One of Bertolt Brecht''s best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble).

Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar''s Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.

With Kurt Weill''s music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world.

This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein''s classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.

One of Bertolt Brecht''s best-loved and most performed plays, The Threepenny Opera was first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble).

Based on the eighteenth-century The Beggar''s Opera by John Gay, the play is a satire on the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho.

With Kurt Weill''s music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce the jazz idiom into the theatre, it became a popular hit throughout the western world.

This new edition is published here in John Willett and Ralph Manhein''s classic translation with commentary and notes by Anja Hartl.