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"RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY" FROM LA OPERA
Premiered on December 17, 2007 on PBS (check local listings)
ESSAY
DYNAMIC DUO
By Tim Smith
Of the many composer-librettist teams who have collaborated on operas, a few have achieved an unusual level of dual fame, representing pinnacles of the art of matching words and music: Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, for one; Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofsmannsthal, for another; Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, for a third.
Although Weill (like Mozart and Strauss) created significant works with other writers, it was his brief association with Brecht that generated his defining achievements. It didn't matter much that the two men did not particularly like each other; something about their creative energies clicked long enough to produce some sensational combinations of music and theater, most notably "The Threepenny Opera" and "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny." The genius of these pieces is the deliciously subversive way they deliver pointed social and political statements, the sharp words often set to disarmingly catchy tunes.
Both of these works were created within a short period during the dangerously unsettled years of the Weimar Republic, when envelope-pushing artists were needling German society on one side and the agents of a reactionary, hatred-fueled, fear-mongering movement called National Socialism were undermining it on the other. In a way, what Brecht and Weill did was to hold up a mirror, allowing those with open eyes to see the world around them. It was not a pretty sight.
Given the hotbed of artistic pursuits in late-1920s Germany, it was perhaps inevitable that Weill and Brecht should meet. Each man was making his separate and distinctive mark: Weill, the composer, with concert works and a couple of operas; Brecht, the librettist, with poetry and plays. NEW YORKER music critic Alex Ross in his new, brilliantly insightful book THE REST IS NOISE describes their union as follows: "Brecht barged into Weill's life in early 1927. Scholars are still trying to capture the dynamic of their collaboration, which Brecht obfuscated for many years by telling arrogant, self-serving lies; the playwright used to say that he had written all the best tunes of 'The Threepenny Opera' and 'Mahagonny.'"
Fortunately, that sort of thing did not mar the fruitful beginning of their association. The two men's talents complemented each other; they got each other's creative adrenaline pumping. To quote Ross again, "On Weill, Brecht had as electric an effect as [the composer's wife, Lotte] Lenya did; he further toughened the composer's image, pushing him in the direction of hard-left politics and giving him words with teeth and bite."
The sharpest example of that comes, of course, in the hit song of "The Threepenny Opera," "Mack the Knife." There are many similarly potent combinations of zinger-filled texts and vivid melodies in "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," which started out in 1927 as a souped-up cantata of considerable audacity. Defined as a "Songspiel" (a play on the German term "singspiel," a theater piece with songs, close to our modern-day musicals), this first "Mahagonny" was a kind of mini-opera that condensed plot elements that would later be fleshed out for the plot of the full-length opera in 1930.
At some point shortly after Weill and Brecht first got together, they got the idea of forging a large work using poems Brecht had written earlier. His verses described a fictitious American desert boomtown where pleasure-seeking, in its crudest forms, is the norm. "Men and women come to 'Mahagonny' to be rich and free," as Weill biographer Ronald Sanders puts it, "and their lives consist of a constant round of fighting, whoring, poker-playing, and whiskey-drinking."
Top banner photo: Cast of ''Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny''
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photo: Anthony Dean Griffey and John Easterlin
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