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Aber etwas fehlt! (But something is missing) Berlin
Deutsche Oper
07/17/2025 - & July 20, 22*, 24, 26, 2025
Kurt Weill: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
Nikolai Schukoff (Jim Mahoney), Annette Dasch (Jenny Hill), Evelyn Herlitzius (Leokadja Begbick), Thomas Cilluffo (Fatty), Robert Gleadow (Trinity Moses), Kieran Carrel (Jakob Schmidt), Artur Garbas (Bill), Padraic Rowan (Joe)
Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Jeremy Bines (chorus master), Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Stefan Kingele (conductor)
Benedikt von Peter (stage director), Katrin Wittig (sets), Geraldine Arnold (costumes), Ulrich Niepel (lighting), Bert Zander (videography), Sylvia Roth & Carolin Müller‑Dohle (dramaturgy)
(© Thomas Aurin)
Two years after the premiere of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in 1928, Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht presented their Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). The former was a remake of John Gay’s 1728 work The Beggars Opera, set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch, showing the underbelly of London while parodying bourgeois values. The latter was more ambitious ideologically, a vehement tirade against capitalism, which, while occasionally revived even to this day, was then, as an entertainment, too didactic to catch on with the greater public, not helped by its dearth of melody.
In 1927, Weill wrote a one-act chamber opera, Mahagonny-Songspiel, consisting of eleven numbers, including “Alabama Song,” for the Baden‑Baden music festival. Weill and Brecht reworked the short work into Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.
The story goes like this. Three fugitives from justice, Fatty the bookkeeper, Trinity Moses and Leokadja Begbick, are on the run when their truck breaks down near a small town, Mahagonny. As it’s far north in Alaska, they don’t think the police will look for them. They decide to settle there, with a dream of transforming Mahagonny into a city of pleasure and a magnet for gold miners to spend their hard‑earned cash. Among the new arrivals are the whore, Jenny Hill, who with five other working girls tells her story in “Alabama Song”, the work’s most famous piece that recurs several times through the opera. One of Weill & Brecht’s best‑known songs, it’s been covered by artists as diverse as The Doors and David Bowie.
Annette Dasch impressed with her versatility as Jenny Hill. Seen three weeks earlier as Josepha the innkeeper in Benatzky’s operetta Im weissen Rössl in Vienna, she was completely convincing as Jenny. The freshly arrived Jenny sounded and acted quite differently from the more experienced one at the end of the opera, though the time span was not long. Her enunciation of certain pivotal words conveyed the young prostitute’s complex character. When Jim chooses her to start a relationship, he asks her preferences and she won’t reveal any. She is whatever he wants her to be. Her words “Es ist vielleicht zu früh, davon zu reden” (“It is too early to talk of that”) were devastatingly sad and said much about poor Jenny. At the end of the opera, her song refusing to help her lover Jim, “Denn wie man sich bettet” (“As you make your own bed”) was biting.
Veteran dramatic soprano Evelyn Herlitzius, seen a few months earlier as a terrifying Klytaemnestra in Patrice Chéreau’s Elektra in Berlin, was an almost equally frightening Leokadja Begbick, the fugitive and ruthless madam. Endowed with a powerful voice, she was imposing and seemed to savour her well‑enunciated lines showing the worst of human nature.
Canadian bass-baritone Robert Gleadow was an excellent choice as Trinity Moses. Heard a few months ago in the title role in Le nozze di Figaro in Paris, Gleadow’s stage presence is overwhelming. He portrayed a sociopathic Trinity Jones that took pleasure in his evil doing. American tenor Thomas Cilluffo was an appropriately sleazy Fatty.
The revelation of the show was Austrian tenor Nikolai Schukoff as Jim Mahoney, a magnetic singer and actor. Initially ill at ease and not properly projecting, he soon became a force of nature. He was capable of showing this lumberjack’s vulnerability in his love for Jenny and his fragility as a man in a savage world.
After seven hard years of labour, four Alaskans lumberjacks, Jim Mahoney, Jacob Schmidt, Bank Account Billy and Alaska Wolf Joe, set off to Mahagonny to enjoy its pleasures. Jim falls for Jenny Hill and they become lovers. The three fugitives and founders of Sin City decide to resolve their financial problems by fleecing the four Alaskans.
Jim misses his home and wife and wants to leave. He has a breakdown and threatens to kill himself, but is disarmed. Jim can’t handle the peace and quiet of Mahagonny. Peace evaporates as there is a hurricane warning. Here the producers brilliantly corralled members of the public to simulate the chaos of the situation. Jim sings that man’s savagery exceeds any hurricane, and implores the public to calm down, as whatever the hurricane destroys, it will be less severe than man‑made destruction. Fortunately, the hurricane changes course and strikes Pensacola, where federal agents are on the outlook for Fatty, Moses and Begbick.
In celebration, the citizens of Mahagonny sing of the four great pleasures of life: eating, drinking, fornicating and fighting. Jacob Schmidt, well‑captured by Irish bass‑baritone Padraic Rowan, overeats till he dies, singing “Jetzt habe ich gegessen zwei Kälbe” (“Now that I have eaten two calves”). The camera close‑up that showed him stuffing himself ensured no one would have a post‑opera dinner. The crowd saluted Jacob as a “man without fear” who went all the way.
The men sing the “Mandalay Song,” warning of the ephemeral nature of love, urging the boys participating in a sexual extravaganza under a large blanket which others held, and to speed it up. The scene was well‑staged as it showed sex as a dirty business to be hurriedly done. Jenny and other girls crawling from under the raised blanket looked devastatingly dehumanized.
Alaska Joe Wolf boxes against Trinity Moses. Out of friendship, Jim bets all his savings on Joe, as Moses not only wins, but kills Joe, in what is clearly a fixed match. Again, the production arranged to have the public on stage to participate in the cheerleading for the match; this worked well.
To drown his sorrow over his friend’s death and the loss of his entire fortune, Jim invites everyone for a drink. When Begbick demands payment and the broke Jim declares he cannot pay, Jim is led off in chains. When Jim asks for help from Bill and Jenny, they both refuse. Jenny sings the cynical “Denn wie man sich bettet” (“As you make your own bed”).
Moses sells tickets to the trial. Begbick is the judge and Fatty the prosecutor. At his trial, Jim is accused of not paying his bills, of seducing Jenny (though it was Madam Begbick who procured her), of inciting the crowd in a subversive joyous song during the hurricane and of hastening Joe’s death by betting on him in the boxing match. He is given short sentences for these crimes, but for the crime of not having money, he is condemned to death.
After Jim’s execution, pandemonium breaks out between the citizens of Mahagonny. Billy and others march and carry placards, with members of the audience onstage for good measure. The city is burnt to the ground; the opera ends in chaos.
It’s a bleak parable on capitalism and its excesses, especially in a laisser‑faire system. First performed in Weimar Germany in 1930 (and banned three years after by the Nazis), it’s still pertinent today, with the capitalist West in both sharp decline and denial, as so eloquently chronicled in French historian and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd’s bestselling book La Défaite de l’Occident (2024).
Though Mahagonny was entertaining, one felt the production tried too hard to be hip and original, in short to produce “a happening.” At the entry to Deutsche Oper, the lights were dimmed, giving the effect of entering a nightclub. The theatre hall was closed until a couple of minutes before showtime, forcing the audience just before curtain time to maneuver through a crowded foyer filled with grotesquely-attired extras, more evocative of Alice in Wonderland than Kurt Weill. At the bar, the price of champagne was reduced from ten to three Euros, encouraging debauchery to loosen up the public. The extras gave some audience members costumes to dress up: tutus, robes, loose chiffon shirts and headgear. When the doors opened, less than 10% of the seats were available; the rest were off limits. Within twenty minutes into the show, some theatregoers seated behind me started vaping marijuana, but mercifully they were removed thirty minutes later. The audience had to stand and eventually many were invited to go on stage to be part of the show. The idea was the Brechtian concept of audience participation, an amplified breaking down of the “fourth wall,” à la French director Ariane Mnouchkine (b. 1939).
In that respect, the producers were successful, whether destabilising the audience to put them in a certain mood, or corralling them onstage, blocked in specific areas, even on mattresses. While some of the action took place onstage, some singers were in the foyer, on the street in front of Deutsche Oper and even at a nearby subway exit. The audience could follow these going‑ons via video on two onstage screens. The problem, for some, was only being able to follow the complete “hip” show on video, breaking down barriers to create a more significant wall between spectator and creator. This made the experiment feel contrived, though it did afford the possibility for the bourgeoisie to feel revolutionary for one night, and to hopefully spread the word.
Early in the opera, a blasé Jim, sated with Mahagonny’s pleasures, complained: “Aber es fehlt etwas” (“but something is missing”). It would seem that Jim nailed it from the outset!
Ossama el Naggar
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