Throughout 1929, Kurt Weill was a busy man. The phenomenal success of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on Die Dreigroschenoper the year before—a craze which persisted until the Nazis banned it—sparked a demand for his music which he was hard pressed to fill. Moreover, he was scrambling to complete the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, his most ambitious work to date, for its première in the spring of 1930. When Ernst Josef Aufricht, proprietor of Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (and scene of the Dreigroschenoper triumph), asked Weill and Brecht for another piece in the same vein, Weill accepted—less from a desire to duplicate his hit than to develop the Dreigroschenoper's "new song style"; its jazz-inflected rhythms and bittersweet melody was a radical departure from his previous, self-consciously avant garde works. Brecht, the Marxist engagé, on the other hand, had little interest in work which did not directly further his ideological aims, and turned the project over to his mistress and collaborator, Elizabeth Hauptmann. Drawing heavily on Shaw's Major Barbara, Hauptmann patched together the tale of Salvation Army Lieutenant Lilian Holiday—a woman with a steamy past brazenly revealed in the "Matrosen-Tango" and hauntingly recalled in "Surabaya-Johnny"—and her uneasy "reformation" of Chicago gangster Bill Cracker. With Brecht's desultory collaboration, she put together two of the projected three acts for Brecht to take with him to the French Riviera in May, where he was to catch up with Weill and work in earnest. An automobile accident prevented him, and Weill composed quietly, setting Brecht's lyrics (some from earlier works) by June.

Directed by Erich Engel, with sets by Caspar Neher, Theo Mackeben, and his Lewis Ruth Band in the pit, and an all-star cast on stage—including Carola Neher (Lilian), Oskar Homolka (Bill), Kurt Gerron, and Peter Lorre—the show aired on September 2, 1929. By curtain time, however, the third act had still not been finished; apparently, the actors improvised. Aufricht recalled that "Up to the interval after the second act it was as big a success with the audience as Dreigroschenoper had been. Then came the third act. Palpably disappointed, they started coughing and fidgeting ... Then to my amazement ... I saw Helene Weigel [another of Brecht's mistresses, cast as the gangster boss] advancing to the front of the stage. Reading from a scrap of paper, she shrieked out into the auditorium in a piercing voice, "What's a picklock compared to a share certificate? What's robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?" and similar bits of crude Marxist propaganda." The enraged audience rose in tumult. The show closed after two further performances. The critics buried it in scorn.

Thus, some of Weill's most immediately gripping music went into eclipse. Lotte Lenya recorded the "Bilbao Song" and "Surabaya-Johnny" before the year was out—initiating their ever widening popularity as cabaret standards—while the Lewis Ruth Band recorded instrumental versions of the latter, the "Matrosen-Tango," and "Der Song von Mandelay." Weill continued to seek a dramatic "scaffolding" in which his music might score, but without success, and the score in its entirety was not heard until after his death, though he adapted three of its numbers (most fetchingly "Das Lied von der harten Nuss") for incidental music to Jacques Déval's play, Marie Galante (1934). Not until Lenya's 1960 Columbia recording of the music—complete, with conductor Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg—could Weill's audience hear how the composer had played off the pizzazz of the familiar hits against the ambivalently parodistic, yet bleakly moving Salvation Army numbers.

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Act 1 - 2.Bilbao-Song

In his typical lighthearted fashion, Bertolt Brecht's lyrics for "Bilboa Song" from Happy End (1929) sentimentalize brutal sexuality, capitalist imperialism, and, of course, romantic love. As Bill, a Chicago gangster, enters a bar, one of the floozies there recognizes him and sings longingly of the terrible and wonderful times they had together in a disgusting dive in Bilboa, lamenting more that those days have ended and that the dive has been turned into an ice cream parlor than the bizarre, violent, and depraved sexual acts they committed together. In his typical heavy-handed manner, Kurt Weill's music for "Bilboa Song" is a fusion of banal melodies, grotesque harmonies, and dancehall rhythms all wrapped up in a dramatic aria closer to the barroom than the opera house. Like most of his songs from the late '20s, Weill's music is deeply ironic and instantly memorable and like many of his songs from Die Dreigroschenoper, its signature harmonic motion is a turn from major to minor over a plagal cadence. For those who relish the revolting, "Bilboa Song" is just the thing.

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Act 3 - 3.Surabaya Johnny

After the enormous success of Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928, composer Kurt Weill and writer Bertolt Brecht collaborated in 1929 on another gimlet-eyed depiction of the wonders of human nature in the ironically named three-act comedy Happy End. A variation of Shaw's Major Barbara and a precursor of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls, Happy End weds Chicago gangsters with Salvation Army workers, allowing Brecht to indulge in his "capitalism is gangsterism misspelled" Marxist rhetoric. In the event, Happy End was insufficiently vile for Brecht who all but insured the failure of the work by having his wife sabotage the premiere with standard-issue Marxist oxymorons from the stage. Despite this, Happy End contains some of Kurt Weill's most repulsively attractive songs in his best tough-guy sentimental vein already familiar from Die Dreigroschenoper. Perhaps the best-known song form Happy End is Surabaya-Johnny, a sort of Dido's Lament for the jazz age. Sung by an innocent seduced and deflowered by an itinerant intercontinental Mack the Knife, the song begins with the same melodic motif that began Die Moritat von Mackie Messer from Die Dreigroschenoper, but it builds here into a highly dramatic, deeply felt, and wholly ironic climax before collapsing into an apthetic and bathetic ballade in its chorus. A hideously beautiful and wonderfully disgusting song that was a favorite of Marlene Dietrich, Surabaya-Johnny is still revolting after all these years.

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