• Kurt Weill. Opera in three acts. 1929.
• Libretto by Bertolt Brecht.
• First performance at the Neues Theater, Leipzig, on 9th March 1930.

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CHARACTERS

Leokadja Begbick	contralto
Fatty, the bookkeeper	tenor
Trinity Moses	baritone
Jenny	soprano
Jim Mahoney	tenor
Jake Schmidt	tenor
Alaska Wolf Joe	bass
Pennybank Bill	baritone
Toby Higgins	tenor

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On the run from the police, Leokadja Begbick, Trinity Moses and Fatty decide to set up a city of their own, with prize-fights every three days. The place attracts malcontents from far and wide, including the Cuban mulatta Jenny and her friends and the lumberjacks Jim, Jake, Bill and Joe. Jim falls in love with Jenny, for whom he pays $30, but Mahagonny is threatened by a hurricane and by the police in pursuit of Mrs Begbick. The hurricane passes and now nothing is barred in Mahagonny, with gluttony, love turning to lust, and prize-fights to the death. Jim, with Jenny and Bill, tries to sail away, but cannot pay Mrs Begbick what he owes. He is captured and tried. Toby Higgins, arraigned before Mrs Begbick for murder, bribes his way out of it, but Jim has no money to do this, and Bill will not lend him anything. He is condemned to death for not paying for his whisky and is sent to the electric chair, while others act out the idea of God coming to Mahagonny. The opera ends with protest banners, seeking general licence, the world of capitalism and the words Können uns und euch und niemand helfen (Can’t help us and you and anyone).

The opera came from an earlier collaboration with Brecht, which had resulted in the much shorter Mahagonny, a Songspiel. In essence an attack on capitalism, the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny gave rise to protests from National Socialist Party supporters in 1930 and the following years, to be banned in Germany, with other works of Weill and Brecht, from 1933. Weill’s music uses a variety of idioms, including ragtime, jazz and formal counterpoint, capturing a particular popular idiom notably in the Alabama Song. The controversial text drew particular opposition on both moral and political grounds.