Drummie123
Verified User
I'm tellin' ya.. only him and this uhh.. "Bobby Darin" could do that stuff good. But it's damn good stuff.
The best rendition of Mack the Knife was Bobby Darin's.
Bobby Darin "Mack The Knife" on The Ed Sullivan Show
What’s the story behind “Mack the Knife”?
A STAFF REPORT FROM THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD
By Straight Dope Staff Apr 1, 2004
Dear Straight Dope:
What's with the lyrics to the song "Mack the Knife"? I heard a radio report a couple of years ago describing it as a song about the real life Detroit organized-crime scene. Is it really about the Detroit mob?
Harmon Everett
SDStaff Songbird replies:
There were no mobs in Detroit in 1728, when the character we know as Mack the Knife first made his appearance. In those days, there were only about 30 families living in Fort Ponchartrain near Detroit du Herie (strait of Erie), and none of them belonged to the Purple Gang. In fact, the reference is to London, not Detroit, and to politicians more than street gangs.
The character of Macheath, later to become Mack the Knife, first appeared in The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (1685-1732). Gay was a popular English playwright and poet, a friend and collaborator of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.
The Beggar’s Opera is a comic ballad opera, the first of its kind, and took London theatre by storm. Gay uses lower-class criminals to satirize government and upper-class society, an idea that has been used often ever since. A century and a half later, the title characters in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance note that they are more honest than “many a king on a first-class throne.” And in our time, wasn’t it Bob Dylan who wrote, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king?”
The main character of The Beggar’s Opera is a swashbuckling thief called Macheath. He’s a dashing romantic, a gentleman pickpocket, a Robin Hood type. He is polite to the people he robs, avoids violence, and shows impeccable good manners while cheating on his wife. The character is usually understood as partly a satire of Sir Robert Walpole, a leading British politician of the time.
The Beggar’s Opera was a success from its first production in 1728, and continued to be performed for many years. It was the first musical play produced in colonial New York; George Washington enjoyed it.
We now skip about 200 years to post-WWI Europe and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), a distant cousin of this SDSTAFFer. World War I had a revolutionary impact on the arts. The avant-garde movement, in despair after the war, embraced the concept of the anti-hero. Gay’s play was revived in England in 1920, and Brecht thought it could be adapted to suit the new era – who’s more of an anti-hero than Macheath? So in 1927 he got a German translation and started writing Die Dreigroschenoper, “The Three Penny Opera.”
Brecht worked with Kurt Weill (1900-1950) on the adaptation. He did far more than just translate Gay’s play, he reworked it to reflect the decadence of the period and of the Weimar republic. Mostly, Brecht wrote or adapted the lyrics, and Weill wrote or adapted the music. Gay’s eighteenth-century ballads were replaced with foxtrots and tangos. Only one of Gay’s melodies remained in the new work. The play parodies operatic conventions, romantic lyricism and happy endings.
The main character is still Macheath, but Macheath transformed. He’s now called Mackie Messer, AKA Mack the Knife. (“Messer” is German for knife.) Where Gay’s Macheath was a gentleman thief, Brecht’s Mackie is an out-and-out gangster. He’s no longer the Robin Hood type, he’s an underworld cutthroat, the head of a band of street robbers and muggers. He describes his activities as “business” and himself as a “businessman.” Still, the character does manage to arouse some sympathy from the audience.
So, we finally get to your song, the “Ballad of Mack the Knife” (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer) from The Three Penny Opera. The song was a last-minute addition to appease the vanity of tenor Harald Paulson, who played Macheath. However, it was performed by the ballad singer, to introduce the character. The essence of the song is: “Oh, look who’s coming onstage, it’s Mack the Knife – a thief, murderer, arsonist, and rapist.” (If these last two startle you, be patient for a couple paragraphs.)
The Brecht-Weill version premiered in Germany in 1928 and was an instant hit. Within a year, it was being performed throughout Europe, from France to Russia. Between 1928 and 1933 it was translated into 18 languages and had over 10,000 performances.
In 1933, The Three Penny Opera was first translated into English and brought to New York by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky. There have been at least eight English translations over the years. In the 1950s, Marc Blitzstein wrote an adaptation, cleaning up “Mack the Knife” and dropping the last two stanzas about arson and rape. At the revival in New York using the Blitzstein translation, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s widow, made her comeback – she had a role in the original 1928 Berlin production.
Blitzstein’s sanitized adaptation is the best known version of the song in the English-speaking world, and undoubtedly the one you’ve heard. Louis Armstrong popularized it worldwide in 1955 with an amazing jazz beat. Bobby Darin’s 1958 recording was #1 on the Billboard charts for many weeks and won a Grammy as best song. It’s been sung as ballad, jazz, and rock by many of the greats, including Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney.
In the 1970s, Joseph Papp commissioned Ralph Manheim and John Willett to do an adaptation/translation that would be “more faithful” to Brecht. So, if you were surprised at the notion of arson and rape, here’s Willett’s translation of the last two stanzas, omitted from the Blitzstein version:
And the ghastly fire in Soho,
Seven children at a go-
In the crowd stands Mack the knife, but
He’s not asked and doesn’t know.
And the child bride in her nightie,
Whose assailant’s still at large
Violated in her slumbers-
Mackie how much did you charge?
Having hit the heights with Louis Armstrong, it’s only fair that we also recount the depths reached in the 1980s with the McDonald’s TV jingle, “Mac Tonight.” Selling Big Macs – how have the mighty fallen.
Got a question, Harmon Everett?
Get behind old Lucy Brown.
Oh the line forms on the right, dear
Now that Cecil’s back in town.
SDStaff Songbird, Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
https://www.straightdope.com/21343290/what-s-the-story-behind-mack-the-knife
"Blitzstein's translation provides the basis for most of the popular versions heard today, including those by Louis Armstrong (1955) and Bobby Darin (1959; Darin's lyrics differ slightly), and most subsequent swing versions. Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, the star of both the original 1928 German production and the 1954 Blitzstein Broadway version, was present in the studio during Armstrong's recording. He spontaneously added her name to the lyrics ("Look out, Miss Lotte Lenya"),[10] which already named several of Macheath's female victims."
Popular song
"...Dick Hyman recorded an instrumental version in 1955.[10] "Mack the Knife" was introduced to the United States hit parade by Louis Armstrong in 1955, but the song is most closely associated with Bobby Darin, who recorded his version at Fulton Studios on West 40th Street, New York City, on December 19, 1958 for his album That's All (with Tom Dowd engineering the recording). Even though Darin was reluctant to release the song as a single,[11] in 1959 it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and number six on the Black Singles chart, and earned him two Grammy Awards, for Record of the Year and Best New Artist.[12][13][14] It was listed as a Cash Box Top 100 number one single in 1959 for eight weeks.[15] Dick Clark had advised Darin not to record the song because of the perception that, having come from an opera, it would not appeal to the rock and roll audience; he subsequently acknowledged his error.[16] Frank Sinatra, who recorded the song with Quincy Jones on his L.A. Is My Lady album, called Darin's the "definitive" version.[10]
Bobby Darin took the song by the scruff of the neck and turned it into the swing classic widely known today. Unlike the Brecht-Weill original, which remains in the same key throughout, Darin's version changes key, chromatically, no fewer than five times, ratcheting up the tension. – Financial Times[17]
Billboard ranked this version as the No. 2 song for 1959.[18] Darin's version was No. 3 on Billboard's All Time Top 100.[19] In 2003, the Darin version was ranked #251 on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list.[20] On BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, pop mogul Simon Cowell named "Mack the Knife" as "the best song ever made".[21] Darin's version of the song was featured in the films Quiz Show and What Women Want. Both Armstrong's and Darin's versions were inducted by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry in 2016.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_the_Knife
Red the next post to see more about Lotte Lenya.
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