Juscribble: Pedro Navaja

These days I’ve been listening to a song called Pedro Navaja. Maybe the tittle is not familiar to you, but I’m sure that if I say “La vida te da sorpresas, sorpresas te da la vida…” you would recognize it immediately!

Apparently, it is not related to Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera, but I thought that, somehow, it was. Although the story has apparently nothing to do with the Beggar’s Opera, the main two characters of the song are a thief (Pedro Navaja) and a prostitute, and the story is told with a kind of “humourous” tone.

I am quite curious, so I searched some information and found that actually Pedro Navaja is based on a song called Mackie Messer, which means Mack The Knife and written by Bertolt Bretch for The Threepenny Opera. Actually, The Threepenny Opera is an adaptation of Gay’s opera, in which the plot is nearly the same, maybe a bit more rude and cruel, but the songs are completely renewed. “Pedro Navaja” is then an adaptation of the adaptation of the songs that appear in Beggar's Opera.