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Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, More Timely Than Ever

Jun. 04, 2013

Kurt Weill’s <em>Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny</em>, More Timely Than Ever

“Strong social satire and even stronger social medicine,” wrote the Los Angeles Times of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Los Angeles Opera in 2007, shortly before the onset of the global financial crisis. Since then, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s scathing satire on capitalism and greed has grown more timely than ever, with dozens of productions playing around the globe. "Mahagonny has a particularly strong resonance in Europe at the moment,” wrote Opera News after a 2010 production at The Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse. “Money institutions tremble, and capitalist paradises look endangered. Brecht and Weill's subversive critique of a society where money, sex and alcohol are prime has rarely seemed more coruscating."

The past few years have brought major new stagings to European audiences. Gerard Mortier made Mahagonny his first Teatro Real Madrid production in 2010, and the Vienna Staatsoper debuted the opera in 2012. The Teatro Real production, magnificently conducted by young Spanish star Pablo Heras-Casado and directed by the cutting-edge Catalan theater company, La Fura dels Baus, went on to play Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and the Megaron in Athens, and was released on DVD. Other recent stagings have been presented by Komische Oper Berlin, Oper Köln, Oper Leipzig, Oper Graz, Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, Vlaamse Opera, and Israeli Opera. Performances at Theater Bremen, Staatstheater Weisbaden, and Theater Freiburg run through the summer, and next season promises premieres at the Staatsoper Berlin and Innsbruck’s Tiroler Landestheater.

Set in a mythical American sin city where money rules and the pursuit of pleasure is paramount, with a score that crosses over from opera to cabaret to Broadway, Mahagonny resonates strongly in the U.S. as well. After a Manhattan School of Music production in April, the New York Times wrote:

Few times like the present seem so appropriate for the work... Its lessons... bear repeating everywhere there is income inequality, austerity, deregulation or Black Friday sales. Highlighting its lessons makes the opera seem didactic, while Brecht and Weill’s essential masterpiece is anything but. It is as funny and as sad as it is furious, and packs its punch in a rich score... that transitions with devilish ease from chorale to fox trot. It is, in sum, a grand entertainment as well as a sobering mirror.

A DVD of the Teatro Real Madrid production, featuring Jane Henschel, Willard White, Measha Brueggergosman, and Michael König, with Pablo Heras-Casado conducting the Teatro Real Orchestra and Chorus, is available on BelAir Classiques. The EuroArts DVD of the Los Angeles Opera production, featuring Anthony Dean Griffey, Patti LuPone, and Audra McDonald, with James Conlon leading the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and Chorus, won Classical Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Recording. Both productions are performed in English with Michael Feingold’s translation of the libretto.

More on the life and work of Kurt Weill is located at www.kwf.org.

Kurt Weill
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927/29)
opera in three acts
text (Ger) by Bertolt Brecht
English translation by Michael Feingold
S, Mz, 3T, 2Bar, B; chorus and orchestra
2(2pic)1.1.ssax.asax.tsax.2(cbsn)-2321-perc.timp-pno.harm ad lib.banjo. bass gtr.bandoneon-str
Stage orchestra: 2(2pic)2.3sax(ssax, asax, tsax)2- 2221-perc-pno.zither or xyl.banjo.bandoneon-3 vn
full evening

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