Compromises took over entirely with Lenya’s postwar Jenny, for the sustainable tessitura of her technique- and maintenance-free voice had now dropped by a good half-octave, and  upper-register qualities appeared only as inflectional lightenings and softenings—though there was never doubt that it was a woman singing with this strung-out contralto manquée sound. Major revisions were thus required in voice distribution and consequent harmonies for the 1956 (Philips) recording, resulting in a distorted, “inauthentic” impression of the score wherever Jenny is involved. On the other hand, what could be more “authentic” than the tangy, ravaged sound and personality of the composer’s widow, the woman who’d sung this music a quarter-century earlier, and had survived to embody for us the world of Weimar protest? All that’s there in every note Lenya sings.

Jenny’s music is restored to its intended elevation, complete with warbled variations in “Alabama” and the high extension in No. 10 noted above, on the 1985 (Capriccio) recording. But the number which would most benefit from this, the soprano/tenor “Crane Duet,” is cut, and the rest of the role is compromised by the vocal limitations of Anja Silja—different from, but equal to, Lenya’s. The fresh and open, though insufficiently grounded, lyric soprano she had that was pushed through temperamentally exciting versions of the Jugendlich roles at Bayreuth in the early ’60s, is long gone, and while she gets the “Alabama Song” off to an interestingly accented start, it’s clear that by the time she reaches even the E-naturals of the verse endings she is uncomfortable; anything above that is a gripped straight tone that precludes any interpretive choice. Someone sings those top Bs and Cs in No. 10, but it doesn’t sound like Silja, and though the pitches are there, they register no dramatic effect.

In the act finales and at a few spots of complex texture, the clean stereo sound of the Cologne recording registers with greater vividness and impact than the ’56 Hamburg version, recorded in analogue mono. But of the two, the Hamburg performance has the greater vitality. It’s urged on by Brückner-Rüggeberg with the theatrical charge, the “tempo of the stage,” that Weill sought, whereas under König’s measured leadership, Cologne’s orchestral musicians sound as if they think a technically keen, musically scrupulous reading (which they provide) will fill the bill. The Hamburg singers, too, have more characterful bite, more tonal weight and presence, than the Cologne group, with wide margins of superiority in the vital roles of Widow Begbick and Trinity Moses. And the Hamburg enterprise crackles with the thrill of reclamation. For Mahagonny had been presumed lost, and its performing materials, then only recently brought out of their Nazi-era hiding-place, were here sounding forth reborn, and for at least some of the participants, in a redemptive aura.

The Met video, which I recently viewed for the first time, brought some of the work’s performance challenges into sharper focus for me. If I had to characterize it with a single adjective, I suppose I’d land on “clumsy.” Yet it’s not as if there isn’t a lot of high-level work being done and many understandable choices being made. There are two conditions at work that could be said to constitute “concrete images of fate” for this on-camera Mahagonny. The first is that it is being done in the Metropolitan Opera House with the forces of the company then (1979) resident there. The second, applicable to any camera effort, is simply that it’s being translated into video form. To speak of the second condition first: of all the many operas with which video representation, even if skillfully handled, is fundamentally incompatible, Mahagonny must stand first. It’s more alien to the camera than the grandest of grand operas. The two advantages the camera has, mobility and, especially, the close-up, so useful and so common as to be constitutive of screen narrative, are worse than useless here. The very bases of Epic Theatre and Epic Opera—that our POV remain objectified; that the performers’ stance include the element of de-familiarization; that we consider at all times the characters’ actions as seen in the social frame and not merely as individual expression; and, most importantly, that we not be drawn into the characters’ inner lives or into their psychologies—all these add up to an absolute ban on the close-up. And without the close-up, the video director is helpless.