Sfida alle convenzioni “gastronomiche” del teatro d’opera: “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny” di Kurt Weill e Bertolt Brecht

• Main Author: Anna Ficarella
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: University of Bologna 2016-12-01
• Series: Musica Docta
• Subjects: Epic musical theatre; Kurt Weill; Bertolt Brecht; Estrangement; Intermediality
• Online Access: https://musicadocta.unibo.it/article/view/6584

An unconventional work like Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, written by Weill and Brecht between 1927 and 1930, provides an opportunity to address, through a multi-disciplinary didactic approach, a crucial moment in the evolution of opera theatre in the German cultural area in the years immediately following WWI. In the Germany of those years, operatic and theatrical institutions had been undermined both by the impact of the new media, above all by silent cinema, and by the disruptive social pressure of urban mass culture during the Weimar Republic. In this context, the ‘epic’ model of musical dramaturgy developed by Brecht and Weill in Mahagonny appears as an attempt to renew, or possibly reject altogether, the 19th-century work by using its very means.