The Threepenny Opera (The Collector's Library of Famous Editions)

155 pp. Tall 8o. Brown full leather, gilt titles & decorations, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, coral ribbon marker bound in. Translated from the original German with the English lyrics and a new introduction by Eric Bentley. Color lithographic frontispiece and illustrations by Jack Levine. Based on John Gay's eighteenth century Beggar's Opera, The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, is a vicious satire on the bourgeois capitalist society of the Weimar Republic, but set in a mock-Victorian Soho. With Kurt Weill's unforgettable music - one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz to the theatre - it became a popular hit throughout the western world.