The pirate Jenny

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The Pirate Jenny is a ballad from the play The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht (with the collaboration of Franz Bruinier ) and Kurt Weill . It applies in addition to the ballad of Mack the Knife as one of the best known and most often interpreted songs of Brecht.

Emergence

The text is believed to have originated around 1926. Brecht originally intended to bring him into the house postil, but instead incorporated him into the Threepenny Opera . The original melody came from Brecht and was worked out into an orchestral version by Franz Bruinier in 1926/27. From 1927 Kurt Weill created the published music for the pirate Jenny while retaining the Brechtian refrain melody.

The premiere took place in August 1928 in the Threepenny Opera , sung by Roma Bahn . Brecht later used the ballad again in 1933/34 in his only complete novel , the Threepenny Novel .

shape

In Brecht's typical rejection of formed language, the ballad is kept linguistically simple in order to do justice to the spoken language . The four stanzas of the ballad each comprise twelve verses in the stage version, in the novel the second stanza has one more verse with the same text due to an additional line break . The last three verses of each stanza form the refrain.

Lecture and content

In the Threepenny Opera, the song is performed by the character of Polly at her wedding, Polly not being the same as the first person in the ballad (1st scene, 2nd act). In the film adaptation of the Threepenny Opera from 1931, the song is sung elsewhere by Lotte Lenya , Kurt Weill's wife, in the role of Spelunken Jenny. In the threepenny novel , it is no longer associated with Polly as “a kitchen maid's dreams” at the beginning of the tenth chapter of the second book.
The first person describes her miserable existence as the maid of a cheap hotel and describes a fantastic future in which a pirate ship turns up in front of the city because of her and all who have despised her are killed by the pirates at her behest.

Text excerpts

Gentlemen, today you see me washing glasses
and I make the bed for everyone.
And you give me a penny and I'll thank you quickly
And you see my rags and this ragged hotel
And you don't know who you're talking to.
And you don't know who you're talking to.
[...]
And this noon it will be quiet at the harbor
when you ask who is going to die.
And then you will hear me say: Everyone!
And when the head falls, I say: Oops!
And the ship with eight sails
And with fifty guns
Will vanish with me.

Cover versions

The (second) English translation as Pirate Jenny by Marc Blitzstein was sung in 1954 at the Threepenny Opera in New York, as in the film adaptation by Lotte Lenya in the role of Jenny.

For many years Lotte Lenya's version (in German, new recording 1958 under the direction of Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg ) was considered exemplary. After Tom Lord , the English version of the song was covered several times as Pirate Jenny between 1964 and 1995, for example by Nina Simone , Turk Murphy , Kate Westbrook and instrumental by the Sextet of Orchestra USA and Joachim Kühn . There are versions by Lale Andersen , Juliette Gréco , Hildegard Knef , Esther & Abi Ofarim , Gisela May , Milva , Marianne Faithfull , Judy Collins , Freygang and Ute Lemper .

Miscellaneous

Lars von Trier's film Dogville (2003) is largely inspired by the ballad of Pirate Jenny and by Brecht's epic theater .

literature

  • Bertolt Brecht: Collected Works . Work edition Edition Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1967.

Individual evidence

  1. a b The Song of the Pirate Jenny (PDF)
  2. In doing so, Weill “not only took up the original flatly, but turned it into immortality in a downright ingenious way.” Success story in the jungle of paragraphs: Seventy-five years of the “Threepenny Society” . In: Neue Musikzeitung , 5/2003
  3. Stephen Hinton (Ed.): Kurt Weill. The Threepenny Opera. , Cambridge et al. a., Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-521-33026-2 , p. 51 ff.
  4. The Book of 1000 Books . 3rd edition, ISBN 3-411-76115-6
  5. The American premiere in 1933 was based on a translation by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky; she was deposed after twelve days. See Kurt Weill Foundation (New York): Threepenny Opera chronology .
  6. ^ Howard Pollack: Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World . Oxford University Press, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-979159-0
  7. ^ Kurt Weill Foundation (New York): The Threepenny Opera Off Broadway (1954–1961) - Trivia
  8. Joachim Kühn, Daniel Humair, Jean-François Jenny-Clark - The Threepenny Opera. Discogs , accessed July 25, 2015
  9. ^ Dogville. Jesus strikes back. filmzentrale, accessed on May 2, 2015 .