Abstract
Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927–1930) is a dystopian narrative saturated with music. Though its catchy melodies such as the “Alabama Song” were meant to work in an estranging way, they have become crossover staples. Brecht’s vision of a capitalist American wasteland has been harder to assimilate into popular culture—until 2016’s political turn in the US has made such dystopia seem nearer at hand. Weill’s music works like weather pressing up against the opera’s text, not unlike the hurricane that ultimately takes the city down. In fact, the hurricane itself works as a messenger, a visiting angel of destruction, in Sybille Krämer’s sense of media transmission and John Durham Peters’ “mediafication” of earthly, elemental forces.
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Notes
- 1.
See Patty Lee Permalee, Brecht’s America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981), 181, and Hans-Christian von Hermann, “Wüste und Turbulenz: Anmerkungen zu Brechts Soziologie,” in Marc Silberman and Florian Vassen, eds., mahagonny.com (Brecht Yearbook 29 [Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University and Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, on behalf of the International Brecht Society, 2004]), 30–39.
- 2.
For Brecht’s own effort to describe estranging, gestic, non-“culinary” theatre, see Bertolt Brecht, “Kleines Organon für das Theater,” in Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller, eds., Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Vol. 23, Schriften 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 65–105.
- 3.
Bertolt Brecht, “Anmerkungen zur Die Dreigroschenoper,” trans. John Willett, in Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 44–45.
- 4.
See Permalee, 169.
- 5.
Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso Books, 1999), 169.
- 6.
Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), 7.
- 7.
Ibid., 8, 12.
- 8.
Ibid., 10.
- 9.
Ibid., 10–11.
- 10.
Ibid., 43.
- 11.
Ibid., 44.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 67.
- 14.
Brecht, Mahagonny, 60.
- 15.
Ibid., 78.
- 16.
See Joy Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 47–48.
- 17.
Alex Ross, “Agit-Opera: ‘Mahagonny’ and ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” in The New Yorker, March 5, 2007, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/agit-opera. Web, accessed February 13, 2018.
- 18.
In a 1958 interview with Hans Bunge, Brecht collaborator Hanns Eisler went so far as to say that “Kurt Weill never even came close” to understanding Brecht’s “abstract” and even “mathematical” approach to theatre and could only “saw the effects of originality.” See Sabine Barendse and Paul Clements, ed. and trans., Brecht, Music and Culture: Hanns Eisler in Conversation with Hans Bunge (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014), 42.
- 19.
Ralph Winett, “Composer of the Hour: An Interview with Kurt Weill,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 20, 1946, quoted in Stephen Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 149.
- 20.
Hinton, 151.
- 21.
Jonathan O. Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 22.
- 22.
Ibid., 68.
- 23.
See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 158–159.
- 24.
See Theodor Adorno, “Music in the Background” and “On the Social Situation in Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
- 25.
Adorno, “On the Social Situation in Music,” in Essays on Music, 409.
- 26.
Wipplinger, 73.
- 27.
Ross, “Agit-Opera.”
- 28.
Anette Guse, “Escaping Brecht? Performing Mahagonny: La Fura dels Baus, Teatro Real, Madrid,” in Anais do Simpósio da International Brecht Society, Vol. 1 (2013), 7.
- 29.
Wipplinger, 73.
- 30.
Stephan Speicher, “‘Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’ von Brecht/Weill in der Komischen Oper: Musik, die mehr als auslegt,” in Die Berliner Zeitung, September 26, 2006, https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/-aufstieg-und-fall-der-stadt-mahagonny%2D%2Dvon-brecht-weill-in-der-komischen-oper-musik%2D%2Ddie-mehr-als-auslegt-15729722. Web, accessed February 13, 2018.
- 31.
Peter Marcuse, “Utopias and Dystopias in Brecht,” in Marc Silberman and Florian Vassen, eds., mahagonny.com (Brecht Yearbook 29 [Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University and Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, on behalf of the International Brecht Society, 2004]), 26–27.
- 32.
Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 80–81.
- 33.
Brecht, Mahagonny, 34.
- 34.
Ibid., 37–39.
- 35.
Hinton, 151.
- 36.
Brecht, Mahagonny, 42.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid., 43.
- 39.
E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), xvii.
- 40.
Ibid., 35.
- 41.
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 51.
- 42.
See Martin Clayton, “What Is Entrainment? Definitions and Applications in Musical Research,” in Empirical Musicology Review, 7 (1–2), 49–56.
- 43.
Christine L. Marran, Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8.
- 44.
Peters, 111.
- 45.
Kevin S. Amidon, “‘Oh Show Us …’: Opera and/as Spectatorship in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, in mahagonny.com , 229.
- 46.
Ibid., 230.
- 47.
Ross, “Agit-Opera.”
- 48.
See Heidi Hart, “Against ‘Collective Caruso’: Male Vulnerability in Hanns Eisler’s Early Choruses,” in The Germanic Review, forthcoming 2018.
- 49.
Brecht, Mahagonny, 74–75.
- 50.
Ibid., 79.
- 51.
Ibid., 80.
- 52.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1.
- 53.
See “Sea Ice Tracking Low in Both Hemispheres,” National Snow & Ice Data Center, February 6, 2018, http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/. Web, accessed February 17, 2018.
- 54.
See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
- 55.
Kaplan, 150.
- 56.
“Mahagonny and its Legacy,” panel discussion, International Brecht Society Conference, Oxford University, June 26, 2016.
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Wipplinger, Jonathan O. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017.
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Hart, H. (2018). Sounding the Hurricane: Mahagonny. In: Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01815-3_6
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