I thought we might visit with the macabre this morning in the guise of an apparently jolly jazz standard, “Mack the Knife“. It is more properly called “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” (German: “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer“) and is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their 1928 music drama The Threepenny Opera. Here is the original version from the 1930’s film of the Threepenny Opera.
A moritat is a medieval version of the murder ballad performed by strolling minstels. In The Threepenny Opera, the Moritat singer with his street organ introduces and closes the drama with the tale of the deadly Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife, a character based on the dashing highwayman Macheath in John Gay’s’s The Beggar’s Opera (who was in turn based on the historical thief Jack Sheppard). The Brecht-Weill version of the character was far more cruel and sinister and has been transformed into a modern antihero. The play opens with the Moritat singer comparing Macheath (unfavorably) with a shark and then telling tales of his crimes: arson, robbery, rape, murder. The song is eternally associated with Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya, who’s version is next. Sadly there is no footage of her singing it.
The song was introduced to American audiences in 1933 in the first English-language production of The Threepenny Opera. The English lyrics were by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky. That production, however, was not successful, closing after a run of only ten days. The best-known English translation, from the Marc Blitzstein 1954 version of The Threepenny Opera, which played off Broadway for over six years. Blitzstein’s translation provides the basis for most of the popular versions heard today, particularly by Louis Armstrong (1956).
The song became closely associated with Boby Darin, who recorded his version in December 1958. Even though Darin was reluctant to release the song as a single,] in 1959 it reached number one on the Billbaord and number six on the Black Singles chart, and earned him a Grammy Award. It was listed as a Cash Box Top 100 as the number one single in 1959 for eight weeks. Frank Sinatra, called Darin’s the “definitive” version. In 2003, the Darin version was ranked #251 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. Both Armstrong and Darin’s versions were inducted by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry in 2016.
From a dark German opera the song has journeyed to become a popular jazz standard, which has been covered by many artists as diverse as Oscar Peterson and Robbie Williams, even Westlife have prosuced a version. The renditions by Ella Fitzgerald and Marianne Faithfull are worth seeking out. But perhaps we should finish where we began with the song being sung in German by Ute Lemper.
