Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

By Thomas May

"I'm going to kick that phony Richard Strauss down the stairs!" Thus did Bertolt Brecht reportedly fume at Kurt Weill, after knocking away the camera of an eager pressman trying to snapshots of the famous collaborators side by side. This outburst was just one of the more heated tantrums surrounding rehearsals for the first Berlin production, in late 1931, of their opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The work had already generated a considerable amount of intrigue in the form of National Socialist Party-instigated protests (including threats of overt violence) since its March 1930 premiere in Leipzig. By the time the Berlin run had been engineered, long-simmering tensions between the creative partners were fast rising to the surface—a personal counterpoint to the political controversy associated with the opera itself.

Given Brecht's unrelentingly alpha-male attitude toward his associates, it was inevitable that relations with the slightly younger composer would reach a breaking point. An almost mythic aura surrounds our image of the Weill-Brecht team. Their epoch-making legacy is seen as the result of one of musical theater's most felicitous partnerships. Yet their collaboration in fact lasted less than four years (aside from the final venture they undertook in 1933 after both had fled Germany: The Seven Deadly Sins).

Indeed, the very work which first inspired their partnership contained the seeds of its destruction just a few years later. In the early 1920s Brecht, who was developing a bad boy reputation as both a poet and playwright, had written a series of sardonic poems about an imaginary city, "Mahagonny," devoted to the monomaniacal pursuit of material lusts. He gathered these together as part of a larger collection called The Domestic Breviary. This was intended as a parody of the books of devotional and religious verse typical of middle-class piety. (Its obsession with the baser desires like money and sex, the poet snarkily noted, should ensure that "it will appeal to very few readers.")

When Brecht and Weill met at a wine bar in 1927—as the composer later recalled—"the notion of a ‘Paradise City' " conjured by the Brechtian Mahagonny fired his imagination and cried out for operatic treatment. Brecht for his part became fascinated by the prospect of applying his radical ideas of "epic theater" to the tradition-bound genre of opera. That project—the eventual Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny—took two years to complete. In the end, the playwright may not have accurately read the forceful musical personality that the diminutive, shy, intellectual Weill would bring to the table.

Their best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, began as a side venture while Mahagonny was still being created. (The origins of its signature hit "Mack the Knife," a murder ballad decades before Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds took up the genre, continue to inspire conflicting accounts from respective partisans of Weill and Brecht). Weill was brought on board fairly late, and no one expected The Threepenny Opera to turn into the hit it became. Its structure of ballads interspersed with spoken dialogue presented far less of a threat to Brecht's role as a shaping force in the final product. But when it came to a full evening determined from start to finish by the dimensions of Weill's score, the playwright found himself unable to control the age old tug-of-war between opera's chief constituents: words and music.

Exasperated, he chided the work for succumbing to the very thing both had set out to subvert: what the playwright termed "culinary opera," a consumer-driven product meant solely as an entertainment commodity for hedonistic pleasure, where attempts at social criticism are "all washed away by the music." The real sentiment that seemed to be piquing Brecht's frustration—as it came out during the tense Berlin rehearsal period—was a reluctance to be relegated to the dreaded role of "librettist," as if he had merely provided the scaffolding thanks to which Weill's music was claiming disproportionate attention.

Yet it is precisely what Weill contributed to Brecht's scheme of acerbically polemical anti-capitalist satire that prevents Mahagonny from fossilizing into a period piece of agitprop Weimar Republic art—which was, after all, the only plane on which the Nazi thugs protesting Mahagonny could grasp it. The tension between Brecht and Weill regarding their respective roles in the collaborative process is part of what fuels the opera's energy and gives it a perennial fascination. Both were responding from their unique perspectives to the extraordinary creative ferment that characterized the Weimar Republic, above all in the profusion of experimental theater and in the burgeoning film industry centered in Berlin. The new techniques introduced by cinematic montage in particular come to bear on both Brecht's and Weill's use of fragmentation.

Mahagonny continues to live an almost surreally varied (if often unrecognized) afterlife, ranging from the Doors' cover of the "Alabama Song" to the second film in director Lars van Triers's American trilogy, Manderlay, where a young white liberal woman oversees social experiments with a group of belatedly liberated ex-slaves. In providing his unpredictably textured and ambitious score, Weill actually managed to bring into greater prominence the more poetically imaginative qualities latent in Brecht's vision of a dystopian civilization that is simultaneously Paradise and Armageddon.

"I have never acknowledged the difference between ‘serious' and ‘light' music," Weill once declared. "There is only good music and bad music." It seems a straightforward enough credo, yet—as is so often the case with this extraordinarily multifaceted composer—its apparently common-sense pragmatism is only the surface layer of a profoundly far-reaching attitude. Weill's instinctive ability to straddle formidable barriers applies not only to his aesthetic convictions but to his biographical trajectory itself.

Weill, a prize pupil of the composer and virtuoso pianist Ferruccio Busoni, abandoned the elitist modernism to which he had been inclined without sacrificing his drive to write innovative and challenging music. He was concerned about restoring the lines of communication that modernist avant garde stances were shutting down—long before the post-serialist revolt of recent years made it respectable to write again "with the audience in mind." This is an artist who could play organ in the synagogue—he was the son of a respected cantor—and also hold court at the keyboard in an all-night Berlin Bierkeller, where he was said to resort to dramatic crescendos as patrons were on the verge of departing, so as to encourage them not to overlook tipping him.

Forced into exile by the Nazis, Weill remade his identity in the United States, so successfully that the myth of the so-called "two Weills" was born. According to this myth, the "formerly German" (the phrase is Weill's own) composer essentially underwent a splitting of his identity as extreme as the double Annas who figure in his cantata The Seven Deadly Sins. Weill sought an outlet for his creativity in the culture industry of America and, in a sort of artistic suicide, as his detractors would have it, compromised the standards he had been pursuing in Berlin by adapting so well to the genre of American musical theater. In a critique reminiscent of Brecht's derision of "culinary opera," they pit these "two Weills" one against the other as antagonistic factions in the strife between artistic quality and entertainment value, as if the two can exist only in conflict.

But however much Weill did, with astonishing gracefulness, change his musical style over the course of his career to adapt to differing cultural conditions, he never abandoned his desire to communicate while also challenging an audience. The diversity of collaborators he cultivated on these shores—from Moss Hart and Langston Hughes to Ira Gershwin—is itself a testament to his secure sense of artistic identity.

Michael Feingold, translator of this production of Mahagonny, has observed that Weill's "is the art of a man who saw that no institution was permanent, that instability was the structural center of modern life." Nowhere is this more apparent that in the paradoxes inherent in his largest collaboration with Brecht, itself created during a time emblematic of 20th-century instability. Mahagonny is, after all, both opera and anti-opera. Weill not only incorporates numerous references to operatic tradition in his score but also adapts the large scale ambitions of opera to frame and structure the fragmentary components of which it is made. Mahagonny's subject matter and narrative style of short scenes juxtaposed in sequence, Weill noted, "made it possible to create a work according to purely musical laws," for "it is only such situations that can be turned into music in closed forms."

At the same time, Weill follows Brecht's lead in attempting to turn operatic grandeur on its head. This is most clearly seen in the musical parallels Weill creates for Brecht's subversion of theatrical convention. Brecht developed his ideal dramaturgy of epic theater to reverse the long entrenched Western tradition where drama operates via a "suspension of disbelief," the goal of which is to encourage audience identification with the emotions and characters portrayed on stage. In place of this "narcotic" theater of illusion, Brecht's theater aims to foreground the artificiality of what is happening so that we are compelled to engage critically rather than emotionally. All the famous terminology from the Brechtian arsenal—most notably the "alienation effect," i.e., the use of narrators or projected placards, ritualized gestures, and the like—relates to this goal of making the theater a place to inspire social and political reflection and debate rather than escapist entertainment.

Similarly, the ideal of "epic opera" as reflected in Mahagonny is to avoid what is the great glory of traditional opera, its power to use music to give dimension to the psychology and emotional lives of its characters (no matter how absurd the situation). Weill's intent by contrast is to steer clear of "psychological" music that illustrates and encourages identification with the characters. And the composer indeed keeps us constantly off balance through his fascinating layering of music from different realms: mixing in with the ironically high rhetoric and formal units (aria, ensemble, choral commentary, etc.) of 19th-century opera are modernist neoclassicism (strong shades of the Stravinsky of the 1920s), jazz and idioms from cabaret and nightclub. Often several streams coalesce in once number. In the "Alabama Song," the refrain's claustrophobically confined intervals and harmonic instabilities alternate with a lush "show biz" tune luxuriating in its G-major schmaltz.

Yet just as Brecht's plays, in practice, continually upend his own theories in an insoluble dialectic, the score of Mahagonny can hardly be pinned down to a set of preconceived theoretical principles. Amid all this variety and episodic fragmentation, Weill remains true to the timeless aesthetic ideal of suggesting an underlying unity. In the arioso when Leocadia Begbick first names Mahagonny, she introduces a simple motif characterizing this "city of nets" (which, as Weill rightly notes, is indeed the opera's true main character). It plays an integrating role in the score's fabric by generating much of the subsequent material.

Sometimes the music itself is of such beguiling beauty—whether in the slight awkwardness of Jimmy and Jenny's first encounter, underlined by a mournful whole-tone scale from the saxophones, or in their subsequent "Crane Duet" in the midst of the brothel orgy—that only the scenic context provides the distancing effect called for. The sudden appearance of the hurricane parodies not just operatic catastrophe but the tendency to blame nature when so much social misery is caused by human agency. Yet here too the sheer economy of the musical polyphony stirs up what may be a distracting admiration. Weill's continual play with the tension between ear catching melody and sour accompaniment acts as a metaphor for the tension between music and text that is so characteristic of Mahagonny.

Indeed, Weill's skills in using the full sonic palette at his disposal are Rabelaisian. They allow for such deft depictions of the polymorphous perversity on display in Mahagonny that he risks having his audience turn on and tune in instead of drawing the Marxist conclusions intended from this Brechtian parable. But that contradiction itself may in fact offer the truly critical stance Mahagonny's creators were ultimately after.

When God finally arrives to condemn these denizens of a latter-day Gomorrah, he only makes it clear that what they had thought of as utopia is in fact hell. Ever since the opera's premiere, our history has been littered with utopias that follow the same pattern. "The work we intend to produce is not going to make use of contemporary material that will be out of date in a year's time but sets out to present our age in a definitive form," Weill presciently observed about Mahagonny. "Its influence will thus extend far beyond the moment in which it is written."

Thomas May writes regularly for San Francisco Opera. His books Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader are available from Amadeus Press.