Mack The Knife by Daniel Michael (P.52.S)

Week #12: "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" - originally called "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" - was written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht as the prelude to the musical The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper). The play was a Marxist critique of capitalism. It was incredibly successful and showed over 1,000 times in Germany and other parts of Europe. An English translation premiered on Broadway in 1933 (after Weill and Brecht were forced to flee Germany), but it was unsuccessful. The show was revived in 1952, with an English translation by Marc Blitzstein. Leonard Bernstein conducted this revival and this time, it was more successful. Still, it wasn't until 1955, nearly 30 years after Mack the Knife was written, that Louis Armstrong recorded a hugely popular version of the song.