On 21st December 1931 the Theater am Kurfürstendamm hosted the Berlin premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY. These were febrile times, both politically and artistically. Tensions between radical groups on the fringes of the Weimar Republic boiled over frequently. The legendary Kroll Opera under the direction of Otto Klemperer, always a thorn in the flesh of right-wing political parties because of its openness to modernist works, was forced to close in July 1931. This despite Klemperer of all people declining to mount the world premiere of the piece in 1929 due to MAHAGONNY’s “crassness”. It was Ernst Josef Aufricht, one of the driving forces behind THE THREEPENNY OPERA, who brought the work to Berlin on his own initiative, hiring former Kroll conductor Alexander Zemlinsky as musical director and Caspar Neher to direct the onstage action and take charge of set design. Actors were cast in place of almost all the singers, which forced Weill into a number of re-writes and caused friction with Brecht at rehearsals. Such complications did not prevent the production from notching up almost fifty performances – one of the last great theatre runs of the Weimar Republic prior to the turning point of 1933.

Today there is again talk of a turning point in the political landscape, so the opera is once again being tested for present-day relevance. In resonating with current political goings-on, does RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY have the same capacity to scandalise as it did in 1931? Or has Brecht’s “brazen, Berlin-style jostling of capitalism” (in the words of Hugo Leichtentritt, writing in Die Music magazine) now lost its sting?

These are the kinds of questions that the symposium at the Deutsche Oper Berlin aims to address. The event sprang from a collaboration with the “Opera in Berlin 1925-1944” project, which is being hosted by the Humboldt University in Berlin and is part-funded by the German Research Foundation (Director: Prof. Dr. Arne Stollberg, Department of Musicology and Media Studies).

As part of the German Research Foundation’s “Opera in Berlin 1925–1944” project, Humboldt University, Berlin

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