Music: Mythical Mahagonny

No trains stop at the city of Mahagonny, on the Gulf coast of the U.S., and no steamers list it as a port of call. But to informed, between-wars German theatergoers, the imaginary town was a metropolis of almost legendary fame—a strange amalgam of jazz-age New Orleans and beer-cellar Berlin.

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was not the most successful stage work of Playwright Bertolt Brecht and Composer Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera has consistently attracted more attention), but it was by all odds their most ambitious collaboration. At its 1930 premiere in Leipzig, its jazzy score and slangy libretto, combined with Nazi-inspired resentment of its Jewish composer and its left-wing theme, touched off one of the worst riots in the history of the German theater. Rarely performed since then, Mahagonny was revived last week by the Heidelberg Municipal Theater in a stark and moving production.

Caricature Capitalism. Both Weill and Brecht, recalls Weill’s widow, Singer Lotte Lenya, were fascinated by the America they knew “from books, movies, popular songs, headlines—the America of the garish Twenties, with its Capones, Texas Guinans, Aimee Semple MacPhersons, Ponzis, and the Murderess Ruth Snyder.” The mythical city of Mahagonny (pronounced mah-hah-ge-nee) was a symbol of that imaginary America, and the city’s reason for being was summed up in the name of its principal hotel: the Here-You-May-Do-Anything Inn. The opera’s songs marked a turning point for Composer Weill—away from atonality toward the jazz influences that would color all the rest of the music that he produced, including such Broadway hits as Street Scene and Lady in the Dark.

With its echoes of the fox trot, the blues, the shimmy, and with its bold melodies and dramatic rhythms, the score remains as compelling as ever. At last week’s Heidelberg revival, the orchestra of only 30 players was heavy on winds rather than strings, managed to re-create with remarkable skill the tinny, strident sound of oldtime jazz bands. The opera’s cast of criminals, procurers and prostitutes were re-creations of the fantasy Americans dreamed up by Socialist Brecht. Their anarchic world was a caricature of turn-of-the-century capitalism.

But as the opera unfolded, detailing the eating, loving, fighting and drinking habits of the inhabitants of Mahagonny during seven workless days of each week, the audience repeatedly broke in with applause—most notably at the end of Alabama-Song, a savage but haunting number in which Lotte Lenya made her debut as a singer more than three decades ago:

Oh, moon of Alabama,

We now must say goodbye.

We’ve lost our good old mamma

And must have whisky,

Ok, you know why.

Corrosive Iridescence. Mahagonny’s enthusiastic reception suggests that twelve years after its composer’s death, it may yet take its place beside Threepenny Opera as an operatic staple. Composer Weill may not have caught the true flavor of jazz-age America that he found so attractive, but in seeking it he caught something else—his corrosively iridescent music recalls the cold cynicism of his own generation of Europeans, caught midway between two wars.