The same thing happens in Mahagonny. Again, we have a Love-You-Bro relationship between Jimmy and Billy, dating from their seven years of felling trees in Alaska. And again, as with the Kanonen-Song in Threepenny, the feel of this bond is established in word and music. Yet, even where Jimmy’s life is concerned, when it comes to money—that’s quite another matter. Billy still loves Jimmy, and at the trial makes desperate attempts to defend him. But appeals to sympathy are of no account; Billy still doesn’t come up with the money; and this time there’s no Riding Messenger to save the day. So Jimmy is electrocuted, and as the great processions marching through the burning City of Nets at the close repeatedly tell us, there is “nothing you will do can help a dead man.”

Now, it’s not that we in the audience do not develop a kind of empathy—an idea of empathy for Jimmy, and for Jimmy and Jenny the couple. It’s certainly melancholy, these bleak fragments of a love that tries to be more than transactional, this long night with one leg manacled to a tree, waiting for the day of execution to dawn. Jimmy’s downfall comes from his floundering efforts to assert some sort, any sort, of individual agency, and finally from a moment of giving in to a personal sentiment: because of those winters in Alaska, Jimmy bets on the prize-fight with his heart, staking his last money on his buddy Alaska-Wolf-Joe against big, brutal Trinity Moses. Then, his buddy dead, he runs up a tab buying drinks for the house—the tab Billy can’t help him with—and on that account is condemned to death. We have an empathy for all this, but it is a sadness at the spectacle, at the human condition as shown. As personal narrative, Mahagonny is a tragedy. But the personal narrative is subsumed in the Weltbild, just as Brecht intended. It’s as close as any opera has come to his “non-Aristotelian” goal.

Just as we should play Brecht by Brechtian rules, so we should play Wagner, Verdi, Mozart, et al. by theirs. And this concept of the Separation of Elements, developed by Brecht for the Epic Theatre, has in the hands of succeeding generations of directors (mostly German, Austrian, or Eastern European) spread like toxic algae into the mainstream of the operatic canon, where, in combination with two other pernicious bits of theatre philosophy—that of the director as co-equal with the creator (in other words, the auteur), and that of production as criticism of the work itself, as nullifier of its rules—has carried us far beyond the polite underhandedness of Wilson’s Lohengrin to become a prime weapon in the battle to annihilate the canon’s values and thus close us off from it. While still making use of it, of course.

So a stand on principle must now be taken, since we have before us massive evidence that once a departure from principle is granted, except for feeble arguments over taste there is no fall-back line of defense against a deliberate, unethical dismantling of our heritage.

˜ ˜ ˜

ADDENDA: If you were interested in the discussion of keyboard usages that ran through the last three posts, you will probably be intrigued by “An All-but-Extinct Instrument Plays Once More,” by Cleveland Johnson, which ran in the New York Times on Sept. 1. It’s about the tangent piano, a late-18th-Century alternate to the harpsichord and fortepiano, of which fewer than 20 examples survive. Johnson’s article discusses its mechanics, its sound, and its possible uses, and touches on a recording by Alexei Lubimov of music of C.P.E. Bach as played on the instrument. No mention of operatic employments, but I wonder . . .