– The final installment of my promised opera overview.
Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was Spoleto’s magnum operatic opus this time ‘round. Just about everybody around here who’s written about it has also raved about it. I don’t need to go into great detail here – just take a look at Fernando Rivas’ enthusiastic review for that. Beyond the fact that I really dug it, too — what can I add? Well, how about a little cross-operatic perspective? And perhaps one wrinkle I don’t think anybody else has explored.
Mahagonny makes for TWO operas in this year’s festival that reek of nihilism, though of different kinds. Sure, Mahagonny (like Wagner’s Valhalla), gets destroyed in the end: expiation for the weaknesses of men (and of Wagner’s gods). But at least there’s a lesson here, even if it’s an anti-capitalist one. Pascal Dusapin’s Faustus, the Last Night, offers no such lesson, because everything in his operatic world is pointless. And, unlike the utopian fantasy of CW Gluck’s L’Ile de Merlin, Mahagonny is a DYStopian vision, where man’s baser instincts are catered to in a surreal world in which greed and exploitation are the accepted norm.
As the future sin-city’s wannabe ladies of the night trudged wearily across the stage for the first time, singing their “Moon of Alabama” song to world-weary, banjo-twangy chords from the orchestra – you just knew you were in for a very special evening. Once you get used to Weill’s unique voice, you begin to realize how original and vital his music is. Then examine his (and librettist Brecht’s) thinking, and you discover how universal his themes are.
My unique contention (compared to those I’ve read) has much to do with the “four pleasures of life,” as explored in the opera’s second act: eating, fighting, lovemaking and drinking. Try extrapolating all four of them into the here & now, and we find that all are still alive and thriving.
Eating? Cheap, fattening junk food is everywhere; obesity (and related illness) has risen to unprecedented, epidemic levels. Fighting? Our addiction to violence remains one of mankind’s most stubbornly incurable diseases: if we’re not killing each other off over revenge, territory or power, we’re addicted to vicarious violence by proxy … otherwise known as sports (like wrestling, football or hockey). Lovemaking? Sex is everywhere and sells everything, even in a relatively puritanical society like ours. Drinking? That’s just the iceberg’s tip. We’ve never had more readily available (or deadlier) intoxicants at our fingertips than we do now.
And finally, there’s good ol’ filthy lucre. Like he did here, Librettist Bert Brecht kept bashing away at the evils of capitalism all his life. Trouble is, capitalism is the most human of societal systems, ‘cause it’s built on mankind’s true (and main) motivator: greed. And that means money. The cold war notwithstanding, capitalism didn’t lick communism with nukes. How many wads of bills get flipped through in this opera? Is there really anything out there that’s not for sale?
So, dear blogophile, tell me: is there one single thing about Mahagonny (even the kangaroo court) that’s not also found ad nauseam in today’s supposedly “real” world? Like I say, the basic tenets of human nature have never changed. So, like it or not, we’re all still residents in good standing of Mahagonny. And just maybe – as in Faustus – there‘s no way out; not as long as people remain people. But we’ve still got to keep trying. And that’s what this opera can still teach us, if we let it.
