The City of Nests
As part of the celebration of the centenary of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), the Salzburg Festival is putting on a lavish production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the opera in three acts that Brecht wrote in 1930 with music by Kurt Weill (1900–1950). The staging by Peter Zadek is excellent, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra directed by Dennis Russell Davies is magnificent, and the spectrum of voices is impeccable, with members of the cast including Dame Gwyneth Jones, Catherine Malfitano, Jerry Hadley, Udo Holdorf, and Wilbur Pauley.
But perhaps even more interesting than the grandiose spectacle unfolding on the stage of the Grosses Festspielhaus (with no fewer than one hundred extras and several multitudinous choirs) is the sight of the thousands of spectators crowding the orchestra section and balconies, the gentlemen in tuxedos and the finely attired ladies glinting with jewels and trailing exquisite scents, who have paid between three and five hundred dollars a seat to come and enjoy a work conceived by its authors, in the vortex of the great ideological battles of the Weimar Republic in the twenties, as a blazing indictment of the North American capitalist utopia, the deceptive dream of material success at the reach of one and all, and the insatiable cult of the dollar, the new Mammon of the twentieth century, its alienating false promises concealing a nightmare of exploitation, erosion of tradition, mafia rule, and gangster violence.
To judge by their expressions of respectful concentration, maintained for the three hours the work lasted, and the enthusiasm with which they applauded the musicians, actors, singers, and dancers, very few of the spectators—top executives, successful professionals, wealthy landlords, bankers, high-level bureaucrats, jet-set beauties, the very incarnations of triumphant capitalism in its most satisfied and least tormented form—noted the delicious irony of which they were the unconscious protagonists. There they sat, sedately enjoying a beautiful work intended as an artistic bombshell by a writer and a musician who hated people like them with all their might and employed every ounce of their enormous talent to eradicate them, along with the system that allowed such people to reach the privileged heights of the comfortable life and artistic luxury they were enjoying, light-years away from the starving masses, who, like the naïve Alaskan pioneers imagined by Brecht, dream of one day reaching Mahagonny, “city of nests,” as the widow Leokadia Begbick calls it, where everyone will be able to find a corner of happiness, success, and peace where they will feel safe and content, like pigeon chicks under the mother bird’s wing. Because they swallow this lie and then later try to rebel against it, the unhappy Jimmy Mahoney and his beloved Jenny Smith are dealt the punishment that free-market societies inflict on those who resist it: he gets the electric chair, and she is sent to a brothel.
In the exquisite performance program (it, like the glass of champagne at intermission, costs ten dollars), illustrated with grim portraits by Lucian Freud advising those in the know of the terminal and bilious sadness with which capitalism infects human beings, a series of texts have been collected. Obviously presented with the best of intentions, they spare no examples or arguments in their intent to prove that the U.S. culture of gangster-businessmen, alcoholics, pimps, and predators denounced by Brecht and Weill in their opera sixty-eight years ago remains for the most part unchanged, although appearances might suggest otherwise, and that therefore the moral arguments and political philosophy that permeate The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny are still pertinent. To this end, Eduardo Galeano explains that the Pinochet regime in Chile was born out of the economic theories of Milton Friedman; and Serge Halimi, drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi (which he appears not to have fully understood), calls for a new social utopia to replace the one shattered with the Berlin Wall and for challenges to the “utilitarian utopia” of Adam Smith. I very much doubt that these earnest intellectuals could ever persuade the crowd surrounding me of the intrinsic evils of the free market, or that the laborious statistics compiled by Jan Goossens with the help of Noam Chomsky (“In the United States, one percent of the population possesses 39 percent of the wealth”) at the end of the program might cause them the slightest remorse or win a single one of them over to the proletariat’s cause. Furthermore, I’d wager that not one person has bothered to read the program meant to rouse their consciences.
In fact, if this performance of Mahagonny proves anything at all, it isn’t that Brecht’s political ideas have survived the catastrophe of statism and Marxist collectivism. Rather, it’s that his literary genius was subtler and deeper than the ideology that motivated him and that he was able to free a work like this from stereotypes and commonplaces and make it express, as if between the lines of the conscious political message, more original and enduring ideas and myths and images whose historical and moral import qualifies the explicit ideology and even contradicts it. The city of Mahagonny, which, by posing as the model of a perfect society, wrecks the dreams and lives of poor, naïve people like Jimmy Mahoney and Jenny Smith who come to it in search of happiness, is nothing like the North American society Brecht had in mind when he wrote his work, the United States of jazz and skyscrapers that bewitched the German intelligentsia between the wars as surely as it repelled them. Rather, circumstances have lent the city more and more of a resemblance to societies like Russia’s, which, upon awakening from the alienation of the socialist paradise that pretended to do away with greed and egoism in human relationships, found itself in a true hell of anarchy, corruption, social violence, economic tyranny by mafias, and a no-holds-barred struggle for money (preferably dollars). If prostitution has anywhere become the last possible refuge from hunger and frustration for penniless girls, as in the Mahagonny controlled by the insatiably greedy widow Begbick and her assassins, it’s not New York or Los Angeles—where prostitutes make more than writers and don’t even pay taxes—but Fidel Castro’s Cuba, where the struggle for greenbacks has taken on the same ferocious and inhuman character it possesses in the Brechtian city.
The work Brecht wrote in 1930 and Weill set marvelously to music by blending popular melodies with American rhythms in a modernist display that also reclaims the best elements of traditional German opera—present in the ironic allusions to Beethoven’s Fidelio—is no longer what it first was, a critique of capitalist utopias and the belief in unlimited economic progress; it is now simply a critique of any social utopia that pretends to recreate heaven on earth and establish the perfect society. Such societies don’t exist, at least not in this world of infinite human diversity, in which all attempts to impose a single form of happiness on everyone have always failed and brought most people serious misery and unhappiness. Whether we like it or not, those of us who refuse to give up the stubborn search for absolutes, full realization, and earthly paradise will discover that the only real and widespread progress—economic, social, moral, and cultural—has always rewarded modesty, not ambition. The winners are those societies that set as their goal not perfection but steady if partial progress, the renouncing of utopias, and the ascension to what Camus called “the morality of limits,” a delicate and beautiful way of understanding democratic mediocrity and pragmatism.
At the debut of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, on March 9,1930, in the city of Leipzig, the angry reaction of some in the audience led to violence; almost two years later, in December 1931, when Brecht and Weill managed to find a Berlin businessman who dared to produce the work in the German capital, the scandal was also enormous. How things have changed since that bellicose and romantic time, when plays and operas transfixed people or drove them to shouts and blows. Things have improved in many ways since those days, when Stalinists and Nazis shot and beat each other to death around the Brandenburg Gate and democrats shivered, impotent and afraid, sensing the coming apocalypse. But in one way at least those times were clearer than these. Back then, when the bourgeoisie went to the theater, they knew what they liked and what they didn’t like, and made their preferences known by clapping or stomping. Now they don’t know, and the few who still distinguish between their artistic likes and dislikes no longer have the courage to show it. Here, at the Salzburg Festival, the fear that they will be called philistines and reactionaries makes them applaud everything that the rebellious Gérard Mortier puts before them: the excellent Mahagonny tonight, for example. But yesterday they clapped just as politely for a Don Carlo by Verdi in which Philip II appeared in a flirtatious little Andalusian hat and Don Carlo and Don Rodrigo were disguised as flamenco dancers (there was also a procession of hooded inquisitors, condemned men on a pyre, peasants with sickles and hammers, and García Lorca-esque Civil Guard officers). They’d probably applaud me, too, if I climbed onstage and sang, to music by Luigi Nono, the Communist Manifesto in the key of G.