20th century opera isn’t short of bleak pieces: Wozzeck, Salome and Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk are just three examples where things start badly and get steadily worse. But in English National Opera’s new production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the bleakometer went firmly off the scale. Bertolt Brecht was unimpressed, to say the least, by his fellow human beings, especially those with any sort of power, and his libretto pulls no punches in laying into their venality, their hypocrisy, their inhumanity.
But Brecht believed that the primary purpose of theatre is entertainment (“it needs no other passport than fun,” he wrote) and in Kurt Weill, he found the ideal partner to wrap his excoriating satire in music which morphs so deftly between light-heartedness, excitement and absolute beauty as to deceive you into feeling that you’re having a lovely night out when the implications of what’s happening on stage are darker than dark.
Although the city itself is a tragedy, founded by criminals and going through many phases before disintegrating in its own immorality – this production is principally framed as the tragedy of Jimmy, the big-hearted Alaskan lumberjack whose fate is sealed when he commits the only true crime in the lawless Mahagonny: failing to settle his bar bill. This was the first time I’ve heard Weill sung by a full-on Wagnerian Heldentenor, and it was a revelation: Simon O’Neill soared above the powerful orchestral accompaniment with elegance of line and beauty of timbre, turning Jimmy into a heart-meltingly tragic character.
Three other singers blew us into the back of our seats with larger-than-life performances. Rosie Aldridge bossed the show as the Widow Begbick, incarnating her character’s absolute certainty of being in charge but also turning on the operatic vocal charm. Danielle de Niese must have adored the role of Jenny, which calls for fully operatic soprano singing, but also contains numbers replete with showgirl pizzazz, the most famous one being the Alabama Song, which she delivered to perfection. As Trinity Moses, Kenneth Kellogg was a big, bruising bad guy with a big, bruising voice. Each of these singers dominated the stage in their respective numbers, as did the ENO Chorus, who sang their hearts out and gave incisive characterisation of the text.
Conducting early Weill requires much ancillary work: particularly in a barn like the London Coliseum, choosing the size of orchestra and chorus and balancing these with solo voices and amplified instruments like banjo and Hawaiian guitar cannot be an easy task, but ENO’s designated Music Director, André de Ridder, managed it with aplomb. De Ridder and the orchestra deftly carried us between saxophone-powered sleaze, string-driven power, guitar-backed schmaltz, the sarcastic bite of the ska rhythms and, yes, standard operatic fare.
Director Jamie Manton and designer Milla Clarke’s staging tends towards the minimalist: the “desert” is the unadorned Coliseum stage and its surrounding technical areas; a large metal-sided container serves as the truck in which Begbick, Moses and Fatty arrive, a brothel, a hurricane shelter and more. Boldly painted slogans announce Mahagonny’s supposed principles. Manton throws in the odd piece of stage magic to keep you off balance: the continuity announcers in white robes, their electronically distorted voices through giant flea collars eerily reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, or the red-clad dancer who narrates the arrival and departure of the hurricane that portends Mahagonny’s destruction. The stage movement is excellent, characters come and go so seamlessly that you don’t see how it’s done, there is large dose of genuine humour and Manton’s direction of the acting is uniformly excellent.
I must make the caveat that Brecht and Weill aren’t for everyone. For each person thrilled by Brecht’s hatchet job on the ruling classes, relevant as it may be in the century of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, there will be someone who finds his viciousness excessive and unappealing. And it’s fair to say that the exact purpose of Mahagonny can seem muddled: is it a purely nihilist piece, without hope for mankind’s future? Is it a warning to the selfish not to tread this path? Is it no more than agitprop against the Germany of its time? Or merely holding a mirror in which a bourgeois audience can find the worst in themselves? As for Weill’s music, for every listener thrilled by the melodies, the rhythms and the incorporation of jazz and cabaret into the classical opera canon, there will be another who will consider it a failed crossover effort, a miscegenated child of opera and Broadway that should never have survived.
As for me: I’ve loved Brecht’s work and been entranced by Weill’s music from an early age. This production is a magnificent exposition of both: kudos to ENO for daring to stage it and for doing so with such panache.
