Macheath

Youth’s the Season made for Joys,
Love is then our Duty,
She alone who that employs,
Well deserves her Beauty.
Let’s be gay,
While we may,
Beauty’s a Flower, despis’d in Decay.
Youth’s the Season, &c.

Let us drink and sport to-day,
Ours is not to-morrow.
Love with Youth flies swift away,
Age is nought but Sorrow.
Dance and sing,
Time’s on the Wing.
Life never knows the Return of Spring.

Sung by Macheath in Act II. Scene I of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first staged 280 years ago today.

Macheath the highwayman becomes Mackie Messer or Mack the Knife in Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera. A much darker character.

Who was then lightened up again for the 1950s pop song “Mack the Knife.”

Watch at YouTube.

Everybody knows Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” but who remembers that Ernie Kovacs liked to use the song “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” as a theme behind the bits in his early television show? Same tune, not quite so jazzy.

Watch at YouTube.