German composer Kurt Weill is ranked high among the best of the 20th century and his music remains popular outside the classical world, from the enduring jazz standard Mack the Knife in his Threepenny Opera, to the Alabama Song covered by the Doors and David Bowie. But not all of Weill’s melodies survived the Nazi clampdown on Jewish culture.

Now, thanks to the work of an academic at University College London, a suppressed Weill stage hit that posed a puzzle for modern musicians is to be revived and performed in a fresh translation. The research of Michael Berkowitz, professor of Jewish history at UCL, in collaboration with the show’s new translator and director, Leo Doulton, has unlocked the mystery of The Tsar Wants His Photograph Taken and made it clear why this satirical work of 1927 was once so heavily suppressed. A performance on 4 May, the first with a full professional cast and orchestra for almost 40 years, will at last set the opera in its proper context, after 80 years of being largely ignored both in Germany and elsewhere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kurt Weill photographed in 1930 by Lotte Jacobi.

Photograph: Getty Images

“The plot deliberately revolves around what a European audience would have assumed were a set of really stock Jewish characters, not only a pioneering woman photographer, who were nearly all Jewish then, but also a group of anarchist terrorists,” said Berkowitz this weekend.

“It tells the story of a woman photographer working in Paris in 1914 who is asked to take a portrait of the tsar as part of an assassination plot. The Nazis stopped it being performed not just because of what then would have been its obvious Jewishness, but because it was not a black-and-white story. They liked straightforward morality. It was just too weird, because there is some sympathy in the drama for the tsar as well.”

The “Zeitoper”, or topical musical comedy, which Weill created with writer Georg Kaiser, details a convoluted attempt on the life of a fictional tsar. Before the tsar arrives in the Parisian studio, five anarchists switch the real photographer, Angèle, with a stand-in and hide a gun inside her camera.

“It is not made clear which tsar it is, or if it is the kaiser. It is a generic monarch, but, of course, the tsar falls hopelessly in love with the fake Angèle,” said Doulton, who believes Berkowitz’s research has finally made sense of the character of the photographer for a modern audience. “Portrait photography was done by Jewish women because they were educated, yet lower class enough for a job seen as slightly distasteful, since you had to deal with sitters. Angèle sounds pretentious about her reputation until you realise that her outsider status made it all so precarious. It is a gorgeous opera and it has made me wonder what other pieces were lost when they fell out of favour with the political regime.”

Doulton, 24, describes the Zeitoper’s satirical approach to political extremism as similar to the tone of the 2010 British film Four Lions, directed by Chris Morris. “In the 1920s there were dangerous anarchists around, but here the idea was that you don’t have to be terrified since they are often not the most intelligent person in the room,” he said.

Poster for The Tsar Wants His Photograph Taken showing at Bloomsbury Theatre on 4 May.

Baritone Edmund Danon plays the tsar in a production put together with Virtually Opera. The acclaimed young mezzo-soprano Joanna Harries plays the leader of the anarchists, accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Johann Stuckenbruck.

For Berkowitz, the revival marks a significant act of defiance against the Nazis, even eight decades after the once highly popular comic opera was pulled from the German repertoire by the authorities. Labelled “Entartete Musik”, or degenerate music, by the Nazi party, it was banned as part of a moment of cultural oppression that also saw books and works of art burned or confiscated if they were associated with Jews or communism.

“Weill was very aware of his own origins and he knew that the level of intimacy with the photographic portrait sitters had meant that Jewish women, such as Lotte Jacobi and Elli Marcus, had become the experts in the field,” said Berkowitz. “Taking a good portrait was not easy and it was also dangerous because of the early cameras and the chemicals. Yet the aristocracy, and later the Nazis, wanted portraits taken as part of their publicity campaigns.”

By 1936, explains Berkowitz, the Nazi regime was furious that Jewish photographers were still around and ordered their studios to be shut down.

The Bloomsbury Theatre production of The Tsar Wants His Photograph Taken has been commissioned by UCL Culture as part of Performance Lab, a season of symposiums and live performances