How do you like your Brecht? Or your Weill?
Or your Brecht-Weill? Banal questions, doubtless, though that is not to say
that nothing can come from them, just as with ‘Aimez-vous Brahms’? There is,
though, a particularly strong case to say that however one does, one should not
receive what one wants, that to do so, to settle back into ritual, comfortable
nostalgia is still more than usually to miss the point. That is certainly
nothing so banal as merely ‘épater les bourgeois’, though if we are honest,
that will rarely be the worst of things, albeit never enough.
Berlin, of course, has (had) traditions of
its own in this respect, not least from the Berliner Ensemble, founded by
Brecht and Helene Weigel: if not quite an anti-Bayreuth, then in something of a
dialectical relationship to the Festival. They are not the only traditions; can
often be misunderstood; and even where not, have no intrinsic right to be
maintained; they will continue in any case to haunt performances, reception,
and understanding. If the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, home to the Ensemble for
all but the first five years of its existence, is even now most renowned for
the 1928 premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, yet also for
the 1931 triumph of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, there remains
the shadow of the notorious Leipzig premiere of the latter the previous year, disrupted
by Nazi thugs who would proceed to ban ‘degenerate’ Brecht and Weill all too
soon thereafter. The BE continues to present a broadly Brechtian, if
increasingly varied, approach to theatre; indeed, Barrie Kosky’s Threepenny
Opera premiered there in 2021, the same pandemic year that his staging of Mahagonny
was first given about a mile away at the Komische Oper. It is now revived,
during that building’s closure for renovation a little further away, at the
Schillertheater—home to a good few spectres of its own. Both theatrically and
musically, we inevitably feel some of their haunting, whether that be the
intention or no, just as the text of Brecht and Weill (and Elisabeth Hauptmann)
invites in and/or fails to repel guests as different as Christ, Luther, Bach, Marx,
and, yes, Wagner and Schoenberg—often in tandem with dialectical antagonists—as
well as Brecht and Weill themselves in earlier guise. Moreover, if it would
make no sense, long after Brecht, Weigel, and indeed Ruth Berghaus and Joachim
Herz (director of the Komische Oper’s first, 1977 production), to insist on some
outdated Neue Sachlichkeit opposition to Wagner, perhaps even to
Wagnerism, such negative, ‘anti’ ghosts will never die completely, nor should
they. The present, a different present even from 2021, naturally makes its
presence, as it were, felt too—often uneasily, as it should be.
I do not think it was only on account of my finding eyes and ears, though maybe it was, that performance and production
seemed to come a little from the past, real and imagined, in the first half and
most strongly to come together, suggesting something new that was yet also a
little old, after the interval. Kosky’s production certainly seemed to have its
roots most clearly in a Berliner Ensemble lying somewhere between its (mis-?)remembered
past and its present earlier on: not in a bad way by any means, but situating
itself in a broadly post-Brechtian dramaturgy, knowing cliché and all, that set
parameters for our response, all the better for certain surprises – alienating,
if you like – to register later on. It took us lightly yet surely, then, on a
little walk through imagined Mahagonnys, imagined Berlins, imagined dramatic
histories, rather as our three initial protagonists fleeing from their previous
home, had taken their leave from their previous city to journey to find their
new one.
If it is clear from the outset who (and
what) Widow Begbick is, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper are initially presented,
though surely only presented, as Christian and Jew, their dialogue somehow
tending a little towards Beckett, whilst remaining the same as it has always
been. It had me recall Kosky’s Bayreuth Meistersinger exchanges between
Sachs and Beckmesser, especially as realised in the acting of Michael Volle and
Johannes Martin Kränzle, that staging for better or worse also preoccupied,
rather more controversially, with the 1930s. And indeed, here Seth Carico and Ivan
Turšić also worked very well together, their characters coming ever more
sharply into focus as the work progressed, whilst maintaining a certain dialectical
relationship that also of course encompassed Ariana Lucas, a properly larger-than-life
Begbick, at the apex or nadir of its unholy trinity.
Work and city founded and in (im-)proper
working order, a fantastic, typically Kosky ‘show’ experienced following a
hurricane both ominous, almost Romantically so, and yet also knowingly, modernistically
constructed, the true Weimar Passion (even passion) can emerge—with irony,
doubtless, yet also on occasion without. Kosky’s conception of ‘an anti-Tristan
und Isolde’ here is interesting, because, inclinations, dramaturgy,
performing practices notwithstanding, a little can seep in and arguably must,
to be ‘anti-’ in the first place. Ask Nietzsche, Adorno, or Stravinsky. Walls
close in and open up, but is it, can it be, any more than an illusion, a
delusion, when they do it with mirrors? Descended from Bach’s multivalent chorus
as well as the Greeks’, and with all the layers of meaning that might entail,
the crowd and thus the city seem larger than they are, but they still,
fractious sheep that they be, need to be convinced, corralled, and implicated
as individuals. They sing – often surprisingly slowly, echoing the Bach of yesteryear
– their chorales but they also act as the Jews of the turba choruses,
called upon each in turn to participate in the death sentence visited on Jim
Mahoney for his ultimate, unforgivable, Mahagonny-blasphemous crime: buying a
round and being unable to pay for it. Stabbing him in turn chills, just as it
should, the law – the Law? – acting as it should, in a world without God, let
alone humanity.
Yet it is not, of course, without God, as the hurricane may or may not have
warned us. He may have been watching all along—though the inhabitants have not
been watching Him. The children of Mahagonny, lost in the wilderness, have – in
striking parallel with Moses und Aron – fashioned their own idols, a
fattened calf included, only to dismember it for pleasure, in anticipating of
what they will do to Jimmy. In a moment that is somehow both touching and not,
Jenny declines to participate, paving the way for God to deliver His judgement.
An ape in a machine, a Cabaret-racialised alienation of the traditional deus
ex machina, wheels itself around pathetically onstage, in contrast not only
with the loudspeaker but also with the groups of ‘character’ and ‘city’ voices,
now heard surrounding us in a spatialised Passion. Ours is a world, nowhere
more so than in Berlin, fashioned and even staged by National Socialism and the
Holocaust. God, morality, or socialism might be right, but is not might right
really? So maybe there was no God after all. Jimmy thought it was Nature, after
all, and perhaps it was—though that vision might ultimately be worse vision
(this side of socialism, anyway). What if Mahagonny does exist, is not a made-up
word, and cannot but endure? What if, to quote from a high priestess of neoliberalism,
‘there is no alternative’?
So far, so (mostly) Brecht, but what of
Weill—and indeed Brecht-Weill? Kosky’s direction certainly assisted the creation
of the latter, attentive musically and in turn granting the impression that ‘musical’
and ‘dramatic’ worlds helped construct one another, even – particularly? – when they
might come into conflict. As an opera, Mahagonny presents its own opportunities
and difficulties; one cannot simply perform it as if it were The Threepenny Opera
or even the Mahagonny Songspiel, even if one wished to, though the
kinship remains clear at every turn and can hardly be ignored. Alexander Joel
and the Komische Oper orchestra brought a strong sense of that ‘Twenties’ sound
to us: hard-edged, band-like, yet also more clearly than ever founded a good
deal of the time in the world of Weill’s teacher, Busoni. Some tempi surprised,
but not in a bad way: they had one relisten and appreciate why they were as
they were. The sense of a monument on which musical as well as other history
might be inscribed came through, not despite but through the immediacy of the
songs. That went for the excellent chorus too: a mass of individuals when
called for, yet equally an implacable single mass as required—dramatically and
musically.
There would be no more point in trying to
imitate Lotte Lenya than there would be Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeburg (conductor on
the celebrated first recording) or indeed Alexander Zemlinsky (who conducted
both Leipzig and Berlin premieres). Nadja Mchantaf, an extraordinarily
versatile artists whom I have seen here in roles ranging from Fiordiligi to Rusalka,
brought her own, vividly lifelike Jenny to the stage: beautifully sung and very
much her own woman. There was some, yet not too much, ‘genuine’ feeling between
her and Gerard Schneider’s Jimmy—with whom, likewise, one sympathised enough at
times, without the work lapsing into something else. Indeed, our Jim-in-Gethsemane
paved the way skilfully and properly for both the judgement of the final scene
and its disregard. As ever with the Komische Oper, there was a strong sense of
a company performance, many of the roles being drawn from its own principals—as,
of course, one might expect at Brecht’s own theatre. Ultimately, message and ‘experience’
were starkly more than the sum of their parts—as they must be in a world such
as this.
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| Image: my own ( Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof) |
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