Weill - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (London, 2026)

Kurt Weill & Berthold Brecht - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

English National Opera, 2026

André de Ridder, Jamie Manton, Rosie Aldridge, Kenneth Kellogg, Mark Le Brocq, Simon O'Neill, Danielle de Niese, Alex Otterburn, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, David Shipley, Zwakele Tshabalala, Susanna Tudor-Thomas, Joanne Appleby, Ella Kirkpatrick, Adam Taylor, Damon Gould, Deborah Davison, Sophie Goldrick, Claire Mitcher

The Coliseum, London - 18th February 2026

Some operas make their mark and are soon forgotten, others only reveal their brilliance in revival after centuries, and then there are some who despite their troubled origins seem to always have an enduring ability to remain relevant and connect with whatever is going on in the world at any given time. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny certainly has a significant social and political stance that arises out of the time of its composition in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic during the ascent of the Nazis, but its powerful legacy goes deeper than that to the extent that it could just as easily be an opera written for our own times. Most evidently it's there in Brecht's fearlessly confrontational subject matter and libretto, but Weill's music is just an important a factor in how that message is put across and undoubtedly the strength of the message and its ability to speak just as powerfully to us today makes it feel like an opera for our times as well as its own time. And, you suspect, for the times ahead. Watch out for that giant tornado heading our way.

That said, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, from my experience of productions at Madrid, Covent Garden and Aix-en-Provence is a tough opera to stage and get right. As one of the iconoclasts of the theatrical stage, Brecht has a lot to do with making it problematic for any director who wants to put their own stamp on the material, but the subject itself is one that requires a balance of subtlety and lack of subtlety at the right points. The production for the English National Opera directed by Jamie Manton and set designer Milla Clarke is one of the best efforts I've seen at meeting those challenges. There is no attempt to glamorise the show, no reliance on operatic clichés or clever ideas. The concept of the city emerging from the container box of the lorry that the three on-the-run criminals arrive in as the foundation for their philosophy to build a city (a nation) where everything is permitted as long as you have money is not far removed from the Royal Opera House version back in 2015, but it ties in nicely with the Brechtian method of maintaining the distancing awareness of the work's theatricality, and the production remains true to that idea throughout.

There is good reason for that, of course, as Brecht and Weill don't want you to be thinking this is just a night out at the opera - they have other intentions and would rather implicate the audience into a self-questioning of the kind of society in which they themselves are participant: a society of unbridled and deregulated capitalism, consumerism and neoliberalism in a downward death loop spiral. I noticed that the comments of the director and designer and the programme notes are somewhat reticent about mentioning any of these words or about the opera or the production making any political statement, not even making any reference to the obvious parallels we can see in the USA related to the Epstein controversy, political populism and the current US administration's attitude towards the forces of justice taking precedence over law, instead preferring to see the opera as a condemnation of unbridled "power" and "pleasure". It's far more than that, but it's a sad sign of the times where artists have to be careful what they say (Wim Wenders most recently taking just such a controversial stance at the Berlin Film Festival), but thankfully all of what needs to be said is apparent in the stage design and production, and most significantly in the power of the work itself.

It's a production that doesn't draw attention to its set designs. Everything is kept relatively simple; a backdrop displays slogans or principles that society adheres to, even if it doesn't say it openly, in its obeisance to the power of money. The only law here of course is that everything is permitted and you are beyond the law as long as you have money. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of that - or at least the most unsettling aspect that jumps out today of the many social indulgences that the opera skewers - occurs in the final act where 'justice' comes under scrutiny and it becomes apparent that we are indeed living in times where you can kill with impunity if its suits the agenda of those the money and power who feel their authority and position being threatened. God forbid that people with no money - the greatest sin in this society - dare to think they have any right to say what they think. That seems to be the way it works in America at the minute but it's an in-built feature of our own system. And who needs tornados to wreak destruction when we’re doing a good job of destroying the world ourselves?

No, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is not a comforting opera, but it has an important message for our times if we are willing to listen and if someone is brave enough to put it on in full awareness of its power and how to get it across. So credit to the ENO's new Music Director Designate André de Ridder and the ENO, since I'm sure that the Arts Council would like to see the company play it safe. Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is not a safe choice, yet it was a complete sell out (box office-wise) at the Coliseum. That's immensely hearting for those who love the venue, the institution and opera.

Musically this one was a marvel. I've heard this opera many times on a screen and on a disc, but it seems that it's only live in the theatre that the range and richness of the score be can be fully appreciated, as well as its power to deliver the message. The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill is more music theatre, but Mahagonny is truly operatic in scope, if not in any conventional manner. It was clear that de Ridder was revelling in conducting this and you can see and hear why: it sounded magnificent. The singing - well, it's not the kind of work that you go to see to judge the merits of the principal opera singers, but it has its challenges nonetheless, particularly when sung in English. The Wagnerian tenor Simon O'Neill was the standout here for me as Jimmy McIntyre, but Danielle de Niese also made a good impression, giving something of a glamorous star turn as Jenny Smith. Rosie Aldridge, Kenneth Kellogg and Mark Le Brocq gave solid performances as Leokadja Begbick, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper. The chorus were excellent.

Musically and theatrically this production of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny struck home. It seemed to reconcile the contradictions between Brechtian distancing and the emotional involvement of Kurt Weill's wondrous score, working with the head and the heart. Act III in particular did everything it was supposed to do, not just delivering on what had been established in the first two acts, but bringing those realisations and their relevance home. Coming back to this work after a number of years and seeing the work performed stripped back to its essentials, it was something of a revelation to realise just how much modern opera owes to this work with its willingness to stretch boundaries, its refusal to accept limitations of musical conventions and taste as well as its fearlessly confrontational subject matter. Seen in this light, it must be considered alongside Berg's Lulu as one of the defining works of the 20th century.

External links: English National Opera

Production stills: Tristram Kenton

Shostakovich - The Nose (Royal Opera House, 2016)

Dmitri Shostakovich - The Nose

Royal Opera House, London - 2016

Barrie Kosky, Ingo Metzmacher, Martin Winkler, John Tomlinson, Rosie Aldridge, Alexander Kravets, Alexander Lewis, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Peter Bronder,Helene Schneiderman, Susan Bickley, Ailish Tynan, Jeremy White

Opera Platform - 9th November 2016

Outrageous. I think that's the key word to aim for in a production of Shostakovich's The Nose. Gogol's wonderfully absurd and satirical comedy is given a musically extravagant treatment by Dmitri Shostakovich and it calls out for an outrageously surreal comic response on the stage. I'm surprised that Terry Gilliam hasn't been ear-marked for this one at some stage, but The Met's recent production at least found an appropriate illustrator's flourish in William Kentridge. If it's outrageous you're looking for however, Barrie Kosky is your man. 

In Gogol's story and Shostakovich's opera, the nose of interest is that of the Collegiate Assessor Platon Kuzmitch Kovalev. Somehow it disappears from his face, is found in the bread mix of the barber's wife and then goes off to have an independent life of its own, much to the consternation of Kovalev. Even worse, it seems to be having a better life than him, being seen in all the important places around the city and even making the rank of State Councillor. Kovalev meanwhile finds that the absence of a nose don't confer much credibility on him with anyone, not with the police or the newspapers when he tries to report it missing, and it pretty much kills any prospects of marriage he might have had.

Kosky delivers an energetic staging that matches Shostakovich's musically eclectic score for The Nose, even adding a tap dancing routine to a score folk and jazzy rhythms, oomph-pah trombones and tuba and even a balalaika ballad, the music alternating between moments of dark reflection, comic verve and symphonic interludes. It's a technical challenge to find the right mood for each scene, particularly as the work is played straight through without an interval and with minimal time for scene changes, but Kosky and his design team come up with some inventive solutions that don't compromise on the director's individual sense of style and his tableau arrangements.

Barrie Kosky doesn't do obvious, but he has some familiar tics and tricks that are starting to become quite predictable. There is some of the director's trademark campness thrown into the Royal Opera House's all-singing all-dancing production, with gratuitous male dancers in corsets and suspenders, but primarily what you get in a Barrie Kosky production of the Nose is an appropriate sense of irreverence. And noses evidently. Lots of noses. It's not just Kovalov's nose that is prominent here, there are noses everywhere you look - which is kind of obvious. As obvious as... well, you know what.

Well, maybe not so obvious, since there is a rather large dose of comic absurdity and satire in The Nose, and any attempt to look for deep meaning in it is doomed to appear rather silly. Kosky gets the comic absurdity, but doesn't really do the satire. But then, Gogol's satire was very much to do with certain peculiarities of Russian society, with its system of rank and position, with power and authority, with corruption and bribery. There is a pre-Kafkaesque edge to it, but that's not what Shostakovich goes for, and neither does Barrie Kosky.

So what does Kosky find in this Royal Opera House production of The Nose? You might not be surprised to find that Kosky picks up on the undercurrents of a castration complex that Kovalev undergoes in his emasculation. Without his nose, Kovalov no longer feels like a man, he is unable to pursue women, and marriage to the daughter of Pelageya Podtotschina Grigorievna is out of the question (although he was always ambivalent about this match in the first place). Evidently you would expect Kosky to make a big deal of this, and literally at one stage he does indeed make a 'big thing' out of the nose.

So it's typically Kosky, a little bit camp, a little bit vulgar (David Poutney's funny English translation keeping it nice and sweary as well), but it's also clever, entertaining and fun. There's some inventive use of tables and desks driven on wheels to keep things moving along. The production is funny in some places and kind of laboured dead air in others, but it's that kind of a hit and miss opera. Summing up the whole enterprise however, an observer comes on to the stage and gets the audience laughing at the idea that anyone would make an opera out of this "sorry little tale"; "It's of no use to any of us". So there's no point in, ahem, looking down your nose at it.

Singing The Nose in English is perhaps a necessity unless you have a large cast of Russian singers ready to take on the 78 singing and speaking parts (outside of Russia, I would think that only the Bayerische Staatsoper have that kind of resource to draw on). English works just fine, particularly in Poutney's good translation, and we get good singing and speak-singing performances from Martin Winkler as Kovalev and John Tomlinson in a variety of colourful roles that he assumes brilliantly. Alexander Kravets's District Inspector is terrific, and Susan Bickley and Ailish Tynan enter into the spirit of the whole thing wonderfully. I'm not at all familiar with the music, but Ingo Metzmacher's conducting of the orchestra certainly holds together all the varied rhythms, moods and peculiarities of the piece.

Links: Royal Opera House, Opera Platform