Kurt Weill, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Act 2, excerpts)

Mahagonny was created by playwright Bert Brecht and composer Kurt Weill between 1927 and 1930 against the background of a crisis in German politics and society. The Weimar Republic, which had been established after World War I, was struggling to maintain its legitimacy against the Communist movement on the one hand, against the National Socialists (Nazis) on the other. Brecht and Weill identified strongly with the Communists. They intended Mahagonny as a critique of 20^th-century capitalism and of the political structures that supported and maintained capitalism in Germany. A short version of the work, the Mahagonny Songspiel (Little Mahagonny) was presented at the Baden festival in 1927. The full opera premiered in Leipzig in 1930. Nazis invaded the theater, protesting the opera’s politics and also its sexually explicit scenes. They forced the show to close after one performance. A Frankfurt production in the same year was likewise disrupted by the Nazis. The opera opened in Berlin in 1931, directed by Caspar Neher and starring Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife). Despite the political turmoil and the personal animosity that had developed between Brecht and Weill, the Berlin production of Mahagonny was a huge success. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, Mahagonny was banned throughout Germany, and both Brecht and Weill fled into exile.

The premise of Mahagonny is that a gang of crimminals on the run have founded a new city on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. , whose motto is “anything goes” – i.e. it’s an allegory for unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism. Jenny (a prostitute) and Jimmy Mahoney (a lumberjack) both arrive in town and fall in love (for a price, of course). In Act 2 the excesses, vices and injustices of the capitalist system are graphically portrayed: a man eats himself to death; young men buy sex at a bordello; one man kills another in a boxing match while the crowd cheers. In the last act Jimmy Mahoney runs out of money – the only thing that is considered a crime in capitalist society . “Jim, I value you as a human being,” says his friend Bill, “but money – that’s an entirely different matter.” Jim is tried, convicted and hanged. “You can’t help a dead man,”” the chorus sings in Jimmy’s funeral procession. “You can’t help any and all of us.”

The music to Mahagonny is a conflation of popular styles of the 1920s – waltzes, marches, cabaret songs, and American jazz. Several scenes parody bygone musical styles – a Chopin Nocturne, a Wagner opera, a Bach chorale. A few of the numbers have become hits in their own right, for example the “Alabama Song,” which was recorded by Jim Morrison and David Bowie. In the excerpts here from Act 2, the glutton’s song (“I’ve already eaten two calves”) is a German Ländler with harmonium accompaniment; the whorehouse song (“Screw faster, boys”) is a march; the boxing scene uses circus music. In between the last two, however, comes a wistful ballad in neoclassical style that Weill added to the score at the last moment. “See those two cranes,” Jimmy and Jenny sing in duet. Watching the cranes fly in momentary synchronicity with the clouds in the sky, we realize that love, no matter that it’s bought and sold, can still make the world stop for a moment.

The “Crane song” poses a problem for productions of Mahagonny. When Brecht and Weill circulated the score of the opera to theaters in 1929, several producers objected to the crude and graphic sex of the whorehouse scene. Weill replaced a portion of the scene with the “Crane song” as a concession. When the censored parts of the scene were restored in the 1931 Berlin production, the “Crane song” was cut. Reluctant to lose a beautiful song, some modern productions restore both the graphic sex and the “Crane song” to Act 2. Others move the song to Act 3 , where Jimmy and Jenny say goodbye just before Jimmy is executed. The recording in the supplementary listening and the DVD both put “Crane song” in Act 2. The printed score puts it in Act 3.