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.