Ivo van Hove makes you feel how intensely there is suffering and living in the opera ‘Mahagonny’

taketonews

It starts with three criminals on the run. Their car is broken down, the desert stretches out in front of them and where they come from they are wanted by the police. So they should just stay here, decides one of them, Mrs. Begbick (soprano Evelyn Herlitzius), and found the ideal city here: “Because the world is so bad.”

Here is the logic at work in the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) by composer Kurt Weill and lyricist Bertolt Brecht. A new production premiered at Dutch National Opera on Wednesday, in an intriguing direction, dominated by projection screens and green screens, by Ivo van Hove, who returns after his acclaimed Salome from 2017. His Mahagonny was first seen at the Aix-en-Provence opera festival in 2019, planned Amsterdam performances in 2020 were canceled due to corona.

It was worth the wait. You could even say that the production is more topical, since the US Capitol was stormed in 2021 by thugs who wanted to establish an ideal state. The story of Mahagonny is in all prophetic intensity a story of our time, in which pleasure and entertainment represent the highest values, reality has lost its gold standard and money can buy everything.

The town of Mahagonny is soon populated by hordes of ‘discontents from all continents’, such as lumberjacks who have become rich through years of torture in Alaska. Their wealth in turn attracts women of easy virtue, such as Jenny, who sings the song that has become more famous than the opera as ‘Alabama Song’ by The Doors, among others.

Also read an interview with Ivo van Hove: Ivo van Hove likes to remain a mystery, even to himself

Observant look

Prostitute Jenny (soprano Lauren Michelle) and lumberjack Jimmy (tenor Nikolai Schukoff) form the love couple of the opera. Their first meeting, filmed head-on in double close-up, is almost a beautiful intimate moment (which is quickly broken, like everything in Mahagonny goes quickly and breaks). Then all kinds of things happen: Jimmy rebels against Frau Begbick’s rules; the city narrowly escapes destruction by a hurricane; Jimmy is the hero when he proclaims that from now on people can eat, fuck, fight and drink without limits; but if he cannot pay his drinks bill, he is promptly sentenced to death – because lack of money is ‘the greatest crime on earth’. Jenny also refuses to help him. Only then will we see them together again.

Such a summary sounds rather meaningless, but the opera is a series of loosely connected scenes with which Weill and Brecht wanted to ‘confront’ the spectator with ‘man’ and make him think. Not rapture but research. Van Hove’s direction radically implements this observational, detached view, with cameras and screens on stage that constantly draw your gaze away from the live actors; he shows the glow and emptiness of virtual reality, but also manages to tap into the humanity of the characters. They are archetypes, empty shells on a screen, and yet you feel that they are really alive and suffering. Jimmy’s death, devoid of sentimentality, is breathtaking. The power of the performance lies in that paradox.

The cast sings well across the board, with Jenny and Jimmy and the impressive bass-baritone Thomas Johannes Mayer (Dreieinigkeitsmoses) as eye-catchers. The wonderful choir of DNO switches effortlessly between an a cappella mini requiem and a real quasi-Slave Choir at the end. The Netherlands Philharmonic plays excellently under Markus Stenz, who makes a small cameo with a piercing gaze. Ultimately, it is Weill’s artful, layered and versatile music that keeps the illusion alive for almost three hours, after which the whole mess goes up in flames.

Tenor Nikolai Schukoff and soprano Lauren Michelle as lumberjack Jimmy and prostitute Jenny.
Photo Clärchen & Matthias Baus/The National Opera

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