The Threepenny Opera is about the values of the bourgeoisie. The criminals in Brecht’s play ape the values and conventions of the middle class. Like prostitution, begging and theft are depicted as businesses. The thief Macheath, a sort of gang chieftain, is in business, bolstered by an army friendship, with the High Sheriff; the business of begging is organized by types of begging and districts by the Peachums; and, overlaid by the sentimentality of melodrama, the society depicted is a recognizable analogue, reinforced by ceremonies and dramatic situations of comedy, to “respectable” middle-class society.

Beyond merely making of this material a pleasant revue using popular music, as John Gay did, to spoof the posturings of the middle class, Brecht has his mock-opera satirize the audience’s values, propagandizing against the decadence of capitalism. Not that his works espoused a particular course of political action—on that suspicion Brecht, a refugee from Nazi Germany to the United States, once found himself called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rather, these productions put the comfortable platitudes of the middle class into the mouths of the villains of melodrama.

The themes—poverty, the exploitation of the poor, the hypocrisy of prostitution, of law enforcement, and indeed of capitalism—reverberate like harsh music through the old plot structure of boy meets girl, parents persecute boy, boy escapes. Brecht uses that formula as a criticism on itself. In scene after scene, as in the wedding reception, the juxtaposition of the criminal context and the middle-class event holds the criminals up for sympathy; the middle class, to ridicule.

Marriage, adolescent rebellion, parental control, middle-class values, friendship, legal ethics, sexual behavior—none of these subjects is the sole theme of this complex drama. Even theater itself is held up for examination as a political statement in support of the power structure.

Betrayal and Moral Corruption As in the ''greatest story ever told,'' the story of Jesus, the protagonist of The Threepenny Opera is betrayed by a former intimate. But there the similarity ends, or rather, diverts to mirrored opposites. Macheath is not a savior like Christ but a moral corrupter, not a paragon of virtue but a fountainhead of sin, not the archetypal human ideal but a base man of bestial instinct. In contrast to Jesus, he maims the woman with whom he has been sleeping in a stable rather than being born of a chaste woman in a stable. The wedding gown and gifts are not humble attire and ritual offerings but stolen goods.

Despite these oppositions to one of the best-known symbols of purity, Macheath is not a completely evil figure. He has some appeal, especially to the whores and women of low virtue. He is gallant in his way, cuffing his gang members for not displaying enough gentility to his new bride; he has courage, or at least disdain, for his fate; and he has a loyal friendship with his army buddy Jackie Brown. He has a roguish charm but his personality is presented not as a role model but as a warning against the seductive quality of such a dishonest life.

Nor is Macheath the only false idol in the play. Peachum is in the business of guiding beggars to larger profits falsely earned in the name of charity. He preys upon the generosity of the public, justifying his use of false wounds and artificial limbs with his own twist on the biblical homily "Give and it shall be given unto you." Peachum argues that people are jaded and must be prodded to charity by ever-newer and more ghastly representations of...