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 20th-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 operas 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 (Weills 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 criminals on the run have founded a new
city on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. , whose motto is anything goes i.e. its 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 moneythe
only thing that is considered a crime in capitalist society. Jim, I value you as a human
being, says his friend Bill, but moneythats an entirely different matter. Jim is tried,
convicted and hanged. You cant help a dead man, the chorus sings in Jimmys funeral
procession. You cant 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 gluttons song
(Ive already eaten two calves) is a German lndler 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 its 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 III, 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.