♫ Die Morität von Mackie Messer ♫Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne, |
♫ The Ballad of Mack the Knife ♫And the shark fish many teeth has |
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An ‘nem schönen blauen Sonntag Und Schmul Meier bleibt verschwunden Jenny Fowler war gefunden Und das große Feuer in Soho Und die minderjährige Witwe, |
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On a beautiful blue Sunday And Sam Meyer still is missing, Jenny Fowler was discovered And the giant fire in Soho, And the under-aged widow,
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♫ Reprise ♫Und so kommt zum guten Ende Daß nur er im Trüben fische |
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♫ Reprise ♫Here it comes the happy ending. That he’s fishing troubled waters |
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Und die einen sind im Dunkeln |
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There are those that dwell in
darkness, |
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Date: 24 February 2010
Subject: The Merriless Widow
[previous] Now on to
our unhappy widow. Each verse begs comment. Brecht seems to have been
in a bad mood when he wrote them. He is known to have suffered lifelong
bouts of writer's block & plagiarism. Like EdelRose this song was
written under the gun right before curtain, when an actor threatened to
go on strike. Why does he have to specify that the widow was
minderjaehrige (young & presumably hot)? Is he congratulating
Macheath for his good taste in tail? V2 shows cruel irony in two ways.
First of all, he has just gone out of his way to name two corpses, Sam
Meyer & Jenny Fowler, but he doesn't name the widow, because
everyone already knows her, thus making the listener participate in her
shame, since he is presumed to share the guilty knowledge. Second, the
nature of the crime makes the victim's identity all the more sensitive.
I cannot for the life of me explain why Brecht feels the need to tell
us that Mack woke the widow up to fuck her. Why do I need to know this?
Is that somehow an aggravating circumstance? It sure feels sad. Last, I
don't quite understand the bit about the price, and didn't really
bother translating it, since it may be just a cheap rhyme. After all,
who was going to pay Macheath to rape a widow? Aren't widows more
traditionally married for their money? I think this whole song reflects
Brecht's channeling his inner Pope, who (not
content to lampoon one
unduly harsh critic)
invited him to the pub for an empoisoned pint that
literally made him shit his pants.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 14 February 2010
Subject: Re: The Fucking Clarinette
Much the same could be said of contemporary sung interpretations, notably one reputed to be by Bert Brecht himself, and another by Lotte L-someone, the current flame of Kurt Weil. Lots of updates in the coming days, Opera, then Vivaldi in a few uploads as I sort through the pics of the various festivities, then Piano after 18 or 19 February (some confustion abrew). It occurs to me that Rose is the first child in the world to have an artist writing her biography online in real time in multimedia, text, music, and images (stll & soon to move). Yeats' son gently blamed his father for the mediocre poem he wrote to commemorate the boy's birth. He said his sister had it worse, as the old man wrote a masterpiece on her birthday. I had occasion to tell Rose about Murder's answer "Thornless" to news of her birth. As occasionally happens between us (see "tonic & dominant"), it took me years to understand John's perfectly intelligible words.
Date: 12 February 2010
Subject: Re: The Fucking Clarinette
What would you like to know about the fucking clarinette in this? It's playing with a shit-ton of vibrato, that's what stands out most to me.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 12 February 2010
Subject: Mothers & Daughters-in-Law
Two deaf woman talk on the phone. Their language skills are similar,
primitive at best, even though C the G somehow learned how to speak
Spanish (with an awful accent), some English, a little Flemmish &
Italian. My mother loves to fight with C the G, so when the telephone
rang, knowing that there's no one else on Earth who hates me enough to
call me, she answered the bell. Now picture this moment. Both ladies
are bored & lonely. The phone rings. They have known one another
for four years, having spoken many times since July 2006 when my mother
showed up one morning unannounced at the house, until the drunk &
pregnant C the G threw her out a couple of days later at one o'clock in
the morning. Both of them claim not to have recognized the voice of the
other. My mother, whose explanations are ever more unbelievable,
thought she was a shopkeeper, whatever that means. C the G thinks it
was my new gf, but for the fact that I haven't got one. I will probably
never have one. I will not share Rose's time with some bimbo who puts
out, although I would gladly share my time with a bimbo that puts out.
This is a backward, depressed land. The intellectuals are in Paris. I
have no idea what these verses mean: "Dass nur er im Trueben fische/Hat
der Hinz den Kunz bedroht," so I've just translated the first one (some
kind of proverb) literally, and subbed an appropriate Aesop
quote for
the second (which is quite obscure, neither "Hinz" nor "Kunz" being
common nouns in standard German, although Google gives a couple of
other examples of them) in order to rhyme "boar" with "poor".
From: SAGReiss
Date: 11 February 2010
Subject: The Fucking Clarinette
I guess the music is just some vaudeville accordion shit, but Kurt Weil was a great musician, I think. Moreover I've got three new verses of Bert Brecht (and there are others flying around on the internet) to deal with. Please someone give me some of your musical wisdom. I don't need pics of Rose to publish this page. I need someone's learning about the heartbreaking clarinette (or fucking flute or whatever) at the end. It is fairly fucking unbearable, quite in keeping the (can't find an adjective evil enough) company of Swift & Pope:
http://www.sagreiss.org/opera/brecht_weil_mackie_messer_2.mp3
Date: 11 February 2010
Subject: Marriage IS Incest(e)
Well, yes, sex between members of the same family, who share a bed
& bathroom, meals & something else beginning with the letter
m-. There's no mystery about a spouse, not that scary sense of
discovery the first time Murder thought he really might get into
Molly's shorts. Let us not speculate. So, what have we got in our poem?
The alliteration (not in English) of the title, and the protagonist's
name Macheath. The syncopation of the rhymes to make them masculine.
The very insistent position of the conjunction "and" on the strongest
possible beat [except the rhyme] of trochaic verse. Lots of
subject-verb inversions [oops, verb postponement] due to
the persistent use of relative clauses, often emphatic. Brilliant use
of the effet de
reel in each verse, blue Sunday, Sam Meyer the Jew, the
waterfront (a leitmotif in the opera), Soho, and that awful last verse
[before the end of the film].
Even the hero is sullied. This ain't Robin Hood. I haven't read Gay's
play yet, nor listened to the music by... OK, now I understand why the
last verse is so pitiless: "The original idea of the opera came from
Jonathan Swift, who wrote to Alexander Pope on 30 August 1716 asking
'...what think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores
there?'" John
(...) Swift & Alex Pope were two of the
meanest men
in London, which was a mean town. Anyway someone called Johann
Christoph Pepusch wrote the songs. Gay was apparently such a heartless
fuck (as his name seems to indicate) that he wanted to leave the
spectator bereft of even music. I hope you all appreciate the geometric
problems I solved in delicately counterbalancing text, sketches,
details, & The
Orchestra so that everything fits exactly in its
place. I have no original photos, so the size was a given constraint,
but I like the way it's worked out. This is not easy when writing for
the moving target of the web. I've tested the site down to a resolution
of 1280 pixels (I unjustified the lyrics for that.), and fuck anyone
who has lower. Buy a new 'puter, bro. Give someone a job in China.
From: SAGReiss
Date: 10 February 2010
Subject: The Beggar's Opera
I've got our next two projects (after the work in progress Vivaldi) outlined: Piano Rose (video, if & when the new camera arrives in some working order that I can understand) & The Beggar's Opera of John (another one) Gay, Bert Brecht & Kurt Weil. The former won't require your help, as Sara, who apparently can't even spell her own name, will do all the work. The latter is illustrated by the beautiful pics of The Orchestra that C the G painted in the spring of 2007 before she decided that she preferred going to the Saturn to play chess or clusterfuck on the billiards table in the backroom. I haven't got the Accordionist, but I don't like that one as well anyway, although the sketch is very good. I know I'm trying your patience, but any musical insight you could provide would as always be highly appreciated. (Peter is probably going to dedicate next week's shows to The Threepenny Opera, interpreted this season by the Comédie Française, comme par hasard.) Weil, as you know, broke with Brecht (or vice versa) over the perceived elitist tendencies of chromatic (as opposed to diatonic) music, which hurt the latter's communist feelings. I understand both points of view, but I'm still holding out for democratic atonality & ergonomic Linux. I don't think the modernism of Murder's Blackbird bothers Rose, but I don't really know the reason why she still refuses to listen to it. Brecht's verse is lovely, and the singer trills his Rs wonderfully (as my mother does, for some reason, in the word "three") like German, French (Edith Piaf), & some anglophone (Frank Stanley) vaudeville singers do. The translation is obviously mine, but that's easy, since I speak the language (as opposed to Hebrew, Spanish, & Italian). The meter, which I have recreated without difficulty or perceived awkwardness, is a very standard (& regular) trochaic tetrameter with the final slack syllable syncopated in the rhymes:
A: - u / - u /
- u / - u
B: - u / - u / - u / -
C: - u / - u / - u / - u
B: - u / - u / - u / -
John (Murder), you are somewhat guilty for this huge mess of
incest(e) &
Gesamtkunstwerk. The Beggar's Opera page seems to be
some kind of revenge or reconciliation sex between me & C the G.
You see, what you call: "order", & what I call: "Motivating the
Signifier" is what irked me about the slideshows. I knew I could
vary
the intervals between one- & twelve-thousand milliseconds (which I
later found to be untrue, since I could in fact do whatever the fuck I
wanted). It upset me that this decision should be arbitrary, based on
some misconception of what the reader might like. Who gives a fuck
about the reader? I needed the interval to become necessary, and that
proved to be the key. [It was the timing of the slideshows that showed
me that words, music, & images could not only illustrate one
another, they could interact.]
