Three - “Something Like Opera”

Summary

“It is the miracle of the man's gift that it all hangs together,” wrote Blitzstein in a 1958 review of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, “becomes natural, even inevitable.” Blitzstein, according to his own account, first encountered Aufstieg through a piano score in 1930. In November of 1936 he met with Weill and Brecht to try to arrange a Broadway performance in New York. Six years later, Weill wrote to Lenya, “it seems those pansies will never forget that I turned them down with Mahagonny!” After Weill died, Blitzstein remained on the case, writing but never completing three different drafts of an adaptation called The Rise and Fall of Magnet City from 1957 to 1962.

Weill described the score of Aufstieg as “a series of 21 closed forms” or “a stringing together of situations” which “yield a dramatic form only in the musically fixed, dynamic sequence.” In adapting the Songspiel into a fullscale opera, he maintained the genre of Song as a building block or musical unit while weaving numbers into a macro-structure that could “sustain an entire evening.” The resulting form, despite the “astringent dissonance” noted by Blitzstein, holds together eclectic material through classical principles, subverting tradition while renewing it for the future in a Busonian vein.

With Street Scene, Weill further developed this aesthetic principle. If the surreal story about the fictional city of Mahagonny becomes a realist tale at a Manhattan tenement, he cast an even wider net, showing that he could toss off a number in any style and still create a unified whole. Hinton notes that “Street Scene is not only an opera about the city; like Mahagonny, it was conceived for the city.” Downes, while noting “the extraordinary evolution” of the composer “from the sophistications of the (professed) avant-garde” in the Mahagonny-Songspiel to “plain, direct, emotional expression” in his January 1947 review, also pointed to a certain continuity with Street Scene, which he called “the most important step toward significantly American opera”: “we are given to wonder whether it is not the very artist coming here from a European social and cultural background who will be quickest to perceive in its full significance an aspect of American life; and feel it as those who always have been in its vicinity might not.”