Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, ENO, 16 February 2026

Coliseum

Images: Tristram Kenton

Announcer – The Company
Leokadja Begbick – Rosie Aldridge
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Mark Le Brocq
Trinity Moses – Kenneth Kellogg
Jenny Smith – Danielle de Niese
Jimmy MacIntyre – Simon O‘Neill
Jack O’Brien – Elgan Llŷr Thomas
Bank-Account Billy – Alex Otterburn
Alaska Wolf Joe – David Shipley
Jenny’s Girls – Joanna Appleby, Deborah Davison, Sophie Goldrick, Ella Kirkpatrick, Claire Mitcher, Susanna Tudor-Thomas
Jenny’s Boy, A Cloud – Damon Gould
Jenny’s Boy, A Typhoon – Adam Taylor
Toby Higgins – Zwakele Tshabalala

Director – Jamie Manton
Designs – Milla Clarke
Lighting – D.M. Wood
Choreography – Lizzi Gee, Spencer Darlaston-Jones
Sound design – Jake Moore
Intimacy and fight coordinator – Haruka Kuroda

Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (director: Matthew Quinn) 

Orchestra of the English National Opera

André de Ridder (conductor)

In Berlin’s Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof, one of my favourite cemeteries, Hegel lies buried—as, very close, do Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, as do many others. Brecht’s Chausseestrasse house and the room in which he worked overlooked that cemetery; the Marxist Brecht expressly chose it out of increasing fascination with Marx’s single most important intellectual forerunner, GWF Hegel. One summer, I lived ten minutes’ walk away and visited regularly. Karl Marx, of course, lies in another celebrated cemetery, in another great world city: Highgate in London, further from anywhere in London I have lived, yet not so far in the greater scheme of things. This tale of ‘my’ two cities, of two cemeteries, of three dead men and more – ‘Nothing you can do will help a dead man’ – shaped my experience of this new ENO production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, not least since I had seen Mahagonny only two months previously, in Berlin, in Barrie Kosky’s Komische Oper staging. 

In capitalist society as in its artistic production, then as now, the grit lies in contradiction. What Hegel the divined as ontology, Marx situated in particular social and economic conditions. We are not obliged to choose; both indeed may be true or at least contain truth. In any case, following in both Hegel and Marx’s wake, Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny offers an illuminating instantiation of some of these contradictions: not only in subject matter but in aesthetics and its implications for performance and reception. Some art fails because it simply is not very good, or at least is not well presented. The contradictions here, though, are of a different nature, not to be smoothed over, concealed, or reconciled, but to be such stuff as dreams are smashed on—as indeed is patently the case wherever we look in our present social and political predicaments. No wonder, then, that this new ENO production, the last, I believe, before the company’s move to Manchester, is replete with more general resonance than those personal, albeit connected elements with which I began. 

The contradiction between advertisement and reality is key to the Mahagonny and the Mahagonny we visit with Jamie Manton and his team, yet so is the form of production we can all see – and hear – if only we open our eyes and ears. In the ‘real’ world, ideology mystifies, obscures, yet never quite conceals; here, contradiction is perhaps more glaring, but that is the (Brechtian) point. It all goes back to a lorry, a box of theatrical tricks. (In what I think is pure coincidence, it put me a little in mind of the van in Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring, though vehicular function may hold something in common.) Great claims are made for the city the unholy trio – less a trinity than in Kosky’s staging with c.1930 religious symbols – have built. Perceived desire and demand play their part, whether for whiskey or women—and, in a welcome update, men too. Sex workers rather than prostitutes, Jenny’s girls and boys are available to all, though the outcome does not change. Any declaration of love is not necessarily entirely hollow, but its truth is fleeting and contradicted by the destructive self-interest of all (save, perhaps, the founding mother and fathers). Even the whiskey is diluted by grim recycling that suggests what comes out one end will go back in the other. 

But it is not all grime and grimness: there would be no contradiction then. There is Weill, of course, on whom more soon, but there is also a lively sense of fun, of entertainment: not necessarily unmediated, but what is? There are plenty of witty moments to occasion a wry smile or more, whilst the framing – the Coliseum’s staging and technical equipment a container for, in turn, the container – reminds us this is theatre. Announcements are made by alternating members of the company, part Brechtian remnant with loudspeaker, part Handmaid’s Tale entertainment imitation. (Before the interval, that is; after, they are more clearly themselves, unmasked.) And whilst the production in general shies away from specific contemporary reference – we can hardly fail to make it – the trial as gameshow surely gives the Trumpian game away. Resourceful designs impart a sense both of using what was to hand and also of what one might see, or have seen, at the Berliner Ensemble. In the contradiction between expectation and reality, a weathervane (we have plenty of them in our world) tapdancing hurricane points the way to just destruction of the city, only suddenly to change direction in a triumph of the knowingly underwhelming that prefigures God’s forlorn, defeated attempt to visit justice on this world at the end, drawn out Weill’s Bachian chorales bleakly yet thrillingly subverting Christian passion. Likewise, a cloud dances in counterpoint to Weill’s delicious parody of overwrought, out-of-tune Romantic salon music, edging out Jimmy’s act in more ways than one. 

For the tension and indeed contradiction between Brecht and Weill will, should always lie at the heart of this work and its performance. Can, should music do what Brecht seems to imply it should? Where does that leave the songs, the tunes, the band? André de Ridder, music director designate, drew out biting and seductive playing from the ENO Orchestra. One could sympathise with Jimmy on his last night, traduced and betrayed, as for once strings soared, but not too much—and then it was over. Structurally, closed forms – how they do (and do not) add up to more – were clear and did far more than reproduce those of the libretto. It can be all too easy hearing Weill in the twenty-first century to succumb to nostalgia for a ‘Weimar’ that never was. Here, edge was maintained without entirely denying us pleasure; banjo and Hawaiian guitar could be heard amidst ominous, bass-led hemming in. If only Jeremy Sams’s translation could have decided what it wanted to be and stuck with it, much would have bitten still more savagely. Much was good, but there were too many instances that simply jarred, and the crucial Biblical element to Brecht’s writing was too often lost. 

One less productive contradiction, at least for me, lay between operatic voices and miking. The Coliseum has never offered an ideal acoustic for opera, but here balances were too often awry. The chorus suffered more than most, words sometimes more or less inaudible. Rosie Aldridge and Danielle de Niese offered nicely contrasting and complementing female leads, equally at home in more operatic moments and something closer to the street, both fine singing actors. Simon O’Neill proved a tireless Jimmy, ably supported by his friends, Alex Otterburn, Elgan Llŷr Thomas, and David Shipley. Alongside Kenneth Kellogg and Mark Le Brocq, all offered individual performances founded on the text and on a recognition that the text has contradictions of its own, not least between words and music. Ultimately, I found there was in all respects no need to choose: Berlin and London offered different experiences, in contrast, complement, and yes, contradiction. In some ways, the latter, perhaps ironically, seemed the more Brechtian in its reluctance – refusal would be too strong – to concede to opera, even in Weill’s idiosyncratic conception. It was, in any way, a properly barbed, defiant way for ENO to bid us au revoir. 

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Komische Oper, 13 December 2025

Schillertheater

Images: Iko Freese/drama-berlin.de

Leokadja Begbick – Ariana Lucas
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Ivan Turšić
Trinity Moses – Seth Carico
Jenny – Nadja Mchantaf
Jim Mahoney – Gerard Schneider
Jack O’Brien – Caspar Krieger
Bank-Account Bill – Hubert Zapiór
Alaskawolfjoe – Philipp Meierhöfer
Toby Higgins – Thoma Jaron-Wutz
Stage piano – Rui Rodrigues

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Katharina Fritsch
Set designs and lighting – Klaus Grünberg
Assistant set designer – Anne Kuhn
Costumes – Klaus Bruns
Dramaturgy – Maximilian Hagemeyer

Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin (director: Jean-Christophe Charron)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Alexander Joel (conductor)

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.

Image: my own ( Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof)

Komsi/BBC SO/Oramo - Howell, Weill, and Mahler, 16 April 2025

Barbican Hall

Dorothy Howell: Lamia
Kurt Weill: Der neue Orpheus, op.15
Mahler: Symphony no.4 in G major

Anu Komsi (soprano)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Sakari Oramo (conductor, violin)

Placing little-known music with a Mahler symphony might be thought both a sensible and high-risk strategy. It will almost certainly result in the music gaining a wider audience. In the case of Dorothy Howell, though, it is difficult to imagine many wishing to extend that acquaintance. To be fair, she was young when she wrote Lamia, premiered (1919) and championed by no less than Henry Wood. Maybe there are better pieces from later on in her career. The muted reception accorded to a committed performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo said it all, alas. I cannot imagine anyone would have divined inspiration in Keats without being told so. An opening two-flute figure intrigued; like everything else, it led nowhere in particular. This was a tone poem that might just about have appealed as to those for whom Delius’s music is too goal-oriented and too radical in musical language. If introductions to introductions to introductions were your thing, you might still find it featureless, though there usually seems to be an English ‘enthusiast’ market for rhapsodic expanses of lateish-Romantic sound. 

Weill came, then, as a relief, in a rare opportunity to hear his 1925 cantata Der neue Orpheus. It continued a vaguely Grecian theme, yet is anything other than nostalgic, setting Yvan Goll’s ironic, surrealist – perhaps ironically surrealist – poem in a witty set of musical parodies taking us from Clementi to Wagner via Stravinsky, Mahler, and other milieux. And that is only one central section of its twenty-minute span. (Howell, apparently, was significantly shorter, yet felt longer.) Can one hear absence? Almost certainly, if only contextually. The absence of violins in the chamber orchestra was surely felt in that sense at least, in typically wind-led sound, adopted with immediate security and conviction of idiom by the BBC SO. The orchestral introduction, imbued with a keen sense of drama, might have been the opening to an opera. Vividly communicative, Ana Komsi’s account of the text relished its surrealism but also the humanity seemingly gained (shades already of the uneasy collaboration between Brecht and Weill?) by its alchemic conversion into vocal music. . ‘Everyone is Orpheus. Who does not know Orpheus?’ Such apparently lofty universalism was immediately deflated, even alienated, by banal detail of his vital statistics and personality. Increasing presence of Busoni in the orchestra was splendidly brought out by Oramo, reminding us not only of the identity of Weill’s teacher, but of the conductor’s recent outstanding account of his Piano Concerto, Pierrot- as well as Orpheus-like, Oramo took up his violin, as sounds of the circus took us closer to the world of Mahagonny and, especially notable, that of The Soldier’s Tale. 

If Goll and Weill’s Orpheus moved its audience in performance of a Mahler symphony, so did his interpreters. Not quite what I was expecting, this Mahler Fourth was arguably more dramatic in a stage sense and less Classical than most. It was not so much that movements in themselves and in relation to one another seemed to have been conceived separately as that conception apparently having been born more of contrast than line, even continuity. The first movement’s opening was more deliberate than usual, really holding back before launching into a spirited first subject. It had charm, style, precision, heart, and heavily inverted commas. Flexibility is written as well as called for interpretatively, but both varieties seemed emphasised here and throughout in a notably nightmarish reading, in which sardonic presentiments of the Fifth Symphony took precedence over those of neoclassicism. It was doubtless more context than anything else, but Weill at times seemed only to be just around the corner. And the music certainly breathed: not always regularly, but it breathed. 

Weird, childish, all things in good measure, the second movement got a move on without being hurried. If Oramo loved it a little too much from time to time, it was a fault in the right direction. And here a certain sort of neoclassicism did come to the fore; there were passages in which Schoenberg’s Serenade, op.23, was unquestionably a kindred spirit. It seemed to foretell both movements to come, the third unfolding ‘naturally’, almost in reaction, without trying to turn it into Bruckner. There remained in such contrast a highly modern subjectivity. Mahler’s inheritance from Beethoven was neither overlooked nor overplayed in a passionate yet far from overblown performance whose climax proved properly moving. So too did the advent of the finale, palpable as it must be in sincerity that is childlike yet never childish. Komsi’s singing contributed a further level of intercession as intermediary between us and the saints. This was rightly more Styrian than Sienese, in voice and orchestra alike. I am not sure I have ever felt more immediately involved, mediation notwithstanding, as if a definitive, magical link had been forged in the Great Chain of Being.

Stemme/Svensson - Wagner, Liszt, Koch, Mahler, and Weill, 2 March 2023

Wigmore Hall

Wagner: Wesendonck-Lieder
Wagner-Liszt: Am stillen Herd aus Richard Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’, S 448
Sigurd von Koch: Die geheimnisvolle Flöte
Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
Weill: Happy End: ‘Surabaya Johnny’; Nannas Lied; Youkali

Nina Stemme (soprano)

Magnus Svensson (piano)

What it is to hear a great voice such as Nina Stemme’s at close quarters. Doubtless there will be some – there always are – for whom this was not, according to their own arbitrary definition, ‘true Lieder singing’. (They probably said the same about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, though would deny it now.) Such silly, anti-operatic snobbery aside, though, anyone actually listening to Stemme’s way with words, here at the Wigmore Hall just as on the stage at Covent Garden or Bayreuth, will have heard that it was precisely that, furthered by a voice that never needed to strain, yet which never sounded too big, and which sounded as if it could have gone on all night. 

The Wesendonck-Lieder are perhaps not the easiest place to begin, cold, but here was the hochdramatisch thing from the start. The size of Stemme’s voice was apparent, of course, but so too were seemingly endless reserves of breath. Hardly surprisingly, echoes – presentiments, really – of Tristan und Isolde were heard. And the leisure of the close to the opening ‘Stehe still!’ was indicative of an approach that could and did take its time, seeing no reason to rush, without even the slightest hint of dragging. Magnus Svensson proved a supportive pianist, but this was really Stemme’s show, ‘Der Engel’ beginning with relative intimacy, blooming at her behest, the piano in tandem. There was a little of Isolde on stage too, Stemme gazing into the distance in the piano introductions to ‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’: not stagey, but rather poised. The former’s tessitura permitted a taste of what her Brangäne might have been like too. Ringing top notes in ‘Schmerzen’ and ‘Träume’ alike, the former leading to a truly exultant climax, the latter’s detailed colouring, each reiteration of the word ‘Träume’ subtly different, a joy in itself. If Svensson’s solo rendition of Liszt’s Meistersinger paraphrase proved a little stiff, freer the more it became Liszt proper, then it was a welcome opportunity to hear a true rarity. 

Another rarity was Sigurd von Koch’s 1916 song-cycle, Die geheimnisvolle Flöte, in a well-judged performance that might have been prepared for a repertoire work. Setting poems from Hans Bethge’s collection Die chinesische Flöte, known to many musicians from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Koch offers well-crafted responses, firmly rooted in German song tradition, yet with occasional hints of something more Debussyan (in harmony, rather than word-setting). Stemme and Svensson treated each of the five songs individually, with their own moods, yet also as part of a greater whole. The sadness of ‘Traurig Frühlingsnacht’ and the dark defiance of the closing ‘Herbstgefühl’ – no gentle autumnal – were especially captivating, the latter quite something in performance. 

Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder is, of course, absolutely central to the repertoire, more often heard in orchestral guise, yet with such clarity and spareness heard here perhaps sounding both more starkly modernist and closer to Bach. Stemme offered great clarity too, both of line and of purpose, though she was certainly not deaf to Mahler’s irony, a nice link to the Weill songs to come. If it were difficult not to think of this performance in some sense as ‘operatic’, it was certainly not so in a negative way. As in the Wesendonck-Lieder, Stemme was not afraid to colour with tuning, a sign of well-placed confidence as well as artistic judgement. She, as well as Svensson, used harmony – for instance on the words ‘O Augen’ in the second song – to evoke Wagnerian mystery. The intensity of ‘Wenn dein Mütterlein’ gave way to still greater sadness, again not without irony or indeed straightforward delusion, in ‘Oft denk’ ich sie sind nur augegangen’. True Mahlerian horror was unleashed in the closing ‘In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus’, the hallucinatory final stanza a proper heir to Winterreise. (Now there is an intriguing prospect.) 

Stemme’s use of words was crucial in Weill – with and without Brecht – in which three songs she continued to hold the audience in the palm of her hand. Svensson’s pianism seemed just the thing here too, idiomatic throughout. So vividly communicative was Nannas Lied that surely a listener without texts and without a word of German would have had a strong idea of the ‘Liebesmarkt’ and the challenges of moving beyond ‘siebzehn’. The tango rhythms of Youkali offered still more alluring cabaret, also – perhaps oddly – making me think we need to hear Stemme in Schoenberg, from the cabaret of the Brettl-Lieder to full-throated Erwartung. As an encore we heard the Broadway Weill: ‘My Ship’ from Lady in the Dark, despatched indeed with sails made of silk, Stemme’s English as perfect as her German. Wonderful!

LSO/Rattle - Weill, 28 April 2022

Barbican Hall

Kleine Dreigroschenmusik
Vom Tod im Wald, op.23
Street Scene: ‘Lonely House’
Four Whitman Songs: ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ and ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’
Die Sieben Todsünden

Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)

Andrew Staples, Alessandro Fisher (tenors)

Ross Ramgobin (baritone)

Florian Boesch (bass-baritone)

London Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

The opening of Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenmusik struck a properly anti-Romantic note, the Overture clearly growing out of 1920s’ Neue Sachlichkeit, the ‘Anstatt-dass Song’ likewise wearing its post-Busoni-and-Hindemith constructivism wisely on its sleeve, a hard edge supplied by banjo and piano. In between, the ‘Ballad of Mackie Messer’ showed something a little more yielding, rapport between saxophone and piano especially noteworthy. At times, it perhaps felt a little too conducted, but there is a difficult balance to strike here. An intimate, inward account of ‘Polly’s Lied’ and a surprisingly fast—if only in context—‘Kanonen-Song’ worked well in tandem. Simon Rattle tied things up nicely in the Finale, whose temporary ghostliness trod a thin yet necessary line between alienation and something that might just have been pathos. In the excellent hands of the LSO brass, its Chorale proved properly inscrutable. 

We remained with wind band for the little ballad-like cantata, Vom Told im Wald, for which Rattle, his players, and Florian Boesch gave a compelling, sepulchral performance which, like the rest of the programme, never exaggerated, without quite straying into the world of understatement. Those who like Weill to go to extremes may have been disappointed, but there was much to be said for an approach, especially in the concert hall, that underlined his more ‘purely’ musical qualities, as well as the more traditional side to his acuity of verbal response. Weill’s flirtation with less tonal realms contrasted strongly with ‘Lonely House’ from Street Scene (Andrew Staples), its ‘American’ style well captured, now with the luxury of a full complement of LSO strings, idiomatic without cloying. Two of the Four Walt Whitman Songs, more interesting to me, were shared between Ross Ramgobin and Staples. The vivid quality of Ramgobin’s ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ had us see as well as hear the bugles and drums. ‘Dirge for Four Veterans’ proved nicely ambiguous in its military response. 

For the ballet-chanté, The Seven Deadly Sins, Rattle conducted the LSO without a score. Strikingly dressed and coiffured in ‘Weimar’ style, Magdalena Kožená navigated the demands of song and speech alike with typical excellence, her German outstanding in clarity as well as idiom. Rattle kept the action moving, though it never sounded remotely hard-driven. This is clearly a score he knows, understands, and loves; the LSO and his cast responded in kind. That tightrope between alienation and something more sympathetic was once more intelligently trod. Well shaped and paced, it almost sounded over before it had begun. A fine conspectus of Weill, then, though it was perhaps a pity not to hear any of his early concert music: to my ears, generally showing the composer at his finest.

 

For Berlin

March, this year

October, this year. A Schöneberg café

Storm Large/Hudson Shad/BBC SO/Gaffigan - Korngold, Weill, et al., 23 November 2016

Barbican Hall


Korngold – Symphony in F-sharp
Walter Jurmann – Veronika, der Lenz ist da
Dimitri Tiomkin – High Noon: ‘Do not forsake me, O my darlin’’
Weill – A Touch of Venus: ‘Speak Low’
Weill – Klopslied
Jurmann/Bronisław Kaper – A Day at the Races: ‘All God’s Children Got Rhythm’
Weill – The Seven Deadly Sins

Storm Large (singer)

Hudson Shad

BBC Symphony Orchestra

James Gaffigan (conductor)

In the world’s present parlous state, Brecht (Weill too, perhaps) speaks to us more clearly, more sharply than most. Donald Trump could pretty much have sprung from the pages of Mahagonny, or indeed The Seven Deadly Sins. The fine performance of that masterly ballet chanté which was the necessary performance in this BBC Symphony Orchestra performance. The rest I could pretty much take or leave, although there were clearly admirers in the audience.

 

When first hearing Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp (in the BBC Philharmonic recording with Edward Downes), I rather liked it. It must have been years since I had last heard the piece; I cannot say that I had missed it greatly, and indeed found it something of a bore on this occasion. It was a well-enough upholstered bore, yet I did not find the material justified the length. In the first movement, it took a while for the orchestra to achieve a good balance, although the Barbican acoustic should probably take some blame for that. (Thanks to the Government, by the way, for scuppering the plan for a decent concert hall in London!) James Gaffigan went to considerable extremes of tempo, but held the movement together pretty well. A certain cinematic quality to its progress was not inappropriate, nor was a certain sonic similarity to the ‘heroic’ Prokofiev of the Fifth Symphony. Transitions were well handled in the scherzo, though ensemble was not always so precise as it might have been. I liked the languorous quality to its trio; Gaffigan’s tempo, however, sometimes brought the music to near-standstill. A Brucknerian quality was apparent in the slow movement, which received a warmly neo-Romantic reading, not lacking in necessary malice. The finale proved colourful, but a well-paced performance could not disguise its excess of repetitions.

 

The second half opened with a number of close-harmony pieces from the American group, Hudson Shad. I am not convinced that concert-hall listening is really quite right for such music: perhaps they would be better off in a bar, with drinks and chatter. (But then, I was never able to understand Cambridge choirs’ enthusiasm for them; I longed to hear more Byrd instead…) My patience for Kurt Jurmann’s hit Veronika, der Lenz its da was limited indeed, but others seemed to enjoy its ever-so-mild camp. Likewise the other Jurmann song, and the two contributions from Dimitri Tiomkin. ‘Speak Low’ from A Touch of Venus served to reinforce my prejudice that Weill’s music lost almost all interest upon emigration across the Atlantic. The short Klopslied, however, was recognisably the work of Busoni’s pupil, albeit with a healthy dose of surrealism thrown in. The gentlemen did not overplay it, thereby letting its anarchic wit speak for itself. It was a real find (for me, that is).

 

For The Seven Deadly Sins, Gaffigan and the orchestra returned, joined by Storm Large, a singer with real presence, indeed real star quality. For a performance in English (the translation by Auden and Kallman), one is better putting out of one’s mind the world of Lotte Lenya. That was surprisingly easy, for Large, ably accompanied, made the work very much her own, in a subtle, sharply observed, finely enunciated performance. She could act, but did not need to draw attention to the fact, just as she could sing and dance, again without any need for underlining. The shedding of her overcoat spoke volumes; so did the chill of those spoken Anna II statements: ‘Right, Anna’. With a wind-heavy band that sounded just right, with Gaffigan unfailingly adopting tempi that sounded equally right, and with just the proper sense, from time to time, of a little rhythmic drag, Weill permitted Brecht to speak. Dance rhythms pointed to Weill as ironic heir to Mahler. Much orchestral material reminded us that this was the composer of that magnificent Second Symphony. (What a pity we had not heard that in the first half instead! Or indeed the Violin Concerto.) Hudson Shad were on excellent form too, their ‘Family’ often sounding very much of a Neue Sachlichkeit world, the bite of Brecht’s text – ‘Shameless hoarders earn themselves a bad name’ – drawing blood. The exploration of sins had a properly cumulative effect as far as ‘Envy’, after which the Epilogue proved a further study in alienation. They were going home to Louisana, to that little home beside the Mississippi. ‘Right, Anna!’

Stemme/Barenboim - Brahms, Wagner, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Sibelius, 8 November 2015

Großer Saal, Musikverein

Brahms – Liebestreu, op.3 no.1

Botschaft, op.47 no.1
Meine Liebe ist grün, op.63 no.5
Auf dem Kirchhofe, op.105 no.4
Von ewiger Liebe, op.43 no.1

Wagner – Wesendonck-Lieder

Nadia Boulanger – Les Lilas sont en folie
Soir d’hiver
Was will die einsame Träne

Lili Boulanger – Attente
Au pied de mon lit
Si tout ceci n’est qu’un pauvre rêve

Sibelius – Törnet, op.88 no.6
I systrar, I bröder, I äsklande par, op.86 no.6
Den första kyssen, op.37 no.1
Soluppgång, op.37 no.3
Var det en dröm, op.37 no.4
Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings mote, op.37 no.5

Nina Stemme (soprano)

Daniel Barenboim (piano)

This is one of those occasions when I am essentially entering a personal diary entry rather than a review. The reason is simple enough, and is intended as no disrespect to the artists, quite the contrary: I was not well, and devoted far too much of my attention to stifling a cough to be able to write properly on the performances. It was, as one might have expected, a splendid concert. Stemme was her wonderful self: a little steely, though a good way short of Nilsson, less impeccable with her diction than I might have expected, but more than compensating by the meaning she imparted with the marriage of words and text. We heard more than a little Brünnhilde: not only in the Wesendonck-Lieder, but also on occasion in Brahms. Barenboim was at his best as a collaborative artist: responsive, in no sense domineering, but very much an equal partner. How he must know and feel the kinship with Tristan! I found the Nadia Boulanger songs pleasant, if somewhat generic: a nice reminder of Barenboim’s association with her. Lili Boulanger’s songs, on the other hand, announced the ‘real thing’ from the outset, and the performances sounded all the more committed; there was no doubting the compositional voice, post-Debussyan, to be sure, and with connections one might draw, but never to be reduced to them. (I must hear these songs again, soon!) I am no fan of Sibelius’s symphonies, but am always happy enough to hear his songs, and there was certainly much to be gained in hearing them from Stemme. She sang, I think, another as her first encore; I do not know which. The second, more surprising, was Weill’s ‘My ship has sails’ from Lady in the Dark. More later in the week, when I hope to be recovered! (Alas, a Wien Modern concert tonight had to fall by the wayside this evening.)

Aufstieg and Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Royal Opera, 10 March 2015

 

Images: ROH/Clive Barda

 

(sung in English)

 

Royal Opera House

Leocadia Begbick – Anne Sofie von Otter

Fatty – Peter Hoare
Trinity Moses – Sir Willard W. White
Jenny – Christine Rice
Six Girls – Anna Burford, Lauren Fagan, Anush Hovhannisyan, Stephanie Marshall, Meeta Ravel, Harriet Williams
Jimmy McIntyre – Kurt Streit
Jack O’Brien – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Bank-Account Bill – Darren Jeffery
Alaska Wolf Joe – Neal Davies
Bar Pianist – Robert Clark
Toby Higgins – Hubert Francis
Voice – Paterson Joseph

John Fulljames (director)

Es Devlin (set designs)
Christina Cunningham (costumes)
Bruno Poet (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Arthur Pita (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renata Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)

 

At long last, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny has come to the Royal Opera House. Kurt Weill’s teacher, Busoni, remains scandalously ignored, but a season which includes house firsts both of this opera and Szymanowsi’s King Roger, cannot be all bad. The unresolved tension, much of it fruitful, some of it perhaps less so, between Brecht and Weill, came through loud and clear in this estimable performance, given in a new translation by Jeremy Sams (which was certainly preferable to his ‘versions’ of Mozart, even if not entirely free of the translator’s habit of drawing attention to himself rather than to the work). Is it an opera? Yes, of course. As David Drew pointed out long ago, in a 1963 Musical Times article,  one of the most pernicious ideas about Mahagonny has been ‘one that menaces even the most generous-hearted listener – the idea that Weill intended the work as an attack on the body of the operatic convention by means of parody or an injected virus (jazz, cabaret etc.). This idea is wholly false.’ As Drew continued, Weill had far too much knowledge of and respect for the operatic repertoire, above all Mozart, but others too (not least, and ominously for his collaboration with Brecht, Wagner), but he was also genuinely excited by the new paths opened up by composers such as Janáček and Stravinsky. (He was also a great defender of Wozzeck.) The problem, for me, is that sometimes, though not always, the musical material does not present the composer at his strongest; in general, and despite the songs and tunes we know and love, I find him the more compelling the closer he comes to his time with Busoni. The Second Symphony and Violin Concerto are surely his masterpieces. Mahagonny’s music, however, remains on an entirely different level from Weill’s disappointing music for the United States. (Whatever his apologists may claim, that is surely where, in aesthetic terms at least, he ‘sold out’.)



Trinity Moses (Willard White), Leocadia Begbick (Anne Sofie von Otter), Fatty (Peter Hoare)

The greater problem still, though, lies in the collaboration with Brecht, whose strengths are quite different, and whose adamant refusal to sentimentalise may sometimes be undone by Weill. (Not that Weill is sentimental as such, but his æsthetic is undoubtedly different, less didactic, unquestionably less concerned with alienation, more concerned perhaps with ‘opera’). It is no mean achievement of John Fulljames’s production of this difficult, perhaps impossible, work, that Brecht’s stature as, after Beckett, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century playwrights comes across with increasing immediacy. There is no attempt to make us ‘sympathise’, although Weill sometimes does not help in that respect. The conceit, as with that of the work itself, is admirably simple, though certainly not simplistic.  Mahagonny and Mahagonny grow from a splendidly designed lorry. The accoutrements of capital, of ‘entertainment’, of neo-liberal barbarism sprout necessarily: garishly, of course, but retaining focus. Voice-overs and video projections do excellent work, Brecht’s placards reimagined for our computer-screen-obsessed age. Perhaps the acting does not always convince as strongly as it might as acting, but that is part of the trade-off between Brecht and Weill: an immanent criticism as much as, perhaps more than, a shortcoming. Choreography is sharp and to the point, for instance during the ‘Mandalay Song’, as the men of Mahagonny – and what an indictment for us this is of male behaviour, the Widow Begbick notwithstanding! – await their turn with the prostitutes. I wondered whether the Christ-like imagery at the end was exaggerated, but to be fair, it is no more so than it is in the work. Besides, we are at liberty to interpret God’s coming to Mahagonny as we will.

 

 

For, in general, the action is non-specific enough for us to be able to relate it to when and where seems most appropriate. (It would surely be bizarre, if in our age of bankster-crime run truly riot, we did not think of our own characters such as HSBC's The Revd Prebendary Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint, surely an invention who would have been too much, too far-fetched, too agitprop, even for Brecht.) Price variations do their evil work, and Fulljames, whilst not entirely ignoring the ‘American’ element, does not overplay it. Weill was certainly alert to the danger of the work seeming as if it were too much ‘about’ America, writing to his publisher: ‘The use of American names for Mahagonny runs the risk of establishing a wholly false idea of Americanism, Wildwest, of such like. I am very glad that, together with Brecht, I have now found a very convenient solution … and I ask you to include the following notice in the piano score and libretto,’ although, oddly, it would only appear in the full score, not in the piano score: ‘“In view of the fact that those amusements of man which can be had for money are always and everywhere exactly the same, and because the Amusement-Town of Mahagonny is thus international in the widest sense, the names of the leading characters can be changed into customary forms at any given time. The following names are therefore recommended for German performances: Willy (for Fatty), Johann Ackermann (for Jim), Jakob Schmidt (for Jack O’Brien) [etc.]”.’ In an English-language version, we necessarily tilt more towards Americana – the exhibitionist piano-playing of Robert Clark is an especial joy! –  but not too much. Moreover, whilst those of us with Lotte Lenya in our mind’s ear, may miss her and the rest of the Wilhelm Bruckner-Rüggeberg crew, we know that this is not a work to be confined to nostalgic conceptions of Weimar culture.

 

Jenny (Christine Rice)

Mark Wigglesworth is surely one of our most underrated conductors, although let us hope his forthcoming tenure at ENO will change that; he conducted a punchy, intelligently varied account. If I found the ‘Alabama Song’ a little on the slow side, it was slow rather than sentimentalised. Weill’s Neue Sachlichkeit generally won through, and where more typical ‘operatic’ impulses threatened Brecht’s conception, that suggested its own humane rewards. Choral singing was well-drilled and not without ‘expressive’ quality: never too much, though. The chorales did their formal, almost Stravinskian (think not least of The Soldier’s Tale) work, reacting both with ‘tradition’ and with Brecht. There was certainly a characterful, properly parodic sense of what Drew, in that Musical Times article, called ‘the fairground banalities of the trial scene,’ likewise of the horrifying ‘stormtrooper tunes of the boxing scene’. Where, though, was the Crane Song? Everything is permitted, of course, its omission certainly so, but it seemed a pity. We should at any rate be grateful that the once-popular ‘Paris version’, a travesty, with no warrant from Weill, in which songs from the Songspiel were interspersed with a few instrumental pieces from the opera, is no longer favoured.

 

 

 

The tension between Brecht and Weill was perhaps most clear in the vocal performances. How to approach these roles as opera singers, in so large a theatre? For the most part, the cast coped well enough; if their performances fell somewhat uneasily between (at least) two stools, then perhaps that is unavoidable in a presentation of the work so conceived. Willard White balanced gravity and sleaze as Trinity Moses. Kurt Streit as Jimmy had his lyrical moments – but also, alas, his moments of would-be lyricism. Christine Rice’s Jenny veered uneasily between home-spun Oklahoma and operatic vibrato, but her transformations were not so blatant as those of Anne Sofie von Otter’s Widow Begbick. Stylistically, she was all over the place, but I assume that in some sense was the point.  In any case, the whole, as the cliché has it, was more than the sum of its parts.

 

At the time of its first performance, Adorno’s was one of the few critical voices raised in favour of the work: ‘Apart from the diametrically opposed operas of the Schoenberg school, I know of no work better or more strongly in keeping with the idea of the avant-garde than Mahagonny … Despite and on account of the primitive façade, it must be counted among the most difficult works of today.’ That difficulty may have lessened, as indeed has that of Wozzeck or Von heute auf morgen – now when shall we see that in London? – but it remains, the chill with which Brecht and Weill react against each other perhaps no less than ever.

 

Programme Essay for Mozart and Weill: 'Opera and the Symphony - Mutually Informing'

(This essay was originally published in a Salzburg Festival programme for a concert in which Marc Minkowski conducted the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. The programme was slightly altered at late notice, owing to a change of soloist, but I have given the original version here.)

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Symphony No. 33 in B flat major K. 319

‘Parto inerme’ from La Betulia liberata K. 118

‘Ombra felice’ – ‘Io ti lascio’ K. 255

‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ from Mitridate, re di Ponto K. 87

Kurt Weill (1900–1950)

Symphony No. 2

Deviation and dialectic

Mozart’s Symphony No. 33, dating from 1779, would prove to be his penultimate Salzburg symphony. Initially it was a three-movement work, its Minuet and Trio added five or six years later, most likely for a specific performance in Vienna, where audiences tended to expect, and in this case therefore received, a symphony in four movements. Whereas the first of the symphonies written upon returning home from Paris, No. 32 in G major K. 318, very much bore the marks of Mozart’s experience in the French capital – its three sections in one movement clearly modelled after the overture style of opéra comique – this three-movement work conformed to the Italianate model most popular in Alpine Salzburg, though, interestingly, the later Minuet and Trio offer no hint of stylistic incongruity. (Hans Keller begged to differ, suggesting an element of undue contrivance in its ‘fit’, but that seems a dubious case of wisdom after the event.) Whether the smaller orchestra – no flutes and two horns rather than four – reflects a response to audience reaction, the orchestral forces available or simply a matter of the composer’s inclination remains, in the absence of documentation, a matter of conjecture.

 

Perhaps the most strikingly ‘forward-looking’ feature of a work which erroneously, if understandably in the light of ‘reversions’ such as orchestral size and number of movements – is the high level of motivic cohesion, not only within movements but between them too. The first, third and fourth movements all open with a downward octave leap, B flat to B flat, a unifying correspondence the least tutored of ears might readily recognize. This being Mozart rather than Haydn, the generative variety of melodic profusion following each of those opening statements is, however, more striking still. A familiar yet typically finely crafted balance between fundamentally diatonic harmonic rhythm and sinuous melodic chromaticism characterizes the first movement. So does the startling – with hindsight – appearance of a four-note contrapuntal tag which would make its most celebrated reappearance in the Finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. It is perhaps more immediately relevant to this Symphony, however, to consider its previous appearance in the Credo of Mozart’s Mass in F major K. 192 and more generally as reflective of an Austrian and South German contrapuntal tradition born of Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum.

 

Experimentation may not be so overt in this Symphony as in some of its immediate predecessors and is, in any case, rarely a prevailing characteristic of Mozart’s symphonism. Nevertheless, the reversal of events in the slow movement’s recapitulation, the second subject preceding the return of the first, offers a formal ‘deviation’, albeit one with precedent in earlier works, as satisfying as it is surprising. More noteworthy still however is the movement’s serenade-like grace, serenity and warmth. The ‘reduced’ wind section shows in a well-nigh perfect blend of the harmonic and contrapuntal that we need not wait for the Viennese Mozart to experience delights both sensuous and intellectual. Such a dialectic also informs the ‘Viennese’ third movement, the ready cliché of Trio ‘relaxation’ undoubtedly true in the brief serenade sandwiched between two hearings of the Minuet. The latter’s sternness in miniature seems almost to prefigure the neo-classicism of La clemenza di Tito, even Beethoven. In the Finale, we hear ebullience, contrapuntal mastery, hints of Parisian orchestral virtuosity allegedly left behind and, perhaps most important, an operatic sense of characterization, oboes and horns again taking a leading role, in which all the world is truly a stage. Indeed, in 1786, the year of Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart would sell a copy of this Symphony, together with Nos. 34 and 36 and three piano concertos, to the Donaueschingen court, attesting to a more extended after-life than was typical for his Salzburg symphonies.

 

Precocious dramatic sensibilities

It would generally take longer for the wider world to appreciate the charms and, in many cases, the profundities of Mozart’s early vocal works. Mitridate, re di Ponto gained considerable success with its 26 initial performances, but then went unperformed until the early 20^th century. In the case of the 1771 oratorio La Betulia liberata, commissioned by Don Giuseppe Ximenese, Prince of Aragon, the music seems originally never to have been performed at all, notwithstanding Mozart’s unfulfilled idea over a decade later to rework material for a commission from Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät. This azione sacra, a setting of Metastasio’s 1734 libretto, drawn from the Book of Judith, is stylistically very much in the mould of opere serie such as Mitridate, written the previous year for Milan. Both castrato arias, the oratorio’s ‘Parto enerme, e non pavento’, sung by Judith herself, and the opera’s ‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ speak of a dramatic sensibility belying the composer’s tender years. Some of the luxuriance of the Salzburg symphonies is present. So also, however, is considerable single-mindedness in pursuit of dramatic truth, doubtless partly born of Mozart’s admiration for and imitation of Gluck. The righteous determination of a biblical heroine may thus be understood, historically as well as in the context of this concert, to be informed by that of Mitridate’s treacherous son, Farnace.

 

Not, of course, that we may not discern in those arias a genuine delight in the capabilities of the voice as such. The same may be said of the contrasting, mostly tender scena ‘Ombra felice’ and aria ‘Io ti lascio’, wherein we hear what to us is a strikingly familiar Mozartian voice of compassion, prior to an ‘operatically’ brilliant conclusion. We also hear startling freedom of form within the rondeau structure of repeated refrain, not at all what Metastasian traditionalists would have expected. Perhaps some at least, though, were beguiled, even inspired. For already, without being entirely fanciful, we hear in all three arias intimations, if not yet fully formed, of the mature Mozart’s Shakespearean ability to abstain from judgement, to permit characters to speak for themselves rather than didactically to be commanded. Such is apparent in an ‘edifying’ oratorio, in a more overtly ‘dramatic’ operatic ‘entertainment’, and in this ‘insertion’ aria for Metastasio’s Arsace, an aria which seems in fact never to have been ‘inserted’ and was probably intended instead for castrato concert performance in 1776. At any rate, it offers Mozart’s sole example of a concert aria for alto, irrespective of gender.

 

Three night scenes

It may seem something of a distance to travel from Mozart to Kurt Weill, and it would in most respects be vain to pretend otherwise, especially with respect to the mature and ‘late’ Weill of Brecht and Broadway. Weill’s Second Symphony is no early work, hailing instead from the period immediately following his 1933 flight from Germany, of Die sieben Todsünden, that ballet-cantata interrupting the Symphony’s composition. The Symphony nevertheless seems in retrospect to hark back to a greater seriousness more readily associated with Weill’s teacher, Ferruccio Busoni, far from the least in his generation of Mozart’s disciples. Indeed a good deal of Weill’s melodic and harmonic language here is strikingly close to Busoni’s and would surely be more generally recognized as such, did Busoni’s music not continue to languish in such neglect. The first movement’s introduction, arguably more balletic, even operatic, than symphonic in the Classical-Romantic sense, leads into a sonata-form movement whose scurrying, fantastical qualities might almost have leaped out from a discarded sketch for Doktor Faust. A neo-Lisztian Mephistopheles certainly seems at work in the transformational techniques both within and between movements. Without labouring the point, and certainly without wishing to ascribe ‘influence’, we may also recall Mozart’s practice here.

 

Amidst the debris of the once all-conquering Neue Sachlichkeit, orchestral wind proffer a satirical edge, harsher, more ironic than Mozartian seduction. Hindemith’s Kammermusik may be a reference point here, but far from the only such point, or even, surface impressions notwithstanding, the most important one. For there beats, perhaps surprisingly, a heart not entirely distant from that of another great symphonist: Gustav Mahler. The second of the 1924 Violin Concerto’s three movements, Notturno – Cadenza – Serenata, has provoked comparisons with the central, three-movement sequence, Nachtmusik – Scherzo – Nachtmusik, of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. The unhappy reception accorded Weill’s Symphony upon its 1934 Amsterdam premiere by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bruno Walter even drew from the composer an alternative title, Drei Nacht-Szenen (Three Night Scenes), recalling Mahler’s example, enduringly strong with Willem Mengelberg’s orchestra. That said, as ever with Weill, as with Mahler, things are not so simple. If we consider the central Largo funereal, then it can only be so in a markedly detached sense: certainly not without wit and difficult to describe as tragic in a Mahlerian or indeed any other sense (even, that is, when we invoke the nocturnal ambivalence of the Mahler of the Seventh Symphony). Hints, sometimes more, of jazz, even of show tunes, permeate the whole, most of all in the Finale, which seems concerned as much to step aside from as directly to combat grandiloquent, Romantic expectations of symphonic climax and fulfilment.

 

And yet, even though Weill’s speaking at times both of a ‘symphonic fantasy’ and of a ‘nocturne’ reveals important truths, this is no anti-symphony. The recurrence and questioning of the first movement’s march rhythms in the Finale imparts a degree of conventional cyclical unity even as its expectations undergo a degree of deconstruction. Weill, like Mozart, was above all a musical dramatist and such in a sense was the deconstructive drama of his exile: more defiant, perhaps, less sardonic than that of his Weimar-era coming to maturity, but the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) was always more Brecht’s conception than that of his sometimes uneasy collaborator. The composer’s final orchestral work is now, alongside the Violin Concerto, generally and rightly considered as significant in their way as Weill’s collaborations with Brecht. Perhaps it is helpful to think of the composer as analogous to Prokofiev: enamoured with the stage, not always the most ‘natural’ of symphonists, but an interesting symphonist nonetheless, the interest of his contribution being partly a consequence of a more oblique relationship to this weightiest of forms and traditions.