REMINDER: Friday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 in the Marc Scorca Auditorium of Opera America, 330 Seventh Avenue, New York City, I’ll be reading from “Opera as Opera,” conversing with Marc Scorca himself about aspects of the book and the operatic scene, and following with a Q & A session. I hope to see many New York area readers and devotees then!

 In the mid-1950s, I worked for a couple of years as a secretary (or “male secretary,” as it was customarily named) in the travel trade, for Thomas Cook & Son. Those were the twilight years of the “Cook’s Tour” company as the more or less royally designated booker for the imperium on which the sun never set. The office atmosphere was neo-Dickensian, with pay scale to match, and my position next-to-bottom rung. But there were some nice end-of-week parties, at which the Basic Black dresses, bow ties, seersucker suits and ice-cream jackets created a sort of penniless glamour—or, for reasons about to become clear, what I might call Threepenny Glamour.

At these parties, music was always playing—monophonic LPs, or—in some instances still—78s, on whatever console or low-hi-fi component rig the evening’s host/ess could afford. This being a travel-bum crowd, the repertoire was predominantly from across the pond. Charles Trenet,  Germaine Montero, and Bea Lillie were big. But more often than not, prime playing time was given to Noel Coward (The Las Vegas Album) and Lotte Lenya (the Berlin Theatre Songs album). They were not taken as mere background music (there was Mantovani for that). Folks stopped chatting, gathered round, and followed. They knew the words, they knew the tunes. Newcomers were initiated, and soon joined in the unison choruses at the payoff lines of “In a Bar on the Piccola Marina,” “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” or of “Surabaya Johnny,” the “Alabama Song,” or “Pirate Jenny.” Coward had for some years been in somewhat the same condition as the Empire itself, but was now revived for one more go-round by his brilliant nightclub appearances. Lenya carried the guidon for a culture that actually bore the same time stamp as Coward’s, but was to us by way of discovery, old/new, rebellious/decadent. Coward singing Coward and Lenya singing Weill may seem a very odd pairing. But they had in common inimitable personalities, a mastery of cabaret craft, and a tone of world-weariness that suggested past excitements now faded, old wisdoms that were slipping away.

One of the three distinct Weills, Weill the Third, had already been known to us. That was the Weill of the American musicals and the hit songs they birthed (“September Song,” “Speak Low,” and others); of Down in the Valley, the brief American-style Schuloper that wedded an operatic parable to the folk-music movement of the time; and of Street Scene, Weill’s operatic adaptation of Elmer Rice’s play, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, that ran on Broadway for 148 performances. But now Lenya, the composer’s widow, carried the torch for Weill the Second, first via the hit production of The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre de Lys and its cast album, then with the above-noted LP, and then, at least for us in New York, through a long series of performance events: I recall a Weill evening at the Lewisohn Stadium concerts, with Threepenny in its Blitzstein translation; a full-blown concert performance in German at Carnegie Hall that brought us Ludwig Donath and Polyna Stoska as the Peachums^(I); and The Seven Deadly Sins at the New York City Ballet, with Balanchine the choreographer, as he had been at the work’s premiere (Paris, 1933). The New York City Opera staged Threepenny, in German, rather ponderously and in too large a theatre, with Martha Schlamme as Jenny and Kurt Kasznar as Macheath. And along the way, there were the superb complete original-language recordings on Columbia (Philips) of Die Dreigroschenoper and a work previously unknown to most of us except through one of its numbers, the aforementioned “Alabama Song”—Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (“The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). All this was very much driven by the stardom of Lenya, and enabled by the presence of the same emigré generation that also formed a core audience for the big-business years of Lieder singing here.