Brecht and Weill’s ‘Mahagonny’ inspires the ENO
A scene from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht @ London Coliseum. An English National Opera production...
Three losers — Leokadja Begbick, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper, all fugitives from justice — decide to found a city somewhere in the southern USA, providing people whatever they think they want. Mahagonny, the name of the city, apparently has the connotation of spider’s web, though in what language I’ve no idea. The point is that it draws people in and traps them.
Brecht’s original satirical concept is about the attractiveness, but ultimate folly, of idolising money, gluttony, and sex on demand. The ensuing opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, was first produced in Leipzig in March 1930. With music by Kurt Weill and a libretto by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it proved to be their last major collaboration before Hitler’s seizure of power three years later.
This production of Mahagonny directed by Jamie Manton is new. It very much gives the feeling of Germany in the 1930s, as we see members of the men’s chorus running in white underwear, looking as if they were taking part in one of those Nazi athletic events. As Manton says, Brecht’s “intention was to put up a dark mirror to society”, making this a rather unsettling piece with echoes in today’s world.
Musically, Kurt Weill originally wrote this for a theatrical band as a Singspiel, but later realised it on an operatic scale. The orchestra therefore needs to retain the original rhythmic bite and improvisatory sharpness, and in the ENO’s music director designate, the German conductor André de Ridder, they have exactly the right man to realise this. He grew up “with the music of Kurt Weill running through my veins”, and produces an excellent performance from the orchestra. De Ridder will commence full time in 2027, as well as taking on the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, after relinquishing his post as General Music Director of the theatre in Freiburg.
The ENO’s strong cast includes Rosie Aldrich, Kenneth Kellogg and Mark Le Brocq as Begbick, Moses and Fatty, the founders of Mahagonny. Simon O’Neill as the lumberjack Jimmy MacIntyre and others also sing excellently. But the star attraction was Danielle de Niese giving a simply splendid performance as Jenny, leader of the town’s prostitutes.
As a Marxist, in his writing for the theatre Brecht aimed to show audiences they should have the power to change the world, which in some cases could involve speaking directly to the audience, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect). Its aim was to prevent the audience emotionally identifying with the characters, forcing them instead into a detached, critical, and objective perspective. This may be the reason the lighting designer D. M. Wood decided occasionally to shine a very bright light on the audience, but it had the alienating effect on me of closing my eyes, which was not quite the intended purpose.
Kurt Weill himself was a very interesting character, who married his main singer Lotte Lenya twice, in Germany in 1926 and again in America (where this opera had been set) in 1937, after their divorce in 1933. That was the year Hitler came to power, when the two of them left Germany, and moved to Paris, before relocating to America in 1935. There he continued to produce operas such as Street Scene, which the English National Opera staged in a very successful production in 1989. Mahagonny only has a short run at the Coliseum, with its final performance on 20th February.
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