The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny

The conductor Gustav Brecher, between 1914 and 1933 the General Music Director of the Opera in Leipzig, was a courageous decision maker. As late as March, 1933, he dared to present Kurt Weill’s DER SILBERSEE (The Silver Lake) – a performance that he could not finish conducting owing to the Nazis in the audience’s continual disturbance.

There had already been similar scenes on March 9, 1930, when Brecher brought into being THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY, one of Kurt Weill’s most successful works, in collaboration with the author of his libretto, Bertolt Brecht. In the house a throng of Nazi supporters raised such hell against the work that the performance came close to being cut short. Weill, Brecht and Brecher, independently of each other, left Germany as outcasts in 1933. Fleeing to the US by way of France, the composer found his way to a new musical language and partially was able on Broadway to continue his earlier string of successes. When he passed away in 1950 in New York, he was by no means forgotten in Germany, and his works, THE THREEPENNY OPERA and THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY, were back in the repertory there, works to which he himself, from his forced exile on and, most certainly, after he, in 1943, became an American citizen, did not feel any longer much of an attachment.