Cancelled: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt MahagonnyNew production

Ninety years after its politically explosive premiere in Leipzig, one of the most radical and well-known musical theater works of the 20th century appears on the stage of the Komische Oper Berlin in a new production by Barrie Kosky, under the musical direction of General Music Director Ainārs Rubiķis—with star tenor Allan Clayton as Jim Mahoney, and ensemble member Nadja Mchantaf as Jenny Hill. 

In the middle of a wasteland, far from the federal agents pursuing them, three fugitives from justice become founders of the city of Mahagonny. It’s to be their promised land, a pleasure-city where sin reigns unbounded—since nothing less than the sale of love and alcohol will ensure the flow of money. Eat! Love! Box! Drink! But alas, who’s going to foot the bill…

A story of the flight from enslavement, from criminal pasts, from poverty—set in an empty desert filled with dreams and yearning, apocalyptic natural disasters, strict proscriptions and voluptuous excesses. Premiered contemporaneously with Arnold Schoenberg's opera of the Old Testament, Moses and Aron, Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a work in which the references to the Books of Moses are more hidden, but which are ultimately just as unmistakable. Mahagonny, both opera and anti-opera, thematizes the snares and traps of human existence with the use of biblical images—all carried aloft and driven home by the music of Kurt Weill. His compositions here absorb a disparate group of styles and influences—all in all an unparalleled and inimitable achievement.