Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) is a political-satirical opera composed by Kurt Weill to a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht. It was first performed in Leipzig on March 9, 1930.
[edit] Plot
Somewhere in the heart of an imaginary America, three criminals, Leokadja Begbick, Trinity Moses, and Fatty, are on the run from the law. Turning their backs on society, the three found Mahagonny, the City of Nets, where one is allowed to do anything as long as he has money. Drinking, gambling, prizefighting, and sex are the occupations of the inhabitants. Soon a ragtag citzenry has made a home in Mahagonny, including Jenny Smith, a prostitute, and Jim MacIntyre, a lumberjack. When a hurricane approaches Mahagonny, it appears that the city is doomed. The panicked citizens react with distress, terror, and even half-remembered prayers -- but the storm simply bypasses the city. Freed from the fear of the storm (and the implied divine disapproval of their lives), the people of Mahagonny resume their hedonistic lives and sink to new depths of depravity. Meanwhile, Jenny and Jim have fallen in love and plan to leave the city. Their escape is thwarted when Jim is arrested for an unpaid bar bill. In a court where murderers easily buy freedom through open bribery the penniless Jim is condemned to death. Debt, he learns, is the only unforgivable crime in Mahagonny. Jim dies on the gallows, and the opera ends with discontent destroying the city, which burns as the inhabitants, carrying protest placards, march aimless away . . . where? To what?
The music uses a number of styles, including rag-time, jazz and formal counterpoint, notably in the Alabama Song (covered by The Doors and later David Bowie). The lyrics for the Alabama Song and another song, the Benares Song are in English (albeit specifically idiosyncratic English) and are performed in that language even when the opera is performed in its original (German) language.
[edit] History
The libretto was mainly written in early 1927 and the music was finished in the spring of 1929, although both text and music were to be partly revised by the authors later. An early by-product, however, was the Mahagonny-Songspiel, sometimes known as Das kleine Mahagonny, a concert work for voices and small orchestra commissioned by the Deutsche Kammermusik Festival in Baden-Baden and premiered there on 18 July 1927. The ten numbers, which include the Alabama Song and Benares Song, were duly incorporated into the full opera. The opera had its premiere in Leipzig in March 1930 and played in Berlin in December of the following year. The opera was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and did not have a significant production until the 1960s. It has played in opera houses around the world. Never achieving the popularity of Weill and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny is still considered a work of stature with a haunting score. Herbert Lindenberger in his book Opera in History, for example, views Mahagonny alongside Schoenberg's Moses und Aron as indicative of the two poles of modernist opera.
[edit] Trivia
The 2005 movie Manderlay, directed by Lars Von Trier, contains several references to the plot of Mahagonny. The most notable of these is the threat of a hurricane approaching the city during the first act. Von Trier's earlier movie Dogville, to which Manderlay is a sequel, was for a large part based on a song from Brecht's famous Threepenny Opera (The Pirate Jenny). In the brothel scene in Act II of Mahagonny, the choir sings a "Song von Mandelay". The play Happy End (1929) by Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht and Weill, also contains a song called Der Song von Mandelay, which uses the same refrain as in the brothel scene of Mahagonny. Brecht's use of the name Mandelay/Mandalay was inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem Mandalay.
