Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] enjoyed enormous public success after it premiered in Berlin on August 31, 1928, and has since solidified its reputation as one of the best-known and most influential stage plays of the Weimar Republic. The leftist playwright Bertolt Brecht based his script on Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of a 200-year-old English play, The Beggar’s Opera, and decided to keep the story set in London’s criminal underworld. The plot revolves around the rivalry between Peachum, a crook who controls London’s beggars, and Macheath, a notorious gangster with secret connections to the police chief. While Brecht infused the Threepenny Opera with political and anti-capitalist messages, his collaborator, the composer Kurt Weill, injected musical jolts of jazz, blues, and dance music that subverted the operatic genre altogether. Weill’s wife, the actress and singer Lotte Lenya, starred in the original production and sang some of its most memorable numbers. In this excerpt from a 1958 recording, we hear the Overture and “The ballad of Mack the Knife,” perhaps the most famous song from the play, which a number of crooners covered after the war, including Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Bobby Darin.