Rise and Fall of the City of Ma­ha­gonny

In the middle of a wasteland, far from the federal agents pursuing them, three fugitives on the run from justice become founders of the city of Mahagonny. It’s to be their promised land, a pleasure city where sin reigns unbounded—since nothing less than the sale of love and alcohol will keep the money flowing. Eat! Love! Box! Drink! But alas, who’s going to foot the bill...

A flight from enslavement, from criminal pasts, from poverty—set in an empty desert filled with dreams and yearning, apocalyptic natural disasters, strict proscriptions and voluptuous excesses. Premiered contemporaneously with Arnold Schoenberg's opera of the Old Testament, Moses and Aron, Brecht and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a work in which the references to the Books of Moses are more hidden, but ultimately just as unmistakable. Mahagonny, both opera and anti-opera, thematizes the snares and traps of human existence with the help of biblical images—all carried aloft and driven home by the music of Kurt Weill. His compositions here absorb a disparate group of styles and influences—all in all an unparalleled and inimitable achievement.