I don’t really know whether the collaborations between Brecht and Weill deserve to be called operas but some of them at least are sung by opera singers and produced in opera houses so I think they are legitimately within the ambit of this blog.  Arguably the best known of them all is Die Dreigroschenoper which premiered in Berlin in 1931.  I’ve seen it a couple of times in English translation and, like most people I guess, I’m familiar with the music (in both English and German) through recordings by people like Lotte Lenya, Ute Lemper and Robyn Archer.  With that background I was very interested to take a look at the 1931 film of the work directed by GW Pabst. Continue reading →