Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aix, 2019)

Kurt Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2019

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ivo van Hove, Karita Mattila, Alan Oke, Sir Willard White, Annette Dasch, Nikolai Schukoff, Sean Panikkar, Thomas Oliemans, Peixin Chen

ARTE Concert - 11 July 2019

As a satire of capitalism Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny has surely never felt so relevant and present with the times as it does now with the rise of populism and consumerism escalating towards end days. Never has it been more the case of giving the people what they want as long as you can get into a position of power and make some money out of it. And even if they don't yet know what they need, it's up to the enterprising businessman and leader to manufacture a dreams that they can sell them.

Directing Weill's anti-opera for Aix in 2019, Belgian stage director Ivo van Hove would seem to be in a good position to make this subject contemporary and relevant, but instead he goes for what is almost an anti-production approach. Using his familiar modern stage techniques of a stripped-back stage, using projections and on-stage cameras, it certainly emphasises the idea of capitalism being based on a sense of falsehood, illusion and fake glamour that is very much in the spirit of Bertolt Brecht, but it also turns out to be surprisingly dull and not as effective as it might be.

It's not surprising then that the stage is bare at the start of the opera. Widow Begbick, Fatty and Trinity Moses are literally in the middle of nowhere, three crooks chased out of town so they can't go back, their truck broken down so they can't go forward. Begbick tells them that they are going to build the city of Mahagonny there out of nothing. With the promise of entertainment, a deregulated paradise free from red-tape and restrictions on personal freedoms an unpopular laws and taxes, they're sure that it won't be long before the city and the stage is populated, attracting those with something to sell (like Jenny Smith and her girls, first at the door waiting for the punters to arrive) and those who believe that they can buy anything; everything is for sale, everything is permitted and money talks.

Up to a certain point anyway and it's in the fall of the city of Mahagonny that there ought to be some lessons learned - but only if you see the opera as a cautionary tale and there's nothing to say that it's anything more than a merciless satire on society and a bleak outlook on the darker base impulses of humanity. Certainly Jimmy Mahoney begins to recognise at one point that money can't buy you everything, but all he feels is missing is the urge to hit someone, and - wouldn't you know it - that's a need that can be exploited to make more money. Ultimately it's a self-destructive urge, and essentially the whole system is predicated on just such an outcome, or at least on putting it off for as long as possible while achieving the maximum consumption and profit.

It's all something that we can still recognise in the world today on an even bigger scale, with the urge towards violence and making money fuelling many a war. Even the hurricane and close call with death that Mahagonny narrowly avoids can be seen as a phenomenon brought on by man-made activity, in the accelerated abuse of natural resources and global warming. So perhaps it doesn't need to be overly emphasised or made explicit. We are all very much aware of what is wrong with the world today and the global consequences of what is happening. The real question is why do we still do it?

You would think however that the system should at least be superficially attractive and appealing. You don't need to go down the missing-the-point route of the Royal Opera House's 2015 production to achieve that, but Ivo van Hove doesn't even want to permit any such illusion, and indeed insists on showing us its ugliness and how we are willing to look past it for the sake of it suiting our immediate needs. Updating it for the modern age, van Hove's production incorporates how we have come to accept even digital manipulation as something of worth when it has no material value whatsoever. Everything is acted out for cameras, a selfie generation wanting to be immortalised on reality TV. Even the indulgences of the 'Everything is permitted' section of the opera takes place in a faked green-screen environment. It's a hollow experience and yet we've come to accept this as being enough.

So if Ivo van Hove's production feels very hollow and lacking in any substance, perhaps that the point, but you do get a sense that there is a wasted opportunity here to make something more of the opera and take it to another level. There's more to Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny than that however and its other qualities at least go some way to providing balance and reflection on the work. Musically the performance at Aix is of the highest order under conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. It's a fine interpretation that shows the richness of the work, its dynamism and unexpected sophistication, its ability to use whatever type of musical genre, jazz, classical, cabaret - and match it to drama and character as well as to the subtext it wants to use to undercut them.

In terms of singing, the work does have 'proper' operatic qualities and challenges. Nikolai Schukoff provides the most satisfying performance as Jimmy Mahoney, resolute and dissolute, capturing all the contradictions of the character and singing the role tremendously well. Karita Mattila and Annette Dasch also give good committed performances full of character and fire, if a little unsteady in places. What they also do particularly well is work with the on-stage camera close-ups that van Hove often uses this to bring an edge of intimacy and urgency to the work. That's not so much the case here, where despite the excellent work of the orchestra and some outstanding choral work from Pygmalion - the opera (and Jimmy) gradually fizzles out without it ever feeling like it makes the necessary impact. But maybe that tells us something as well.

Links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

Weill - The Threepenny Opera (Belfast, 2018)

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill - The Threepenny Opera

Northern Ireland Opera, Lyric Theatre -  2018

Sinead Hayes, Walter Sutcliffe, Kerri Quinn, Matthew Cavan, Orla Mullan, Tommy Wallace, Jolene O'Hara, Paul Garrett, Richard Croxford, Jayne Wisener, Brigid Shine, Maeve Smyth, Mark Dugdale, Steven Page, Gerard McCabe

Lyric Theatre, Belfast - 30 January 2018

An opera that isn't really an opera is an interesting choice for the directorial debut of Northern Ireland Opera's new Artistic Director, Walter Sutcliffe. His predecessor, Oliver Mears however opened his tenure in a similarly non-traditional and low-key fashion with Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium - also in a theatre rather than the opera house - the indication being possibly that opera has much more to offer than La Traviata and Madama Butterfly, and that it can and should be accessible to everyone. Indeed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's street-theatre piece The Threepenny Opera has precisely the same ideal of breaking down traditional barriers, and if anything that's the real beauty of the work, and not a bad statement of intent either if you want to see it that way.

Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera is just one in a long tradition of works that have brought a taboo-breaking common touch to opera. The Threepenny Opera was modelled on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), putting a glamorous criminal 'Mack the Knife' and the low-life of society at the heart of an opera, filling it with popular accessible music and bawdy scenes. If you want, you can go right back to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea for similar daring shifts in the subject of opera to appeal to a wider audience, and you could take it right up to Thomas Adès's scandalous Powder her Face, a work which indeed has also recently made its mark in Belfast at the Lyric Theatre in an NI Opera production. In that respect, Walter Sutcliffe's production of The Threepenny Opera continues a tradition of exposing audiences to opera that challenges and entertains.

It's difficult then to judge a production of The Threepenny Opera by traditional standards. It has to be judged on its own terms, and perhaps its aims - to challenge and entertain - aren't so different from those presented to its original audience in Berlin in 1928. Leaving aside whether it really meets the criteria of opera - where boundaries are flexible and are still being pushed forward in works like Evan Gardner's Gunfighter Nation, where the musicians are also the dramatic and singing performers - the basic principle of putting on a show with musical numbers that tells a story is there in place in The Threepenny Opera, and it can be used as a means of expressing or exposing social attitudes or issues in the world today. Some things - money, greed, criminality, corruption - never change or go out of fashion, it seems.

Walter Sutcliffe makes perhaps only a token effort at any contemporary political or local social reference, but the nature and structure of the work itself with its Brechtian theatre innovations can be the best vehicle for making us think about what The Threepenny Opera tells us about the world today; ie. there's a lot of theatre involved. The focus then is rightly about making this an engaging piece of musical theatre with grotesque exaggerated characters, bold sets, colourful costumes, colourful language too and swinging musical numbers that, thanks to it becoming a swing standard over the years, even has an instantly recognisable bona-fide classic hit in its repertoire, the wonderful 'Mack the Knife'. If that doesn't draw you straight into The Threepenny Opera, nothing will.

There were perhaps just a little bit of self-consciousness and nerves early in the preview shows of the NI Opera production at the Lyric Theatre, but then director Walter Sutcliffe doesn't make it easy for the cast by making practically the entire stage a steep cabaret staircase with narrow steps for them to teeter down on heels while singing the famous opening number. Dorota Karolczak's sets and costumes however are entirely appropriate, telling us - as if it isn't already apparent from the garish costumes, heavy make-up and colourful wigs - that this is purely a theatrical confection; don't be expecting any hard-hitting social realism here. This is a show, and we're here to entertain you.

And although it might take a little while to warm to the exaggerated and unfamiliar form of 1920s German jazz-cabaret theatre, entertain it does. By the time we get to the conclusion, we've been caught up in the sordid little dealings and womanising polygamy of 'Mack the Knife' Macheath, the money-making exploitation of the poor beggars by Jonathan Peachum, the mistreatment of the Wapping prostitute Jenny Diver and her girls, the bribery and corruption of police superintendent Jackie 'Tiger' Brown and his officers, and even the compicity of the church is called out in Reverend Kimball's blessing of the union of Mack and Polly Peachum. There's plenty there played out in broad strokes to entertain, and if it no longer shocks in the same way, it's at least a shock that such goings-on are now nothing more than we've come to expect from celebrities, politicians and the establishment.

Other than the inclusion of the local vernacular, Sutcliffe is probably wise not to draw any obvious comparisons to current affairs and political events in the world today, in this particular work anyway. There's only one overt contemporary reference where the famous image of Syrian refugees marching into Europe is displayed. It's a reminder, in the spirit of the original, that even behind the fiction and glamour the dealings of this little group of individuals relies on the exploitation of the less fortunate masses whose fate is casually ignored. Mack being saved from the gallows at the final moment may be a moment of Brechtian theatre drawing attention to the artificiality of dramatic narrative, but in its own way it also points to the truth that those with power, money and influence write their own story and, unlike the people whose lives they destroy, they tend to come out of such scandals relatively unscathed.

Judging it by the casting alone, which is made up more of actors more familiarly seen on the Lyric stage than the Grand Opera House, The Threepenny Opera is more musical-theatre than opera in the traditional sense. That doesn't mean however that the standards that need to be met aren't just as high, nor that they weren't indeed met.  Even if there's a measure of musical-theatre belting it out, there were some very impressive singing performances. Jayne Wisener's Polly Peachum has a light voice, but it's sung in a way that was a perfect match for her character's delightfully ambiguous moral outlook, her calculated ruthlessness and casual indifference to all manner of criminal activity and moral depravity masked by a disarming sweetness. Brigid Shine's Lucy Brown showed an impressive range and control in her singing, again matching the feistiness of her character. Mark Dugdale has plenty of experience in music theatre and carried the role of Mack with a confident swagger and charm. Where caricature and exaggerated counted more than singing ability, Matthew 'Cherrie Ontop' Cavan's Mrs Peachum and Richard Croxford's scouse Jackie Brown all delivered wonderfully entertaining performances, and in baritone Steven Page's Jonathan Peachum you had the best of both disciplines.

Behind all the exaggeration and caricature, fleeting moments of human sentiment and character emerged, principally in the character of Jenny Diver, sensitively performed and well sung by Kerri Quinn. If The Threepenny Opera is to deliver that kind of range between crowd-pleasing belters and moments of quieter reflection it needs to be well managed from the point of view of the music. The musical rhythms are vital, charming and engaging, with unusual instrumentation and harmonies to throw us off and hint at an underlying unease and sleaze. Sinead Hayes brought that out with a somewhat more refined arrangement, the restraint allowing for greater emotional expression and sensitivity than you might expect from the smoky swagger of Kurt Weill's score. The placement of the orchestra to the wings of the staircase - all dressed in character - also provided a perfect balance and stereo separation between the music and the singing. Look out, old Macky is back.

Links: NI Opera, Lyric Theatre

Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Royal Opera House 2015 - Cinema Live)

Kurt Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Royal Opera House, 2015

Mark Wigglesworth, John Fulljames, Anne Sofie von Otter, Peter Hoare, Willard W. White, Christine Rice, Kurt Streit, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Darren Jeffery, Neal Davies, Hubert Francis

Royal Opera House, Cinema Live - 1 April 2015
 
What is both clever and great about Weill and Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is that as long as we live in a society that is centred around capitalism and commerce, it's message is always going to be pertinent and relevant. Inevitably there's much made of how the message of the work reflects our own current economic downturn, but even if we lived in boom times, the opera would still show fairly accurately the kind of 'Wolf of Wall Street' excess and vulgarity, the moral and social breakdown that inevitably follows when the acquisition of obscene amounts of money it seen as an end in itself. There's not much to be said for capitalism, is there?

As well as being clever (and true), this is however part of the problem with the work as it stands as an opera. It's rather preachy. Its parable of the building of a city by three criminals whose founding principles are based on nothing more than exploiting its transient citizens for every penny they can get out of them (no money left, you'll feel the full weight of the law - immigrants welcome, as long as you have something (money, cheap labour) to contribute) is more of a concept than a plot, and it lacks genuine engagement. It's true that Bertolt Brecht was more interested in gaining the intellectual participation of the audience than their emotional engagement or identification with the characters, but for the work to succeed on the opera stage today, it needs a little more of a bite to shake a modern audience out of its complacency.

Perhaps Brecht didn't anticipate, considering its evident failings as a model for social well-being and despite its superficial allure, that Capitalism could possibly turn out to be so pervasive as to be endorsed as a sine qua non, but then, it's clear from this work that he doesn't have too much faith in human nature being motivated by anything other than naked greed and self-interest. Nonetheless, the Royal Opera House production of Mahagonny does feel complacent. Not in terms of professionalism or performance - everything is well considered here - but it is a production that is designed for the opera stage for a Covent Garden audience, and it consequently fails to invite anything but a complacent shrug of recognition. 'That's so true', you think, 'but not much you can do to change it'.

For a regular opera, you don't really expect much more of a response than that, but Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is not a regular opera and, consequently that's really not good enough. It's not entirely the fault of John Fulljames's direction for the Royal Opera House, but inherently a problem with the work itself. It's not the anti-opera that it sets out to be, but rather does end up preaching to a well-heeled audience that is not really going to consider its wealth vulgar, or have to worry that it will all disappear on binges of whoring and drinking. Weill might be partly to blame for how the musical language speaks and soothes away any unwelcome recognition, its jazz-influenced rhythms no longer as daring as they might once have been, but Brecht's heavy-handed mocking of capitalist society doesn't invite any real engagement or suggest alternatives either.

A stage director, set designer and a musical director willing to really engage with the message could however make more of a difference here. The problem with John Fulljames, Es Devlin and Mark Wigglesworth's interpretation is that it is resolutely opera house. They do justice to the letter of the work as it was written, and give every indication of the relevance of its intentions, but they don't find a way to update the nihilistic 1930's spirit of the opera in a way that would invite a modern audience to put aside their opera preconceptions. The La Fura dels Baus production at the Teatro Real, by way of comparison, managed to be a little more adventurous and inventive with the work, and conductor there, Pablo Heras Casado, managed to get more of the genuine swagger and swing of the orchestration. The production team at the Royal Opera House, on the other hand, don't really treat Weill and Brecht's work differently from the way they would approach any other opera commission.

Es Devlin's set designs are, it has to be said, inventive and very much find a modern way to envision the themes of the work - even if it tripped up the performers on one or two occasions. The city of Mahagonny comes literally from the back of a lorry, neatly compartmentalising the scenes in the first act, while the second and third acts add shipping containers to the construction. There are no niceties here, it's a city that has evolved out of the practicalities of delivering commercial products and services. That's as much a reflection of the abstraction of Brecht's alienation devices, inviting audiences to consider the "idea" of a city rather the concrete reality of a realistic set. We're now familiar with this kind of set design now however, and just as much depends on what you do within in. Unfortunately, John Fulljames doesn't find any original way of making consumption in this permissive society anything more than it is on the page. When you have actually seen worse in reality on the streets of modern metropolises, it's fairly tame stuff indeed.

So, instead of engaging with the ideas, there's not much else for the critic to review here other than the old fall-back of how good the singing performances are - as if Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is just another work to be assessed in that peculiar view of opera as little more than a perpetual singing contest. Christine Rice was the probably the strongest voice here as Jenny, giving a great rendition of the famous Alabama Song, but for me she was much too plummy and operatic for the down-and-dirty role. Kurt Streit was best with character, but his singing was also strong, bright and lyrical, capturing the wild abandon of Jimmy McIntyre. If character realism is important here, and it's debatable, it would then colour your view of Anne Sofie von Otter's over-acted Widow Begbick, but it was an enjoyable characterisation, even if it apparent that her voice is no longer strong enough to carry the sung-recitative sections. Willard White's voice isn't as strong as it once was either but Trinity Jones is a familiar role for him, and he can still do it well.

This was a good performance then and highly entertaining, as professional as you would expect from the Royal Opera House, but something was still missing. Being aware of the content from a synopsis isn't usually an issue with opera - you can usually expect an infinite amount of variety in interpretation - but here, having laid it out beforehand in the pre-screening and interval features, it all played out a little too routinely and complacently. One thing Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny should never be is routine and complacent, but whether that's a problem with the Royal Opera House's production or the world itself worryingly becoming a parody of capitalism that outstrips anything in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera, one would like to think you'd get more out of this work than just a nice evening at the opera.

Links: The Royal Opera House

Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Kurt Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Teatro Real Madrid, 2010

Pablo Heras Casado, Alex Ollé, Carlus Padrissa, La Fura dels Baus, Jane Henschel, Donald Kaasch, Willard White, Measha Brueggergosman, Michael König, John Easterlin, Otto Katzameier, Steven Humes

Bel Air Media

When it was originally composed in 1930, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht intended Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) to be as much a satire of opera and a reaction to the state of the Weimar Republic. Now, when taken alongside such like-minded work contemporary works by Hindemith and Berg, it just sounds like great opera – but it still functions as a scathing satire on all the subjects it deals with, particularly the nature of capitalism, on which it still has very relevant points to make.

You can call it music theatre if you like, but Weill’s score for Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is considerably more sophisticated than that, working in a variety of styles to create a deliberate alienating effect, drawing on specific references, creating dissonance and unsettling arrangements, using unexpected plot points to keep the listener engaged and keep them from complacently and unquestioningly accepting operatic conventions. It does all that and it has great tunes as well, the most notable of which, Alabama Song, sung by down-and-out prostitute Jenny Smith (”Oh, show me the way to the next Whisky Bar“), is almost like the flip-side of the Libiamo sung in celebration at the party of La Traviata’s courtesan, Violetta Valéry.

If you need any convincing that Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny can aspire to great opera however, this 2010 production at the Teatro Real in Madrid, directed by La Fura dels Baus might be just the ticket. I’m not the biggest fan of La Fura – I’ve seen several of their productions fall well short of the mark – but when they get it right and are working with the right kind of material, they can succeed in a spectacular fashion. Their unconventional approach to opera staging, which could even be considered anti-theatre, certainly has a Brechtian influence, so it’s no surprise to find that that the Catalan group are absolutely perfect for this particular work.

Directed by Alex Ollé and Carlus Padrissa, there are no projections this time – other than the titles of each of the sections (in Spanish here, not translated on the screen) – no elaborate designs, no wire acrobatics or off-the-wall concepts. Everything is tailored directly towards the expression of the ideas in the work, finding the most imaginative and impactful way of putting it across, without relying on stagy conventions. The decision then to have the the trio of Widow Begbick, Fatty and Trinity Moses arrive as if dumped from a refuge collection and set about founding the City of Mahagonny on the edge of a rubbish dump is perfect for the nature of their intentions to make as much money as cheaply as possible by appealing to the lowest nature of their visitors, offering them booze, girls and boxing.

It’s important to get the basic concept in place, but the directors find the right tone for each scene, with many wonderful little touches – from Jimmy’s imagined return sea journey to Alaska with the raised legs of the hookers forming the waves, to his trial taking place in a circus ring – all of which give an additional satirical edge that not works along with the material, showing an understanding of its nature, its playfulness and its bitterness, without feeling the need to over-emphasise or add on any additional commentary. The opera is satirical of all these subjects – from the expectations of the individual to the concept of justice – all within the umbrella of the capitalist system, and it doesn’t need any specific or easy-target anti-American agenda attached for the concept to stand on its own and be applied by the listener to their own experience of the system.

I’m not sure why it was chosen to use the US revision of the original opera, singing it in English and changing Jimmy Mahoney to Jimmy MacIntyre, particularly as there are a few native German speakers in the cast here and others, like Henschel, have a strong footing in German opera. If it’s another attempt at alienation effect to keep the audience guessing, then it works here. Most importantly however, the casting and singing is superb. Jane Henschel is superbly capable in the whole range from singspiel-like dialogue to more conventional opera singing, as well as being a fine actress in the role of Widow Begbick. Jenny Smith is an important piece of casting, and Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman makes an incredible impression, oozing sensuality and absolutely electric in her scenes with Michael König’s fine Jimmy MacIntyre. The balance right across the board in the other roles seems perfect, consistently hitting the right note, as do the Chorus of the Teatro Real, who give their all in the scantiest of costumes and in the most… well… indelicate situations. One can’t fault the commitment either of the Madrid orchestra under Pablo Heras Casado.

I don’t know if it’s to do with the encoding, but Bel Air releases often look a little juddery in motion on both my Blu-ray set-ups (most evident here when the Spanish captions move across the screen), and can lack definition in the darker scenes. I haven’t heard anyone else mention any issues with previous releases, so perhaps it’s specific to one’s set-up. Generally however, the image is fine, and even if movements aren’t smooth, I didn’t find it too distracting. The audio tracks, in LPCM Stereo and DTS HD Master Audio 5.1, are both fine, but there’s not much to choose between them. I found the PCM worked better using headphones to keep the sound focussed, and it’s very impressive this way. There are no extra features on the disc, and only a synopsis in the booklet.