Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Opera in three acts with grand orchestra by Kurt Weill
Text by Bertolt Brecht
Tickets
2 hours 30 minutes
Debut performance 1930 - Premiere on 24 September 2006
If you are persecuted by the police, you need a lot of money to bribe the law and order of the state. If you lack money, you have to make money. Three gangsters act upon this motto and build the paradise city Mahagonny in the middle of nowhere, where people will find happiness and where they should spend their money in return. However, the undertaking would have failed, if Jim Mahoney, a simple lumberjack from Alaska, would not have found the law of human felicity: everybody should be free to do whatever he wants to – to gorge himself ad nauseam, to have excessively sex, to prove to be a real man in a boxing match, to drink himself into oblivion. Mahagonny booms, the gangsters gain wealth, however, Jim has overseen a much more important law: you can do whatever you want to - but you have to pay for it. He cannot do so and is condemned to death for his lack of money.
»Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny« is regarded as a political parable, an operatic aesthetically discourse, analysis of the functioning mechanisms of human civilization, merciless inventory of the state of human relations under the rule of the market. The works stands for all this, however, it is a synonym for much more: it is one of the most successful operas of the twentieth century and a grandiose theatre fun of amazing energy and timeliness.