However, to decline acceptance of Epic Opera’s worldview as absolute and all-embracing is not to reject it as a germane POV on the society of its time and place, and the more closely one relates it to that time and place the more that validity is confirmed and—as always—the clearer its living connection to our own circumstances becomes. As I repeatedly argue with respect to the E-19 metanarrative: if we are still emotionally engaged by an opera’s music, and it is the dramatic elements of plot and character that have generated this music, then the problem the generationalist thinkers are wrestling with is not an absence of relevance, but its ongoing (and, for them, highly unaccommodating) presence. That problem is theirs, not the work’s.

Two adjectives are still often attached to Mahagonny: “cynical” and “satirical.” The first, I think, suggests itself because of a dramatic tactic I noted in my last post—the characters are shown behaving ruthlessly toward one another, particularly in the matter of loyalty to personal attachments. We’re watching and hearing Fidelio get turned inside out. Last time, I mentioned the turnarounds between Jimmy and Bill. Jimmy pleads with Bill for money to defend himself at his trial. Bill explains that despite his deep feeling for Jimmy, when it comes to money, he can do nothing. But then, Bill rises in Jimmy’s defense at the trial, and Jimmy, to the same nostalgic strains that define their bond, is overwhelmed that Bill would do this for him, and Bill, continuing the musical vein, affirms that it’s because of their friendship that he’s done this great thing. But because he has no money, Jimmy is condemned to death, and as he departs he remands his “widow,” Jenny, into the care of his last and best friend, the selfsame Bill, so that she will not have to return to her life with the girls of the brothel.

Jenny, too, allows no personal feeling to weaken her survivalist instinct. Jimmy has chosen her when Jacob (Jake) would not meet her price. He is her lover and, in effect, her protector. She, in turn, has sought to protect him from himself as he tries to rewrite Mahagonny’s rules. They’re a couple. Yet at the trial, when he is absurdly accused of having violated her maidenly honor, she steps forward to identify herself as the aggrieved party, explaining herself in a song about hard lessons learned. Then, as Jimmy prepares for execution, they kiss in a musical atmosphere of almost unparalleled emptiness; she calls herself his widow (see above) and promises to always think well of him. In other words, except for our hero Jimmy, who rebels against Mahagonny’s laws and does not accept the “concrete image . . . of fate,” these characters betray one another on the instant in matters of love and death. Yet they do not hold one another responsible for these betrayals—at some level, they understand that this is how it must go—and by this means, the work dictates that we also refrain from judgment, that the conditions depicted by the stage world render morality moot. That’s savage and despairing, and eminently disputable, but it isn’t cynical. It leaves us longing for love and loyalty and for a moral law, and in fear that we are losing these things.