Mahagonny-Songspiel

Mahagonny-Songspiel, also known as The Little Mahagonny, is a "small-scale 'scenic cantata'" written by the composer Kurt Weill and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht in 1927. Weill was commissioned in the spring to write one of a series of very short operas for performance that summer, and he chose to use the opportunity to create a 'stylistic exercise' as preparation for a larger-scale project that they had begun to develop together (the two had met for the first time in March), their experimental 'epic opera' The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930).

The Little Mahagonny was based on five 'Mahagonny Songs', which had been published earlier in the year in Brecht's collection of poetry, Devotions for the Home (Hauspostille), together with tunes by Brecht. To these five was added a new poem, "Poem on a Dead Man", that was to form the finale. Two of the songs were English-language parodies written by Elisabeth Hauptmann: the "Alabama Song" and "Benares Song". Using one or two of Brecht's melodies as a starting-point, Weill began in May to set the songs to music and to compose orchestral interludes along the following pattern:

Song One | Little March | Alabama Song | Vivace | Song Two | Vivace assai | Benares Song | Sostenuto (Choral) | Song Three | Vivace assai | Finale: Poem on a Dead Man

The Little Mahagonny was first produced at the new German chamber music festival at Baden-Baden on 17 July 1927. Brecht directed, Lotte Lenya played Jessie, and the set-design was by Caspar Neher, who placed the scene in a boxing-ring before background projections that interjected scene-titles at the start of each section. According to a sketch published years later, they read:

1. The great cities in our day are full of people who do not like it there.

2. So get away to Mahagonny, the gold town situated on the shores of consolation far from the rush of the world.

3. Here in Mahagonny life is lovely.

4. But even in Mahagonny there are moments of nausea, helplessness and despair.

5. The men of Mahagonny are heard replying to God's inquiries as to the cause of their sinful life.

6. Lovely Mahagonny crumbles to nothing before your eyes.

A programme note for the performance stated:

Mahagonny is a short epic play which simply draws conclusions from the irresistible decline of our existing social classes. It is already turning towards a public which goes to the theatre naïvely and for fun."

The production lasted about forty-five minutes and was a great success, although there were no immediate plans for a revival.

Years later, The Little Mahagonny was produced, in a much adapted version, by the Berliner Ensemble at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in East Berlin, opening on 10 February 1963 and directed by Matthias Langhoff and Manfred Karge.

Stephen Sondheim was asked to translate this piece once with W.H. Auden, but declined. He said of this event, "But, I'm not a Brecht/Weill fan and that's really all there is to it. I'm an apostate: I like Weill's music when he came to America better than I do his stuff before...I love The Threepenny Opera but, outside of The Threepenny Opera, the music of his I like is the stuff he wrote in America - when he was not writing with Brecht, when he was writing for Broadway."

Performance History

• July 17, 1927: Baden-Baden, Deutsches Kammermusikfest; Walter Brügmann, dir., Ernst Mehlich, cond.
• December 11, 1932: Paris, Salle Gaveau; Hans Curjel, dir., Maurice Abravanel, cond.
• January 20, 1971: New Haven, Yale Repertory Theater; Michael Posnick, dir., Thomas Fay, cond. (double-bill with Brecht & Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins)
• September 8, 1984: London, English National Opera; Lionel Friend, cond.
• March 30, 1989: New York, Brooklyn Academy of Music; Peter Sellars, dir., Craig Smith, cond.
• March 25, 2000: New York, Symphony Space; Enesmble Weil, Ari Benjamin Meyers, dir. (presented as part of the 12-hour concert Wall-to-Wall Kurt Weill)
• June 5 and 7, 2008: Seattle, Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, cond.

Recordings

• London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Atherton, with Mary Thomas, Meriel Dickinson, Philip Langridge, Ian Partridge, Benjamin Luxon, and Michael Rippon on Deutsche Grammophon (DGG 423 255-2)
• West Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lukas Foss (Turnabout TV 34675, CD reissue: Vox CDX 5043)
• RIAS Berlin Sinfonietta, conducted by John Mauceri, with Ute Lemper, Susanne Tremper, Helmut Wildhaber, Peter Haage, Thomas Mohr, and Manfred Jungwirth on Decca Records (London CD 430 168-2), doubled with The Seven Deadly Sins
• König Ensemble, conducted by Jan Latham-König, with Gabriele Ramm, Trudeliese Schmidt, Hans Franzen, Walter Raffeiner, Peter Nikolaus Kante, and Horst Hiestermann on Capriccio (Cappriccio CD 60 028), doubled with The Seven Deadly Sins

References

Notes

Cited sources

• Sacks, Glendyr. 1994. "A Brecht Calendar." In Thomson and Sacks (1994, pp. xvii-xxvii).
• Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks, eds. 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. (Cambridge Companions to Literature Series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521414466.
• Willett, John. 1967. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. Third revised edition. London: Methuen, 1977. ISBN 041334360X.
• Willett, John and Ralph Manheim, eds. 1994. Introduction and Editorial Notes in Collected Plays: Two by Bertolt Brecht. (Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry, Prose Series). London: Methuen. ISBN 0413685608.