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)

Così fan tutte, Komische Oper, 14 January 2024

Schillertheater

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Fiordiligi – Penny Sofraniadou
Dorabella – Susan Zarrabi
Guglielmo – Hubert Zapiór
Ferrando – Caspar Singh
Despina – Alma Sadé
Don Alfonso – Seth Carico
Sempronio – Amer El-Erwadi
Tizio – Goran Jurenec

Director, set and costume designer – Kirill Serebrennikov
Implementation of direction, choreography – Evgeny Kulagin
Staff director (Spielleitung) – Martha Jurowski
Co-costume designer – Tatyana Dolmatovskaya
Assistant set designer – Nikolay Simonov
Dramaturgy – Beate Breidenbach, Maximilian Hagemeyer
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Ilya Shagalov

Choral Soloists of the Komische Oper (director: Jean-Christophe Charron) 

Orchestra of the Komische Oper 

Erina Yashima (conductor)  

There should never be a run-of-the-mill Così fan tutte: Mozart’s most exquisite opera, arguably his profoundest, and perhaps ultimately his greatest. (It is, at any rate, my current favourite, and not only because I heard it last.) This was certainly not it, whether in origin, direction, or performance. Indeed, this staging from Berlin’s Komische Oper is an outstanding achievement in almost every respect, giving one much to think about, much to relish, and much by which to be discomfited. On top of that, it is a long time since I have seen and heard so thoroughly accomplished a cast.

 

Kirill Serebrennikov’s production was first seen in Zurich in 2018, albeit under highly unusual circumstances stemming from the director’s house arrest. His choreographer and assistant Evgeny Kulagin, here credited with ‘Umsetzung Inszenierung,’ took Serebrennikov’s place in person, passing to Serebrennikov’s lawyer film recordings of what was developing in rehearsal for the director in turn to comment on via video message. Hence the somewhat involved list for the production team, which I thought important to include as a whole and with as clear a translation of terms as I could. Following several extensions to his house arrest, followed by conviction for fraud, probation, dismissal from the Gogol Centre, and bans on travel and leadership of any cultural institution in receipt of government support, Serebrennikov’s suspended sentence was eventually cancelled by another court on account of good behaviour and the travel ban lifted. Having been permitted to travel to Germany in 2022, he was able to direct the Berlin incarnation of the production, of which this is now the first revival. It would be difficult to deny that these circumstances make the production’s achievement all the more impressive; it certainly suggests some truth may yet lie in the double-edged, Romantic adage that adverse circumstances can foster great artistic achievement.    

Onwards, in any case, to the production ‘itself’. It has already begun when one enters the theatre. A horizontally split set (levels 1 and 2) reveals at this stage – it remains, whilst the settings it reveals change over time – two gym settings, male and female, extras working out. Exercise of a different kind, orchestral tuning, provides the accompaniment. The more physical variety onstage continues into the Overture, skipping noises proving something of an aural irritant, albeit a minor issue in the greater scheme of things. Guglielmo and Ferrando arrive, and eventually Don Alfonso, with much stereotypically, indeed performatively masculine behaviour to be observed as the stage is set. It soon becomes clear, though, that whilst Alfonso has some sort of hold over the men at the gym – not only our pair of lovers – he is also a deeply damaged person, broadening and deepening his characterisation from the typical stock-character cynic. This may be connected with war, which looms eerily large for a production conceived in 2017-18; I could not help but wonder whether some changes had been made in light of the invasion of Ukraine, which Serebrennikov publicly opposed. For, when Guglielmo and Ferrando are sent off to combat – it is unusually clear what might be involved, coffins and all, the women in mourning – the military video game whose control Alfonso is trying, indeed struggling, has him shaken, traumatised. Is that merely a metaphor? Perhaps. We may remember Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi and any number of other literary and artistic connections and constructions. Revelation of the betrayal or defeat he has suffered in battles of the heart, via a display of text messages, offers further context but does not exclude something darker and deeper still. My sense was of a veteran of both types of conflict—and more.

 

For when the opposing ‘team’ takes stock, led by Despina, now not a servant but a therapist, she shows Fiordiligi and Dorabella slides of typical male behaviour, especially in the armed forces. What better way to show her patients – the word is actually used in the subtitles, which alternate as faithful translation and guide to the production – what their lovers will really be up to, if they are still alive? Her visual aids pursue a number of lines, some frankly feminist, some more cynical. The therapeutic turn that has informed many of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s more recent productions (e.g. Carmen, Les Troyens, and the Ring; as well, I am told, as his own Così, which I have not seen) is first brought on board but also brought into question. If anyone is perpetrating a hoax here, it is arguably Despina, who also, far from coincidentally, seems the most resilient of the lot.

Clichés that elsewhere have become tired, for instance the use of mobile telephones, both for messages and pictures, are for once used to genuine dramatic ends. This is, after all, how modern communications work—and modern relationships, even sex, too. Nowhere is this clearer, yet also more genuinely complex, than when Guglielmo and Ferrando are replaced by their ‘Albanian’ – in this case, first Arab – counterparts, Sempronio and Tizio, here played by actors (Amar El-Erwadi and Goran Jurenec) whose time at the gym seems to have been still more successful. The ambiguity over whether they are actual, hired replacements – I think they almost certainly are – is such that one can take different views. ‘Different views’, though, may be understood in a different sense, action (of various kinds) being viewed from another level via video link (not necessarily ‘inspired’ by the director’s treatment, but gaining greater meaning nonetheless through that connection) or even ‘in person’ but as ghostly presence, apparently unseen by and indeed deceased for Fiordiligi and Dorabella. There are especially cruel touches, such as thinking all is well, only to hear the lavatory flush from the en suite bathroom: all very much in the spirit of those extraordinary horns of cuckoldry Mozart employs at crucial points in the score. Actual horns are donned by both ‘Albanians’ at one point, suggesting an assumption of quasi-divine status, Dionysus or even Zeus, enabling and initiating congress and conquest. 

For men now are as objectified as women. As a gay man, Serebrennikov will know this all too well, but so do many younger heterosexual men too. This remains a heterosexual opera on the most fundamental level, without say the step into overt lesbianism taken by Stefan Herheim in his reimagination of Die Entführung aus dem Serail as an exploration of love between and beyond the sexes. On the other hand, the bodies of all concerned, but especially Sempronio and Tizio, are so resolutely in the gaze of us all that boundaries blur and dissolve whether we like it or not—and the implication would be that most, perhaps all, of us do. We are all actors, playing roles here, Ferrando explicitly in assuming the metatheatrical, ambiguous with respect to diegetic status, role of ‘a singer’ in ‘Un’aura amoroso’, ‘credited’ at its close by Don Alfonso. That extends, moreover, to gender roles, surely a tribute to the much-maligned yet ever-relevant Judith Butler. It ultimately comes as no surprise, perhaps even as a strangely satisfying fulfilment, that the title scrawled at the back by Don Alfonso is corrected to ‘Così fan tutti,’ tellingly ‘girlish’ hearts atop the ‘i's a further turn of the dialectical gender-screw (as it were).

 

And yet, this remains a deeply disillusioning experience for all, the modern anomie of what are either hotel rooms or a modern apartment so fashionable it might as well be, not the least of the bridges constructed between deeper meanings to be drawn from Mozart (to a lesser extent, Da Ponte too) and Serebrennikov’s conception. Both women have incomplete, neon-lit crucifixes above their beds: probably only a ‘design feature’, but extending into something more in Fiordiligi’s case, allied to her little shrine (to what, though?) assembled for ‘Per pietà’, when she drags it across the floor, failing twice to maintain the electric connection. For Mozart, these parodies of opera seria have a message that is, among other things, deeply theological; that may or may not be the case here, but it is certainly not to be excluded. This is, after all, a Passion of Passion to rival – to my mind, even to surpass – Tristan und Isolde.

Credit should again be accorded the company’s extras (Komparserie) who had much to do throughout and did it well, not least dressing the two brides in full traditional Russian wedding dress – they might almost have been auditioning for Les Noces – only to have to undress them once again in acts of inflation, deflation, and revelation. In a brilliant coup de théâtre, we turn suddenly to an interpolated musical reminiscence – or premonition – of Don Giovanni’s Stone Guest Scene. The Albanians, seizing hold like twin Commendatores of ‘their’ women’s hands, may be standing in judgement over them or may simply be trying to keep them. It is a disruption that can doubtless only be visited once, unique to this production, but a highly productive one, reminding us that even in the most hedonistic, secular, ‘sex-positive’ society, the question of sin, of remoteness from the divine, does not disappear, far from it; we simply pretend it has and mistake euphemism for theodicy. As desolate as ever, probably more so, the characters attempting to draw some sort of lesson from events that have shattered their world seem quite unaware that, on the level above, an actual fire has begun to blaze. Narcissism, after all, is not the least of our contemporary sins—and/or ailments. 

All this, or most of it, would go for little, were it not brought to life by fine performances. This it certainly received. I can honestly find nothing of any importance to which to object, and much to praise. If I write less about them on this occasion, it is not because I consider them less important; for one thing, they are not to be extracted from what has been said above, but rather very much part of it. In any case, Penny Sofraniadou and Susan Zarrabi portrayed, from the outset, properly distinguished Fiordiligi and Dorabella, clean of line, if hardly of deeper intention. Both drew on varied palettes of vocal colour that could blend where dramatically and musically necessary, without loss to identities that shifted yet never merged. Much the same could be said – and this is Mozart’s laboratory of musical quasi-geometry at work, as well as their artistry – of the Ferrando and Guglielmo of Hubert Zapiór and Caspar Singh. Equally adept as actors and singers, their exploration of wounded masculinities was every bit as revealing as that of Seth Carico’s uniquely subtle Don Alfonso. Ferrando, as usual, had two rather than his full three arias: a pity but not the end of the world. Alma Sadé’s Despina likewise not only acquired new depth as Despina, but contributed that greater range. (And what a relief it was, for once, not to have to endure the usual ‘silly voices’.)

 

Erina Yashima’s direction of the orchestra proved similarly impeccable. Hers was not the sort of deeply personal reading that leads one to speak of a particular standpoint, ‘Böhm’s Così’ or ‘Muti’s’; but it performed a different, more readily theatrical function, near-faultless in its incitement, mirroring, and at times questioning of the action onstage. That I barely noticed her tempi as such speaks for itself: there was a ‘rightness’ in context that could not be gainsaid. Nor could the excellence of the orchestral playing in a score in which any false move, any slight infelicity of intonation or phrasing, will stand out like a sore thumb. The Komische Oper may be known primarily for its emphasis on theatre, but that should not mean the orchestra matters less, rather that it is part and parcel of the action. At any rate, so it sounded here. They may not have been singing, but our ‘Albanian’ actors Amar El-Erwadi and Goran Jurenec also contributed greatly to the action and its ultimate achievement. If, as I suggested earlier, the production was able even to reinvigorate well-worn directorial clichés with new meaning, I may as well offer as my own ‘a true ensemble performance’. Do not take my word for it, though: if possible, try to see and hear this Così for yourself. It has, for whatever this may be worth, my highest recommendation.