Tag Archives: Mahagonny

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, ENO, February 2026

This opera emerged from an earlier Singspiel, and was created by Kurt Weill and Bertoldt Brecht, who wrote the unsettling libretto exposing a dark side to capitalism, where anything goes as long as you can pay. It was produced in 1930 before Hitler came to power, an event that compelled Weill and his wife the …

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The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Royal Opera, ROH, Covent Garden, March 2015.

This is not an easy work to stage, emerging as it does from two slightly incompatible attitudes, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, as to its eventual form. Its genesis lay in a series of songs — the Mahagonny Gesänge — published by Brecht in April 1927, which inspired Weill to fulfil a commission he …

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