Pressings of the album Dear Ella (Verve/Universal 1997) for Austrian, German and Swiss markets contain a bonus track: «Mack the Knife» in Brecht's own German, «Die Moritat von Mackie Messer».
German-writing reviewers agree that Bridgewater sings with a French accent. But more interestingly, unawareness of the German pronunciation of an English word results in a remarkable misrepresentation.
The lyrics of the signature song of the Threepenny Opera consist of six four-line stanzas. This is the second line of the second stanza:
- Liegt ein toter Mann am Strand.
Graphemically, that is; phonemically, there are two possibilities. But in written isolation, the meaning seems clear: A dead man is lying on the beach.
And that is in fact what Dee Dee Bridgewater is singing here:
Misgiving I
But wait, here's a piece of realia butting in: The opera is set in London of the 1920s, and there were not really any beaches there. So unless Macheath had been on an outing to Brighton, which he hadn't, there's something not quite right here.
Misgiving II
And hey, here's a piece of poetics on top: The fourth line of the same stanza, with which the second is evidently to rhyme, is:
- Den man Mackie Messer nennt. (whom one calls Mack the Knife)
And «Strand» doesn't rhyme with «nennt», does it. Or does it?
Well, the phonemic transcription of the latter is /nεnt/, whereas that of the former is /ʃtrant/. So no rhyme.
Mack unmasked
Listening to Lotte Lenya, say, what you'll hear is /strεnt/, which does rhyme with «nennt». This is a phonetic hybrid in German: The syllable-initial «st» is not pronounced as ʃt as it should but as st, and the «a» is, exceptionally, pronounced as an ε (but the syllable-final «d» is, conventionally, pronounced as a t).
So what's going on is that the word is not a German word, that's why the pronunciation violates the spelling to articulation mapping rules of the language. It's English – the English cognate noun, in fact, but in this context it's a proper name, the name of the London street. And Brecht was quite right to have it rhyme with «nennt», for German speakers, when code-switching, normally pronounce the English æ as ε.