Keeping up with Opera as Opera news: I’m happy to report that the video of my appearance of last Sept. 28 at Opera America here in NYC (my talk about the book; my conversation with Marc Scorca, President of Opera America; and Q & A session with audience members) is at last up and running. Click on the Media page above. It’s on YouTube, too. We’ve received another lovely review from Dr. Geerd Heinsen at operalounge.de (Vienna), and several more are  imminent—details next time.

We have three items to add to the ever-breaking onslaught of Operaworld news. One: the Met has a new investiture of Francesco Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur that is on the whole supportive in terms of production and that, on this occasion at least, proved enjoyable, if not transcendent,  in performance. Two: the occasion found its leading lady, Anna Netrebko, to be in both better voice and a more congenial role than was the case in last season’s scary Tosca (see the post of May 25, 2018, Two Voices, Two Journeys). And three: Anita Rachelishvili continues to cement her position as an authentic grand-opera singer. Perhaps because of the appetite-dulling aftertaste left by the company’s other recent excursions into verismo-era operas (Puccini’s Fanciulla del West and, especially, Il Trittico, q.v.), this often-disrespected score also seems to have climbed a notch or two in the general estimation. This may mean nothing more than a flood of gratitude for an evening of nice melodies nicely sung, but let’s not undervalue that.

Adriana is apparently slated for a fresh Met production every 56 years. That was the span from the first (1907—it totaled two performances) to the second (1963—with well-spaced revivals, it chalked up some seventy more), and now from the second to the third. Devotees with any historical interest will know of Edward Johnson’s refusal to mount the piece for Rosa Ponselle in the late ’30s^(I), and those of my age or not too much younger will recall the sinking-heart sensation of the 1963 performances, which coincided with Renata Tebaldi’s career-threatening vocal and personal crisis. I’m afraid I did not keep up with Adriana after its 1968 return (again with Tebaldi, partially restored but still struggling at some important moments), save for the revival of 1994, with Mirella Freni and Luis Lima in the leads, which did not make a strong case for the opera.

Latest Opera as Opera news: the book has received additional significant attention from UK, in the form of a fine thought piece by Richard Fairman in The Financial Times. (If you Google “Financial Times Opera as Opera Osborne” you’ll get to it; the print version should be out this weekend.) And we’ve gotten two new notable stateside reviews as well, by Kenneth Meltzer in Fanfare and by George Loomis in Musical America. While Fairman focuses primarily on the problem of new creation (i.e., repertory renewal), with frequent reference to the book’s arguments, Meltzer and Loomis present substantial overviews of the book as a whole. We’re expecting further additions to Opera as Opera‘s extraordinary critical response. To today’s post:

 There’s been a slight change of plan. I intended this post to be devoted primarily to the new production of Adriana Lecouvreur, starring La Netrebko, with some passing attention paid to Otello, whose revival did not seem to merit extended discussion. And as a performance, so it did not. But though I’d read and heard about this mounting when it was new, I had not anticipated that two of its aspects would strike me as representative enough of the circumambient wrongheadedness to be worth taking up in some depth. So rather than cheat Adriana, which proved worthy of note in a happier sense, I’ll save it for next time.

The Otello had its premiere last season, with the same cast of principals save for the title role (Aleksandrs Antonenko then, Stuart Skelton now). The main advance attraction this year was the house debut of Gustavo Dudamel, the still-young Venezuelan conductor with the appealing up-by-the-Sistema-bootstraps life story and the many plaudits accorded his energy and vision out in Los Angeles. I was also curious about Skelton, whose Siegmund I had heard on the Naxos Walküre recording (see the post of Feb. 23, 2018), and whose Tristan here I had heard spoken of respectfully.

Dudamel certainly put a charge into the opening Storm Scene—been a while since we’ve heard that kind of disciplined aggression—and he secured a high level of execution throughout. As the evening progressed, though, I didn’t detect a strong grip on scenic structure, or on the score’s overall dramatic arc. Big moments (the Act III finale the prime example) were impressive once they arrived, but there wasn’t enough definition or sustainment to the episodes in between to give these climaxes the sound of inevitability. I finally came away with the impression of a significant musical talent not yet plugged in to stage/pit dynamics, and not terribly familiar with Italian operatic style in general. Lacking the old European opera house training ground, we need a Sistema for opera.

Skelton had canceled the season premiere performance a few nights previously, and at the intermission, when it was already clear that he was in difficulty, it was announced that though suffering from a cold, he had agreed to finish the performance. Even allowing a reasonable illness discount, however, and factoring in the impression of his recorded Siegmund, this doesn’t sound like an Otello voice. It is moderate in size, lacking in a clear ring anywhere in the range, and consistently closed off above A at the top. In a cautiously sung Act 1 duet and at the beginning of “Dio mi potevi,” he made some nice effects at lower dynamics, and he never stopped trying to sustain the line. But the voice’s structure did not hold against the reach and stress of the role. His physical representation, too, did not reach out boldly and urgently. This was the second consecutive performance I’ve seen at the Met (following Marcelo Alvarez in Il Tabarro) wherein a leading tenor role has been painfully worked through by a singer evidently not well equipped for it and pronounced ill to boot, yet management has either not had an adequate cover prepared or has been reluctant to call on him.

Last year (see the posts of Jan. 12 and 27, 2018), I wrote a lookback article on La Forza del destino. It had to be a lookback piece because the production of Forza scheduled for the Met season of 2017-18 had been canceled. More recently (June 22 and July 6, 2018), my discussion of Don Giovanni had a Then-and-Now theme, but the Now aspect was represented not by live performance, but by audio and video recordings, which seemed to me more promising material for comparative discussion. Such choices are forced upon us with increasing frequency if we wish to find plausible representation for assessing the merits of opera’s canonical masterworks.

In the instance of Gounod’s Faust, the proximate excuse for writing about it at all is the release, on the Immortal Peformances label, of the 1937 Met broadcast of the work. This performance has had no previous circulation, and doesn’t even appear in Paul Jackson’s Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met, which has set the bar for inclusiveness—though more material keeps surfacing, as with the present issue. The ’37 Faust might appear redundant in prospect, since its three principals (Helen Jepson, Richard Crooks, Ezio Pinza) are also those of the broadcast of 1940, a mere three years along. But as I confirmed for myself in the Don Giovanni explorations, as splendid as Pinza was in 1942, he was more splendid yet in ’37, with just that extra touch of vibrancy and alacrity in this richest of Italian basso cantante voices. And I was willing to wager that the blandishing tenor of Crooks would sound that much fresher in ’37, as well.  So I had the Then of my Then-and-Now.

But after a half-hearted search through the descriptions (and a few clips) of recent CD and DVD performances, I realized that when it comes to Faust, there isn’t any Now now. It’s not in the Met’s repertory this season or rumored for the next, and I sometimes doubt that New York shall ever see it again—the Met’s record with it (an individual performance here and there aside) has been unrelievedly awful for nearly a half-century, and it’s beyond the resources of even the most intrepid and/or foolhardy of our many smaller enterprises. Its decline in popularity and critical standing has been the sharpest of any opera I can think of over the past century, particularly since WW2.^(I) Should we, then, I wondered, just let it slip quietly from view, as recent efforts and attitudes would indicate is the best course? No! Faust is a beautiful and powerful work, whose emotional charge (when adequately conveyed) keeps it relevant by definition, emotional experience being the first honest measure of operatic relevance. But in view of everything I’ve already written about Faust recordings^(II), I realized that in search of advocacy, I’d need to go backward, not forward, from 1937.

For my second Met excursion in a row (see my last post, Noir and Noh), comment has been heard from the peanut gallery, where I’m usually to be found. At Marnie, it took the form of falsetto mockery, and came after the curtain calls. This time (Dec. 5), it came midperformance, as poor Sister Angelica, having just learned of the death of the little son of whom she’d heard nothing in her seven years at the convent, stretched out a supplicating arm toward her implacable aunt, and sang “È morto? Ah . . .” Now, I could almost swear I did hear something there, albeit it did nothing to disrupt the unnatural calm of the proceedings. But from three or four rows back came the comment: “What?” The voice was firm and clear, neither youthful nor elderly. The tone was not of ill-intentioned disruption, but of genuine inquiry, as in “Is anything going on down there? If so, would you care to share?” Later, the same voice registered another reaction, but I didn’t quite catch it, which put it in the same category as many of the remarks being entered by the evening’s performers.

After my Marnie post, in which I yet again had occasion to note the low level of vocal energy coming off the stage, I heard from the highly regarded coach and co-Artistic Director of The New York Festival of Song, Steven Blier. Emphasizing that “I’m just reporting—others heard it, too,”  he wrote as follows:

“The night I went to Marnie I was in the standing room section, and it seemed to me that not much sound was coming off the stage. If you can’t hear the singers and chorus under that overhang, something is wrong. It’s a very voice-friendly, orchestra-muffling spot. Ten minutes into the first act a strange thing happened. A guy came storming up the aisle and confronted the usher, loudly. ‘I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING! I’M IN ROW T AND I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING!’

“‘Sir, there is nothing I can do about it . . .’

“This continued, with the usher asking questions like ‘What row are you in?’—’ROW T! ROW T!’ After a few rounds of this I turned to them and said, ‘Guys, could you take your fight outside? You’re disturbing me.’ Row-T guy: ‘WHAT?’ Me (in Callas-like stage whisper): ‘I am trying to hear an opera and you are making a lot of noise and disturbing me.’ Row-T guy: ‘Who are you? Are you a subscriber?’ [Strange question, since I am in standing room.] Then he turned back to the usher and said something along the lines of, ‘I AM IN ROW T AND I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING! YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!’ The usher answered something like, ‘I can make a phone call, but I don’t think it will help.’ At this point they both seemed to disappear—I wasn’t sure what happened because I was trying to concentrate on Marnie. It was odd.

“Odder still: about seven minutes later, during the scene with Tony Griffey [in the role of Mr. Strutt—CLO] and the chorus when they are telling him he’s been ripped off by Isabel Leonard [Marnie], the volume from the stage jumped by at least fifty percent. Just like that. Boom. At intermission I asked people I ran into if they noticed it, and they all said they had. But no one else suggested the thing I was wondering: did someone turn on the mikes or the amplification or SOMETHING? Could Row T guy have been a technician? Or someone who’d already seen Marnie and was expecting the same vocal impact? It struck me later that he may have been asking for something very specific: the sound enhancement isn’t working, let the tech people know. I don’t know the answers to any of this, but it was one of the most notable things about the whole evening.”

As promised last week, I append below a list of errata found in the first printing of “Opera as Opera.” I have omitted a few simple misspellings and typos, including only the errata that interfere with meaning and/or are misleading. The most important are those from P. 305 to P. 403, where incorrect endnote and footnote numbers are confusing. I suggest that owners of the first printing print this out and retain it for reference. All discovered errata have been corrected in the second printing, now available.

Several correspondents have been kind enough to call these to my attention. I particularly wish to thank Jon Alan Conrad and “Der Merker,” Vienna (http://www.dermerker.com), for their alertness and promptness in conveying these corrections. 

P. 129, n. 11: “the same author’s” should read “Jon Alan Conrad’s.” The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Opera on Records should read The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Opera on Recordings.

P. 270, line 6: “mid-Sixties” should read “1959.”

305, 2nd footnote: “n. 28” should read “n. 2.”

314, 1st footnote: “n. 29” should read “n. 3.”

330: “(see n. 36)” should read “(see n. 10).”

P. 359, last line of text: “discrete” should read “discreet.”

359, footnote: “n. 51” should read “n. 28.”

362: “(see n. 49)” should read “(see n. 24).”

386, line 4: “n. 70⁴⁵” should read “n. 45.”

413, n. 14, line 1: “1952” should read “1962.”

P. 447, line 6: “Act III” should read “Act II, Scene 2.”

CLO

NEXT FULL POST: Friday, Dec. 14: Puccini’s Il Trittico: WHAT?

“Opera as Opera” news: At last, after a frustrating delay since the quick sellout of the first printing, the second one is ready for shipment as of Dec. 4! Those who have pre-ordered should be receiving their copies within days of that date (at least for domestic orders), and fulfillment of new orders should be prompt. Thanks to all for your patience. P.S.: see note at the end of today’s post.

Further: I recently did an interview with host Lawrence Pugliese of Radio Free Brooklyn for its far-ranging cultural program “Troubadours and Raconteurs,” in which we discussed aspects of “Opera as Opera” and related topics. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. After broadcast airings in several markets in the Northeast, it’s taking its eternal place as featured segment in “T & R”‘s Episode 294, reachable at www.radiofreebrooklyn.org. We’ll also be posting it on a media page soon, along with my interview with Christopher Purdy of Station WSOU (Columbus, O.) and the video of my talk, conversation with Marc Scorca, and Q & A at Opera America. We’ve been lagging slightly on this front, but will be catching up. To today’s ruminations:

As with Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel (see the post of Dec. 12, 2017, Extermination, Salvation, Frustration), the plot-and-character conformation of Marnie owes its nebulous presence in our cultural atmosphere to the half-life of a movie by a famous director, though in this case the composer and librettist (Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright, respectively) tell us they have worked primarily from the movie’s novelistic source, by Winston Graham. Movies are starting to take the position relative to opera occupied first by classical myth and legend, and later by plays (and, less frequently, novels) as items of cultural literacy that audiences could be depended upon to at least know about, if not know directly, and thus to establish a certain level of advance validation for the work in question. Whether or not this is a viable idea (movies, and for that matter novels, being conceived and structured along other than stage lines, and very few of them having attained the numinous weight of myth) is a larger question than I’m going to tackle today, except to repeat that in such cases, if I’m unfamiliar with the source materials beforehand, I prefer to remain so until after I’ve determined whether or not the opera works for me on its own recognizance. (I still vaguely mean to catch up with Buñuel’s Angel someday, but since I think Hitchcock a wildly overrated artist by any grown-up standard, I’ll probably not even feint in the direction of Marnie, The Movie.)

The thrice-told tale, as disclosed by the opera, goes thus: Marnie, a chic young woman who easily attracts unwanted male attention, is haunted by a repressed-memory sense that she may have killed her baby brother. She acts out her resulting “need to transgress” by stealing money from office safes in her places of employment, then moving on with a changed identity. But in the instance shown, the man who interviews her for her next change of job turns out to be the same one, a certain Mark, who had indicated some interest in her in the old one. He  recognizes her, but hires her anyway and keeps her secret until she tries to steal from his firm, whereupon he forces her into marriage as the condition of keeping quiet. After a crisis or three, including Marnie’s suicide attempt when Mark tries to consummate the marriage and the death of her beloved horse in a hunting accident (with Marnie in the saddle), she hits the office after hours and cracks the safe one more time, only to find herself constrained by nascent feelings of affection for Mark. Then, following her mother’s death, she’s told by her neighbor that it was the mother, not Marnie herself, who was responsible for the infant’s demise. As she turns herself in to the police for her serial transgressions, she declares herself free. There are other characters, incidents, and subplots, but those are the basics of the story.

The latest on “Opera as Opera”: Our shipping date for the second printing is December 4. Orders can be entered at any time. Meanwhile, we have received two more wonderful reviews, from Donald Vroon in the venerable American Record Guide and from Robert Matthew-Walker in the even more ancient Musical Opinion Quarterly (U.K.). The reception has been extraordinary, and we understand more is on the way!

Today, I promised some words about Nico Muhly’s “Marnie.” And indeed I have seen it. However, I’ve decided to postpone comment until I can wrap it up with Kaia Saariaho’s “Only the Sound Remains,” which is coming up shortly. But there’s plenty to chew over below.  

I once had a student from a small Orthodox community in Israel, who had come to New York to study. He was an interesting man from a culture I knew little about, so we learned from each other. Among the things I learned of from him was the continued life of an ancient prohibition against male  proximity to a singing woman. If he arrived at my studio while a lesson with a female student was still in progress, he would wait outside the door till the lesson ended. One day, after having assured several young women that “No, no, it’s not you, it’s him,” I asked him if he knew the original reasoning behind this rule. He answered with a grave sincerity: “The woman’s voice is very beautiful. If you heard it and were in the room with her, you might want to go to her before you are married.” I thanked him, and of course we continued to observe the rule.

In Act 2 of Karl (Karóly) Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba), set in a lush garden at night, the eponymous Queen instructs her slave Astaroth to lure the love-dazed Assad with her singing. Astaroth obeys with a vocalise replete with Oriental-sounding intervals, long sustained notes, and ornaments. Assad responds with a short, beguiling aria, “Magische Töne.” It happens that for collectors of historical records, these are the two most notable of several fragments that kept The Queen of Sheba‘s aura alive over the past century. The vocalise (called the Lockruf) is most famous in the voicing of Selma Kurz (though an earlier version, by Elise Elizza, while lacking Kurz’s Guiness Book of World Records extended trill, would probably be almost as highly regarded had it been recorded later), and the latter in stunning interpretations by Leo Slezak and (in Italian) Enrico Caruso. And sure enough, poor Assad, though figuratively outside the studio door, soon finds himself—for the third time and counting—hopelessly enmeshed in the Queen’s on-again, off-again allurements. ^(I)We aren’t speaking here of plain old powerful attraction at first sight. We’re dealing with enslaving, all-enveloping, lost-to-the-world sexual intoxication that presents itself as the mother of all the games of tease, then play hard-to-get, that some girls learn at a remarkably early age. Poor Assad’s first encounter was up in Lebanon, whither he’d been dispatched by King Solomon on a diplomatic mission to the Queen, only to encounter an irresistibly beautiful woman plashing about near his mossy bank, as such are wont to do. As he approached her, she not only failed to repel him, but drew him into a fervent, inevitably wet embrace. And no sooner did Assad conclude—reluctantly, I’m sure—that escape was impossible than she vanished into the cedar-scented air.

The Met season now underway is giving us a good dose of late Puccini, which means two things, among others: the Puccini works that are less often performed than his perennial repertoire masterpieces, and the ones that had their world premieres here in New York, by the Met company in its old diggings down on the Southern edge of Times Square. First up has been La Fanciulla del West; Il Trittico is coming soon.

Musicians, critics, and singers of its principal roles admire and love Fanciulla, and in the 108 years since its premiere, particularly from the 1950s onward, it has found enough of a place to be considered “in the repertoire,” globally speaking, though never in a given company’s lineup for many seasons at a stretch. The current revival (of the 1991 Giancarlo Del Monaco/Michael Scott production) has Eva-Maria Westbroek, Jonas Kaufmann (at my performance) and Zelko Lucic in the leading roles, and Marco Armiliato on the podium. I’ll discuss it below, but since it is relatively uneventful—good enough to remind us of the piece’s strengths without being able to consistently compensate for its difficulties—it presents  a sensible opportunity first for consideration of some of the elements that can make Fanciulla go, or, somehow, not.

I think we need to start with David Belasco and theatrical realism. Many of Fanciulla‘s unusual—and, in performance, often problematic—aspects spring from Puccini’s engagement with them and their American milieu. Perhaps you don’t think of Belasco (if you think of him at all) as a representative of realism. Most of the plays he wrote and/or directed, and the kind of theatricalization he strove for, seem to us to belong to a world of extravagant melodramatic romanticization, and the exoticism of Puccini’s earlier Belasco adaptation, Madama Butterfly, often makes it seem like a part of that world. But seen in the light of his own theatrical time, Belasco was a fanatical realist, and like the smartest such, knew that the more extravagant or exotic the material, the more crucial a verisimilitude of detail is to a suspension of disbelief.^(I) And Puccini, as the presiding genius of the verismo era (if not always a verist himself, strictly speaking), was a realist, too, though an operatic one. In Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, Puccini met up with material that pushed him farther than ever before or after in search of something that could be defined as operatic realism.

Three short bulletins on “Opera as Opera”: 1) Owing to a logjam at the printer, the shipping date for the second printing has been postponed to December 4. My apologies for the delay, but that’s still in good time for Christmas. The first printing’s quick sale blindsided my most optimistic calculations. 

2) The distribution center has “discovered” a very few copies of the first printing still in stock, so if you hurry you may be able to get an order filled without the irksome wait.

3) The November issue of Opera brings us another wonderful, substantial review of the book, this one by Stephen Hastings, a critic of high standing and long experience. Give it a look. To the subject of the day: 

My high school years were spent at a traditional New England prep school, a little world unto itself. The ways of that world were already changing—the study of Latin or Greek, for instance, had just been nudged from required-course status to that of recommended language option. But the curriculum was still of pre-Ivy League classical design, and its Protestant evangelical origins (the school was founded by one of the late 19th century’s revivalist stars, D. L. Moody) were still alive as matters of daily practice. Boys and girls had dedicated campuses, with the Connecticut River and a few extra miles between them. The school had an immense dining hall, plausibly reputed to be the largest unsupported indoor space in the Northeast. The noonday meal was Announcement Time. A chime would be struck, the hall would fall silent, and a designated student or faculty spokesman would step forward on a platform with the news of the day: extracurricular club meeting times, school sports team results, social event schedules, academic competition results (the Debating Forum, the Declamation Contest, The Time Current Events Contest, etc.), the occasional disciplinary crackdown. And these announcements, of course, were launched into the room from 16- and 17-year-old throats in unassisted oratorical tone, as was all such speech, whether in the classroom, the chapel, the assembly hall, or auditorium.

A few years ago, I returned to the campus for my class’s 60th reunion. Strolling one of the paths overlooking the City on a Hill greensward, I ran into a classmate who asked what I’d planned for the day’s 5:00 p.m. time slot. When I answered in the neutral, he urged me to attend a concert by the current a cappella group. “They’re really good!”, he said. So at the appointed hour, my wife and I made our way down the hill to the new performing arts building. It stood roughly in place of the two former main classroom buildings, red-brick piles from the time of the school’s founding, one a sciences lab, the other called (à propos) Recitation Hall. In my student days, “a cappella” meant a select group of guys with nice voices and good intonation within the choir, ready for an unaccompanied early church-music selection or the occasional solo turn in an anthem. For these kids, though, it meant close harmony in selections drawn mostly from pop and folk genres. They sang with pleasing tone, good balance, and an ingenuous sincerity. They stayed on pitch.Their presentation was impeccably democratic: at the end of each selection, a different member of the group would announce the next one. Everyone got a turn.

ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 1: Last reminder: Next Friday, Sept. 28, I will be appearing in the Marc Scorca Auditorium at Opera America, 330 Seventh Ave., NYC, to speak and read from my book, “Opera as Opera,” converse about related subjects with Mr. Scorca, and conduct some Q & A. There will be books for sale (sorry, can’t do credit cards), and these will be the only books available for a few weeks, because . . .

ANNOUNCEMENT NO. 2: The initial print run of “Opera as Opera” is SOLD OUT! The pace of sales was much faster than projected. A second printing is scheduled , but owing to a very heavy schedule at the printer’s, books will not be ready to ship till around November 1. We will of course post the exact shipping date as soon as it’s firm. You can still pre-order for this second printing, and be sure of a copy being reserved for you.

˜ ˜ ˜ 

In my last post, I wrote about some of the principles of Epic Theatre, transmitted to us  principally via the plays of Bertolt Brecht and by the copious theoretical literature about them  by the author himself and by followers, critics, and scholars. Being engaged here with opera, I was interested primarily in the way that some of these principles, especially that of a Separation of Elements, continue to exercise influence on that artform, and in the strange fact that this influence has been more on the production of operas quite incompatible with those principles than in the creation of new operas of Epic character. And I noted that Brecht published his formulation in its most direct and succinct form in relation not to one of his plays, but to the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which he and composer Kurt Weill premiered in 1930. ^(I)

Since Brecht was the most important German playwright of his time and a highly regarded poet as well, and since (like Stanislavski, but unlike, say, Reinhardt or even Meyerhold) he wrote out at length his theories on theatre, acting, and music, his ideas have always been before us, and in definitive form. But he was not the only artist writing on the new directions for theatre and opera (and, eventually, on Mahagonny itself) in the aesthetic maelstrom of Weimar Germany. Weill was no mean essayist in his own right, and between 1925 (before his first meeting with Brecht) and 1929 he turned out over a hundred articles for Der Deutsche Rundfunk (the magazine of the then-new German broadcasting system) and other journals. These, however, were never gathered in book form, and simply dropped from sight after the ascension of the Nazis. Since the 1950s, musicologists and other scholars have worked to restore to Weill his independence of thought and to correct the common impression that in the Weill/Brecht collaboration, Brecht did everything but write down the notes. (An overview of Weill’s musical thinking at this time, and translations of some of his articles, can be found in Kim Kowalke’s Kurt Weill in Europe.) With respect to Mahagonny: as Brecht himself rather glumly concluded, it’s an opera, and, brilliant and convention-defying as Brecht’s libretto for it is, in an opera the music is the final determinant of viability.