Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera (1928)

Kurt Weill

The musical The Threepenny Opera opened at the Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin on 31st August, 1928.  It was adapted from an 18th-century English ballad opera, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and offers a Socialist critique of the capitalist world.

Weill set the music to words by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, with set designs by Caspar Neher who had collaborated with Brecht on many works before and since. Despite an initially poor reception, it became a great success, and played 400 times in the following two years. The performance was a springboard for one of the best known interpreters of Brecht and Weill’s work, Lotte Lenya, who was married to Weill.

Songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards, most notably “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife“) which was introduced to the US hit parade by Louis Armstrong in 1956, but is most closely associated with Bobby Darin, who recorded his version in1958. In 1959 Darin’s version reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned him a Grammy Award for Record of the Year. Ella Fitzgerald made a famous live recording in 1960 and other notable versions include performances by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Tony Bennett, Marianne Faithfull, Nick Cave, Brian Setzer, Kevin Spacey, Westlife, Robbie Williams and Michael Bublé.

1928…

“I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household…”
– From a letter in the New York Times

The River Thames

On 6 January 1928 the River Thames flooded in what is considered the most disastrous flood in London’s history.  Fourteen people were drowned and thousands were made homeless when flood waters poured over the top of the Thames Embankment and part of the Chelsea Embankment collapsed.  Westminster Hall and the House of Commons were flooded, as were the London Underground stations and lines along the riverside. The moat at the Tower of London, which had been empty more than 80 years, was refilled by the river. It was the last major flood to affect central London.

Ruth Snyder

On 12 January 1928, convicted American murderer Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing prison.  Her execution, for the murder of her husband, Albert, was captured in a well-known photograph which is now part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Oxford English Dictionary

The final section of the Oxford English Dictionary was completed in April 1928 and the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes.  Today, with descriptions for approximately 750,000 words, the Oxford English Dictionary is the world’s most comprehensive single-language print dictionary according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

On 3 July 1928, John Logie Baird demonstrated the world’s first colour television transmission.  Baird was a Scottish engineer who is often referred to as “The father of television.” In 2002, Baird was ranked number 44 in the BBC’s list of the “100 Greatest Britons” following a UK-wide vote. In 2006, Logie Baird was also named as one of the 10 greatest Scottish scientists in history, having been listed in the National Library of Scotland’s ‘Scottish Science Hall of Fame’.

Also in 1928…

Micky and Minnie Mouse in ‘Plane Crazy’

Sliced bread was first sold in 1928, advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”. This led to the popular phrase, “the greatest thing since sliced bread”. Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, USA invented the first loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine. A prototype he built in 1912 was destroyed in a fire and it was not until 1928 that Rohwedder had a fully working machine ready.

The silent, animated short Plane Crazy was released on 15 May 1928, featuring the first appearance of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.  Later that year, Disney released Mickey’s first sound cartoon Steamboat Willie with Plane Crazy re-released as a sound cartoon in 1929.  Mickey’s voice was provided by Walt Disney himself in these original cartoons.

Born in 1928

English Hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon, film director Stanley Kubrick, artist Andy Warhol, composer Burt Bacharach, actors Shirley Temple and George Peppard, entertainers Bruce Forsyth and Bob Monkhouse and anthropologist Desmond Morris were all born in 1928.

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Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

George Gershwin

Rhapsody in Blue was first performed in New York on 12 February 1924 in the Aeolian Hall. The work was commissioned by a bandleader called Paul Whiteman whose band performed at the premiere with Gershwin himself performing the solo piano part. Much of Gershwin’s performance at the premiere was improvised and the piano part was not fully written down until after this first performance, so it is unknown exactly how the original Rhapsody sounded.

The piece was titled “American Rhapsody” during composition. The title Rhapsody in Blue was suggested by Ira Gershwin after his visit to a gallery exhibition of James McNeill Whistler paintings, which bear titles such as Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Arrangement in Grey and Black.

Rhapsody in Blue has been used extensively in film, television, advertising and even as part of the soundtrack to a video game – often providing a musical portrait of New York City. It was most recently used in the 2013 film The Great Gatsby, despite the novel being set in 1922, before the music was written.

1924…

“He alone could have found the way back to the causeway… The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth… their next worst his death.”

– Winston Churchill on Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Bolshevik Leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died on 21 January 1924, aged 53 at his estate at Gorki settlement. In the four days he lay in state, around one million mourners viewed his body in the Hall of Columns, many queuing for hours in freezing conditions. Lenin was then embalmed and permanently exhibited in his Mausoleum, in Moscow, from 27 January 1924. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour and remained that way until 1991, when the USSR dissolved, yet the administrative area remains “Leningrad Oblast”.

On 22 February, Calvin Coolidge became the first President of the United States to deliver a radio broadcast from the White House. Despite his reputation as a quiet politician, Coolidge made use of the new medium of radio and made radio history several times as president. His inauguration was the first presidential inauguration broadcast on the radio, he was also the first President whose address to Congress was broadcast. On August 11, 1924, Lee De Forest filmed Coolidge on the White House lawn with DeForest’s Phonofilm sound-on-film process, making him the first President to appear in a sound film.

J Edgar Hoover

John Edgar Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation – predecessor to the FBI – in 1924. He was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972 at age 77. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralised fingerprint file and forensic laboratories

On 11 May 1924, Mercedes-Benz was formed by the merging of companies owned by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz.

Also in 1924…

The MGM Logo

The American media company Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) was founded on 16 April 1924 in Los Angeles, and was, at the time, the largest and most glamorous of film studios. The studio’s official motto, “Ars Gratia Artis”, is a Latin phrase meaning “Art for art’s sake”, and was chosen by Howard Dietz, the studio’s chief publicist. The company’s famous logo, which features a Lion called Leo, was also created by Dietz. Dietz based the logo on his alma mater’s mascot—the Columbia University lion. Originally silent, the sound of Leo the Lion’s roar was added to films for the first time in August 1928.

On 30 December 1924, Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced that Andromeda, previously believed to be a nebula, is actually another galaxy, and that the Milky Way is only one of many such galaxies in the universe.

Born in 1924

Actors Ron Moody, Lee Marvin, Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, comedians Benny Hill and Tony Hancock, filmmaker Ed Wood, author Truman Capote, American presidents Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush and Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe were all born in 1924.

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A Dance to the Music of its Time

Few dance companies can claim to have changed the world. Yet for the 20 years of its existence, Ballets Russes, led by the charismatic Sergei Diaghilev, did just that.

Sergei Diaghilev

Diaghilev was an impresario in the old style. Occasionally charming, frequently tyrannical but rarely able to pay the bills, it’s little wonder that Ballets Russes was unable to outlive its founder, collapsing in financial turmoil upon Diaghilev’s death in 1929.

But although he had a touch of the snake oil salesman about him, Diaghilev’s contribution to 20^th century ballet was unmatched. In evaluating his influence, therefore, one is confronted by a series of dazzling lists.

Ballets Russes boasted the greatest dancers of the time, including Vaslav Nijinsky and perhaps the greatest of them all, Anna Pavlova.

Some, like Nijinsky, started off dancing and ended up telling dancers what to do. Ballets Russes’ stable of choreographers was unique, with many of them still legends a century later: Fokine, Massine, Balanchine, and Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska, who created the steps for Poulenc’s Les Biches, the suite of which is performed by the APO on 24 October.

It wasn’t just the dancing; Ballets Russes immeasurably enriched the worlds of visual art and design. Coco Chanel designed costumes. So did Matisse and Miró. Picasso, competitive to his core, went one better and built the sets, too.

Picasso’s costumes for Parade

But what about the music? There’s the irrepressible circus of Les Biches, of course (described by its composer as “a contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness.” Poulenc wasn’t labelled “half monk, half hooligan” for nothing). The scores written for Ballets Russes also include Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, and Parade, composed by Erik Satie after an idea by Jean Cocteau and featuring Picasso’s designs.

And then there was Igor Stravinsky. The Firebird made the composer’s name in 1910 and he affirmed that promise a year later with Petrushka, which had choreography by Fokine and featured Nijinsky in the lead role. Stravinsky wrote four other pieces for Ballets Russes. Among them was Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), which topped the lot – and everything else the 20^th century had to offer – famously causing a riot on its opening night to boot.

We trust the audience will behave with more decorum when the APO performs Le Sacre (without dancers) in November.

Two geniuses of 20th century arts: Stravinsky (L) and Nijinsky (R) at the premiere of Petrushka

Watch a BBC news story showing the only known film footage of Ballets Russes:

Poulenc: Les Biches (1922)

Francis Poulenc

The ballet Les biches was premiered by the Ballets Russes. Poulenc, who was relatively unknown at the time, was asked by Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, to compose a piece based on Glazunov’s Les Sylphides, written 17 years earlier. Poulenc, however, chose to base his work on paintings by Watteau that depicted Louis XV and various women in his ‘Parc aux biches’; the word biche usually translated as hind, or a female deer. Poulenc described his work as a “contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness, which you sense if you are corrupted, but of which an innocent-minded girl would not be conscious.” Diaghilev recognized the great potential of the ballet and produced it for the 1924 Ballets Russes season, bringing Poulenc into the forefront of French music.

Poulenc continually revised the music through the 1940s, eventually reducing it to an orchestral suite in five movements.

1922…

“It was a sight surpassing all precedent, and one we never dreamed of seeing.”
– Howard Carter

Frederick Banting

The first successful insulin treatment of diabetes was made by Canadian Frederick Banting in January of 1922. On 11 January, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old diabetic who lay dying at the Toronto General Hospital, was given the first injection of insulin. The first extract was so impure, Thompson suffered a severe allergic reaction, however the second was completely successful, not only in having no obvious side-effects but also in completely eliminating the glycosuria sign of diabetes.

The Irish Civil War and Battle of Dublin began on 28 June 1922. The Irish National Army, using artillery loaned by the British, began to bombard the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army forces occupying the Four Courts in Dublin. The conflict claimed more lives than the War of Independence that preceded it, and left Irish society divided.

The burial mask of King Tutankhamun

The tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamun was discovered in November 1922, when English archaeologist Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon became the first people to enter the tomb in more than 3,000 years. The discovery received worldwide press coverage and sparked a renewed public interest in ancient Egypt, for which Tukankhamun’s burial mask remains the popular symbol. Exhibits of artefacts found during the discovery have toured the world.

The British Broadcasting Company began its radio service in the UK on 14 November 1922, broadcasting from station 2LO in London. The company was dissolved on 31 December 1926 and its assets were transferred to the non-commercial and Crown Chartered British Broadcasting Corporation.

Also in 1922…

Nosferatu

The German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu) was released in 1922. The film, is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, “vampire” became “Nosferatu” and “Count Dracula” became “Count Orlok”). Stoker’s heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. However, one print of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.

Vegemite was invented by Australian entrepreneur Fred Walker in 1922. Prior to the introduction of Vegemite, the Sanitarium Health Food Company in New Zealand began manufacturing and shipping to Australia a version of Vegemite’s biggest competitor, Marmite. Vegemite was invented, following the disruption of imports after World War I, using yeast being dumped by breweries.
Following a nationwide competition with a prize of £50 to find a name for the new spread, the name “Vegemite” was selected out of a hat by Fred Walker’s daughter, Sheilah.

Born in 1922
Actors Betty White,  Sir Christopher Lee, Veronica Lake and Ava Gardner,  novelist Kinsley Amis, poet Philip Larkin, French fashion designer Pierre Cardin and comics creator Stan Lee were all born in 1922.

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