of German speakers and relatively few tourists, offered another advantage. Here, Brecht’s libretto could be presented without compromise. There were neither German nor English surtitles because none were required. Every verbal barb, every sardonic rhyme and every calculated ambiguity reached its audience directly. In a work where language is no less important than music, such immediacy constituted a considerable asset.
Equally commendable was the production’s refusal to burden the work with fashionable political updating. Too many modern productions of politically charged theatre succumb to the temptation of scattering topical references across the stage in the mistaken belief that relevance requires contemporaneity. Brecht scarcely required such assistance. His London remained recognisably our own because its mechanisms were structural rather than historical. Peachum’s commodification of misery, Macheath’s entrepreneurial criminality and the state’s selective administration of justice belonged as naturally to the twenty‑first century as they did to the Weimar Republic. By trusting this continuity instead of cluttering the work with contemporary allusions, the production displayed admirable confidence. The decision to perform the work without an interval, compressing the entire drama into seventy‑five uninterrupted minutes, further intensified its relentless dramatic momentum.
What remained astonishing, nearly a century after the work’s 1928 première, was the perfect equilibrium between accessibility and intellectual sophistication. Weill understood that melody could function as ideological camouflage; audiences left the theatre humming tunes whose implications they might have preferred to forget. The familiar songs retained all their irresistible immediacy even as their emotional appeal continually subverted itself. One was seduced into recognising the very systems of seduction that the work anatomised.
Although Die Dreigroschenoper lay far removed from the traditions of bel canto, it nevertheless demanded singers capable of combining vocal assurance with acute dramatic intelligence. The cast assembled here proved almost uniformly admirable. Only Brigitte Hobmeier, as Jenny, appeared somewhat underpowered vocally, her voice lacking the weight the role ideally requires. Perhaps for that reason, the celebrated Seeräuber-Jenny was assigned elsewhere.
Erwin Windegger and Dagmar Hellberg were exemplary Jonathan Jeremiah and Celia Peachum. Having appeared only days earlier as Fürst Basil Basilowitsch and Gräfin Mathilde von Luxemburg in Der Graf von Luxemburg, both artists again demonstrated remarkable versatility. Their long experience lent unquestionable authority to these roles, each phrase delivered with relish and impeccable theatrical instinct. Hellberg’s richly coloured mezzo‑soprano proved especially memorable, lingering in the memory long after the final curtain.
Daniel Prohaska and Alexander Franzen brought equal distinction to Macheath and Tiger Brown. Their “Kanonen-Song” – surely among the most devastating anti‑colonial songs ever written – combined incisive vocalism with choreography that heightened rather than softened its calculated brutality. It stood among the evening’s most compelling moments.
Laura Schneiderhan and Anna Overbeck offered sharply contrasted yet complementary portrayals of Lucy Brown and Polly Peachum. Schneiderhan’s brighter vocal profile found an effective foil in Overbeck’s darker, haunting timbre, the latter possessing precisely the distinctive vibrato long associated with Polly’s music.
Although presented as a semi-staged concert performance, the production seldom felt theatrically static. The singers moved with remarkable naturalness, interacting constantly and frequently dancing with sufficient freedom that the performance often created the illusion of a fully staged production.
If one reservation may be ventured, it concerns the inevitable limitations of the format itself. Die Dreigroschenoper thrives upon friction: between illusion and exposure, narrative continuity and deliberate interruption. However imaginatively realised, a concert staging cannot entirely reproduce the kinetic energy inherent in Brecht’s dramaturgy. Yet this compromise was more than compensated by an unusual concentration upon language, vocal characterisation and orchestral detail, elements too frequently obscured beneath visually overassertive productions.
Ultimately, Gärtnerplatz’s Die Dreigroschenoper demonstrated that fidelity to Brecht required neither archaeological reconstruction nor fashionable directorial exhibitionism. Instead, it reminded us that the work’s revolutionary force resided, now as in 1928, in the inexhaustible tension between its glittering musical surface and its pitiless moral vision. Nearly a century after its première, Brecht and Weill still compelled us to confront the unsettling possibility that respectable society and organised crime were distinguished less by ethics than by accounting practices. Few theatrical works continue to smile with such charm while cutting quite so deeply.
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