Among Weill’s many contentions about opera as voiced in his essays, these stand out for me:

1. That opera be constructed according to “purely musical precepts,” from “absolute” musical forms, rather than toward illustrative ends. Its function is “not to describe, but to report.”  However, this “absolute” music must be charged with a theatrical energy, with the “tempo of the stage,” to begin with.
2. That scenes, and sequences within scenes, be determined by these musical forms, which are closed, not continuous. The structure is therefore more akin to that of the opera seria than to the through-composed, ever-evolving model that was the aspiration of most 19th- and early-20th-Century opera. I would interject, though, that in the opera seria, these closed forms (principally arias, secondarily duets, only occasionally anything else), whether “of action” or, more often, “of affect,” are dedicated to the expression of high emotion by individual characters. And that is emphatically not what Weill had in mind at this point, because:
3. The new, “community-advancing” art means to “forge beyond the private, individual fate to common validity.” It’s not to be concerned with private ideas and emotions, but with “larger relationships.” Rather than becoming entangled with the inner experience, the psychology, of the characters, it’s to move on to the “conditions which determine our conduct.” Economic conditions, in fact, are to be seen as the “concrete image of what the ancients called ‘fate.'”
4. These concepts, and others of a more parochial musicodramatic nature, are to underpin operas that will be “morality-pictures of the twentieth century.”

It was in Mahagonny that these principles for operatic renewal came closest to fulfillment. In fact, so far as I’m aware Mahagonny remains alone as a successful piece written along these lines. Delving back into it by means of audio and video recordings, I’m struck by how vital it remains—and for all those who demand an instantly recognizable and applicable socio/politico/cultural relevance to qualify for their seal of approval, it comes pre-certified. Not without some discomfort and awkwardness, though. For if you take these morality-pictures, pervaded with the dark tint of industrial/urban capitalism as Fate while inducing an ache for something better, and hang them up with the panorama of twenty-first-century economic distribution on one side, and that of our simultaneously brutalist and confessional-sentimentalist popular culture on the other, you may get more relevance than you bargained for. Similarly, if you take the structural formalism and anti-psychological objectification of Mahagonny’s musicotheatrical style and see how it looks on latterday interpreters of either mainstream or alternative bent, you’re not apt to get an easy fit. In other words, in terms both of audience acceptance and performability, Mahagonny is a difficult case, for all its musical and dramatic attractions.

So far as personal philosophy is concerned, I would be among audience members not wholly buying into the Weltbild this opera shows us. According to me, economic conditions are powerful but not all-powerful; humans are psychological beings, and their inner lives motivate many of their actions; they can sometimes rise above their primal needs and acquire agency, even under wretched circumstances. Further, I’m bothered by the currency of the psychology-denial trope in the mentalities of intellectually influential directors and theorists. As with Meyerhold in Russia—and at the same time—we see it in Weill and Brecht as a reaction against the prevailing artistic thought of the previous (pre-WW1, pre-Revolution) generation. And as with the Separation of Elements, we often see it now perversely misapplied to character behavior in the interpretation of Romantic and veristic operas. That’s not exactly the fault of any of these music-theatre giants. But it is a calamitous legacy, directly traceable to them.