Satirical? In certain moments, such as the parodic treatment of The Maiden’s Prayer and Jacob’s  ridiculous response (“Das ist das ewige Kunst“), obviously. In the sense that it attacks hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness, yes. For one instance, in the play staged while we await Jimmy’s execution, God Himself, as portrayed by the Widow Begbick’s enforcer, Trinity Moses (and there’s the whole Judaeo-Christian package, nominally speaking) appears to the men of Mahagonny under precisely the  circumstances a skeptic would anticipate: while they’re drinking whiskey on a grey morning. (God condemns them all to Hell for their wayward ways; they and Jenny scream their rejection of Him.) And satirical, perhaps, in the sense that very evocative music, whose popular tunes and dance rhythms commonly serve as cheery entertainment or, alternatively, whose solemn chorales and thrumming marches are devised for reverential or patriotic occasions, instead “report” the flip sides of all these observances in tones of bitter amusement. Satirical, finally, in drawing on the ironic, subversive comic tone of the Austro-German cabaret of the era, and in this tone seeming to satirize opera itself, at least of the kind Weill and Brecht were seeking to supplant.

But “satirical,” in our usual contemporary sense, is no better an adjective than “cynical” for this work. To audiences, it implies something lighter, funnier, and less stringently moralistic than Mahagonny really is. For interpreters, it is likely to send them down a path of smug foolishness. And there’s always the ambivalence that’s in the work and our relationship to it. We may smile at the uses being made of its seductive music, but it remains seductive; we may look on the mortal predicaments of the city’s inhabitants with all the clearness of eye that Brecht intended, but they remain mortal predicaments, and the music makes us feel them.

The question for us is, how can Mahagonny be performed? How can it be sung, acted, staged, and conducted in an effective, true-to-the-work manner? I have managed to see only two live productions of the complete opera—the Met’s, directed by John Dexter and premiered in the 1979-80 season, and, a few years earlier, one mounted by the Minnesota Opera, directed by Wesley Balk. Neither is graven in any detail on my memory. I got to feel close to the piece first through its recording by Hamburg forces under Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg (1956, a performance strongly colored by the literally inimitable, most-and-least authentic Jenny of Lotte Lenya), supplemented later by the Cologne recording (1985) under Jan-Latham König. This is of course an intimacy of the ear-only sort, visualized in the theatre of the mind, which is very strong on atmosphere and vivid at the highpoints of the action, but not truly continuous or completely filled-out—it avoids all the little stuff, the inconvenient specifics that must be addressed in the actual performance situation. On these, the video of the Met production reminds us of exactly how inconvenient they are, and how radically they change under the camera’s eye.

I’m sure many readers understand why I call Lenya’s Jenny “most-and-least authentic,” but for those unfamiliar with the history: she had participated in the premiere of the ur-Mahagonny, the Songspiel, at Baden-Baden in 1927, and introduced a version of the “Alabama-Song” there. But she did not create the role in the finished opera, and the Leipzig singer who did, Mali Trummer, hasn’t left any aural trace I’ve been able to access. Lenya then took over the part for the Berlin production. Her voice at that time was a soprano, innocent of operatic development but able to at least hold pitch in the indicated keys. Even then, though, she surely required some easements. It is not plausible, for instance, that she sang the Act 1 Hurricane Chorus (No. 10, “O furchtbares Ereignis“) as written—Jenny has the top line, with its high B-naturals and Cs, to herself here, and is clearly meant to sound out above the ensemble just as the lead soprano would in a Verdi concertato. Nor is it likely that in “Meine Herren, meine Mutter prägte” she twice took the ascending line up to a sustained A, with a ritardando and a diminuendo, at “Ein Mensch ist kein Tier!“, as marked.  Those are feats for operatic voices, and compromises must have been made.