Sinatra

Mack the Knife

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The best known version of this song in the English-speaking world, and undoubtedly the one you’ve heard was recorded by Bobby Darin.

Louis Armstrong popularized it worldwide in 1955 with an amazing jazz beat. Bobby’s  1958 recording was #1 on the Billboard charts for many weeks and won a Grammy for best song.

It’s been sung as ballad, jazz, and rock by many of the greats, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney.

From Wikipedia’

 

Interesting Facts

The character of Macheath, later to become Mack the Knife, first appeared in The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (1685-1732). Gay was a popular English playwright and poet, a friend and collaborator of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.

The Beggar’s Opera is a comic ballad opera, the first of its kind, and took London theatre by storm.

The main character of The Beggar’s Opera is a swashbuckling thief called Macheath. He’s a dashing romantic, a gentleman pickpocket, a Robin Hood type. He is polite to the people he robs, avoids violence, and shows impeccable good manners while cheating on his wife.

The Beggar’s Opera was a success from its first production in 1728, and continued to be performed for many years. It was the first musical play produced in colonial New York; George Washington enjoyed it.

We now skip about 200 years to post-WWI Europe and Bertolt Brecht. Gay’s play was revived in England in 1920, and Brecht thought it could be adapted to suit the new era. So in 1927 he got a German translation and started writing Die Dreigroschenoper, “The Three Penny Opera.”

The Brecht-Weill version premiered in Germany in 1928 and was an instant hit. Within a year, it was being performed throughout Europe, from France to Russia. Between 1928 and 1933 it was translated into 18 languages and had over 10,000 performances.

In 1933, The Three Penny Opera was first translated into English and brought to New York by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky. There have been at least eight English translations over the years. In the 1950s, Marc Blitzstein wrote an adaptation, cleaning up “Mack the Knife” and dropping the last two stanzas about arson and rape. At the revival in New York using the Blitzstein translation, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s widow, made her comeback – she had a role in the original 1928 Berlin production.

Blitzstein’s sanitized adaptation is the best known version of the song in the English-speaking world, and undoubtedly the one you’ve heard. Louis Armstrong popularized it worldwide in 1955 with an amazing jazz beat. Bobby Darin’s 1958 recording was #1 on the Billboard charts for many weeks and won a Grammy as best song. It’s been sung as ballad, jazz, and rock by many of the greats, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney.

From Wikipedia’