But we have a video. So we are obliged to consider the pros and cons of its other governing condition, its Metropolitan Opera-ness. I shouldn’t want to be understood as condemning the company for mounting Mahagonny. No one else was doing it, and I think Levine and Dexter felt a real connection to the work and a sense of its importance. And it is an opera. Yes, there’s dialogue, declaimed over accompaniment in timed mélodrame manner, and much of the sung declamation is inflectionally flat, in strings of unvaried note values (“reporting”). But those are notes on those pages, not Sprechstimme x’s, and they should be “reported” by sung means. Even the Hamburg singers, drawn from the Staatsoper’s ensemble, lapse too often into speech where singing is indicated, and the Met was in a position to provide a corrective to the habit.  I  think the company made some good casting choices, too. At least from the musical/vocal standpoint, Teresa Stratas and Richard Cassilly probably could not have been bettered as Jenny and Jimmy; Ragnar Ulfung (Fatty), Arturo Sergi (Jacob), and Paul Plishka (Alaskawolfjoe) are also strong; and the sextette of Mädchen is fine.

But the clumsiness intrudes immediately. Here come Fatty and Moses, on the lam with their busted-down truck: Ulfung, at this point a loud, cutting character tenor with actorly chops but a pronounced Swedish accent, and Cornell MacNeil, with no actorly chops of the sort needed, and against whose big, beautiful Verdian baritone in its prime we could enter the complaint of  a blandness of character. Their opening dialogue, almost Beckettian in its desperate-but-resigned factuality, is yelled out into the house as if shooting for top prize in the high school declamation contest, their timing that of singers counting. Yes, the Met measures in at at least twice the cubic footage we want for this show, but this is not a solution, and will continue to not be for the duration of the performance. The fact that the performance is in English (the Drew/Geliot translation) means that we expect some kind of naturalness—we can’t let it off the hook as more German ranting or something we’ve read about Expressionism.

Throughout my viewing of this video, I was aware of people doing good work of the kind they know how to do, without quite finding the kind that would feel really right. A few examples will have to suffice:

In an opera-company context, I can’t imagine a better choice than Stratas for Jenny. I was pleasantly reminded of her great personal appeal, her unusual theatrical instincts, and her identification with Weill’s music, of which she made a mini-specialty on recordings around this time. And she’s in her best voice here, sounding really lovely. But that appeal lay in a vulnerability, spiced at times with a sexual naughtiness or playfulness. She works to keep those under wraps here, but the propensity for empathy keeps breaking through, and the video director, Brian Large, fully aware that she can be read by the camera to greater effect than anyone else, naturally wants to engage with that. In the Crane Duet, she leans forward, watching the birds as if rooting for their relationship. But that pulls us in with her. Our hopes start to rise, too. The event of the scene—Jimmy and Jenny observing the cranes circling each other, understanding the parallel to their own lives but aware from the start of the fated parting—is blurred, and its musical bleakness (and the beauty of the bleakness) tinged with a bit of warmth. Warmth should never be felt in this show.