Threepenny Opera Quotations

I was aroused straightaway by the raw intensity of the songs ...
—Bob Dylan

I fell in love with Weill's music for Threepenny, which seemed to me unworldly and wonderful. Its uncanny effect haunts me to this day.
—Burgess Meredith

...you would hear those songs wherever you went in the evening.
—George Grosz

The mocking jazz score that the world has come to accept as a true masterpiece.
— Carmen Capalbo

I think the most wonderfully insulting music I have ever come across was composed by the late Kurt Weill for Bert Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
— Walter Kerr

Many have tried to imitate it. No one has succeeded.
— Harold Prince

The Threepenny Opera sums up a whole epoch and evokes a special state of mind.
— Harold Clurman

Weill's Threepenny Opera, so cynical and strangely moving, presented the perfect image of that hopeless and stressful time in Berlin.
— Aaron Copland

It's the subtlety underneath the obviousness that gives strength to The Threepenny Opera.
— Lotte Lenya

The production of Threepenny Opera at the Theater de Lys in the early '50s certainly influenced a whole generation of theater composers-me included.
— John Kander

The Threepenny Opera turns the accepted values of the good life upside down.
— Brooks Atkinson

What is essential to any production of Threepenny is that it be fun.
— John Simon

Does not attack norms but transcends them.
— Herbert Ihering

A model of modern operetta as it should be.
— Oskar Bie

The Threepenny Opera makes it clear how intimately the counter-morality of the beggars and rogues is bound up with the official morality.
— Walter Benjamin

to the top

Introduction Synopsis Music MakingOf inAmerica inEurope Chronology Authors Quotes offBway1954 Audio Posters Macheath MackTheKnife EZ Quiz Quiz Calendar Links Contact