WHEN Scottish Opera performed Kurt Weill's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny back in the 1980s, director David Alden placed the opening scene in Margaret Thatcher's 10 Downing Street kitchen.
Such was the apparent extremism of right-wing Thatcherism at the time that the irony wasn't lost on an opera satirising a mythical American desert town where every man is out for himself; where lumberjack Jimmy Mahoney gets roasted on the electric c
hair for not being able to pay his bills while Toby Higgins, with enough means to buy off the court, gets a mere slap on the wrist for committing murder; where money is God, judge and executioner.
Well, here we are in credit crunch times, and had this year's opening International Festival event – a concert performance of Weill and Berthold Brecht's gripping 1930 collaboration – been a fully-fledged stage production of the opera, the temptation would have been to go down a similar contemporary route. After all, when Mahagonny's sordid economy dives into recession, it's the time of reckoning and bills have to be settled. No money, no sympathy.
It's an irony that tonight's conductor, the colourfully eccentric Viennese composer and self-styled chansonnier HK Gruber, instantly acknowledges. …Mahagonny is, he concurs, "an opera of our time – ageless". But updating is not a road he would ever personally choose to go down. In fact, while …Mahagonny is a work he would drop absolutely anything to conduct, his preference has always been to perform it unstaged, where the music and text speak for themselves without any interpretational clutter getting in the way.
This is exactly how it will be presented at the Usher Hall tonight, when Gruber directs the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus along with a solo cast that includes Susan Bickley, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Giselle Allen and (replacing the indisposed Willard White) Alan Opie, as Weill's promiscuous menagerie of prostitutes, gamblers and criminals. Those familiar with Gruber's work will know what to expect – nothing less than the idiosyncratic.
"I discovered the opera not long after discovering Weill's music for the very first time," he recalls. That was in 1963 when, as a 20-year-old composer searching for an escape from a rigorous musical indoctrination into Schoenberg's 12-note techniques, Gruber chanced upon some recordings of Weill's music in a Viennese record shop, initially discovering the better-known Threepenny Opera and the symphonies.
"But hitting upon …Mahagonny was a moment of genuine enlightenment. I simply couldn't put it down. I listened to it each day, and now after 40 years I really have this opera in my heart, in my brain, in my memory. From the very first day I dreamt of being a conductor, I wanted to conduct …Mahagonny not as a stage piece, but as an oratorio."
That was largely to do with Gruber's general dissatisfaction with opera. "I never could understand what the singers were singing. In most operatic performances, you got the text better from the box office programme, never from the singers. But here was this record with Lotte Lenya and other singers from the 1950s. When music and text come together like that it creates an imaginary theatre, and one that doesn't cost a penny!"
The …Mahagonny moment was also a defining one in shaping the way that Vienna-born Gruber – brought up among the ranks of the exclusive Vienna Boys Choir before embarking on a traditional musical training – was to shape the character of his own music.
"To that point I had felt terrorised by the Second Viennese School, especially Schoenberg, who was effectively saying to the world, 'I have discovered a musical technique which enables us to dominate the world for the next 100 years.' I thought, 'Is that a goal for composers, to dominate countries?' What a fascistic idea for a Viennese composer whose name is Schoenberg and who was Jewish. I found that absolutely scandalous."
Gruber was more naturally drawn to the gritty, urban style of Weill and Hans Eisler, both members of the so-called November group in Berlin whose political affiliations, like Brecht's, were very left wing. Their main goal, and the one that appealed immensely to the impressionable Gruber, was to simplify music in order to reach the masses.
At which point in our conversation Gruber leaps up and bursts into a verse of Eisler's militant Solidarity Song. "I discovered through both these guys that, as a composer, your goal must be to find your own voice, your own language, and write what you want to hear and what you can hear," he explains.
In declaring his fondness for such agitprop influences, Gruber is not debunking Schoenberg and the formalist Viennese avant-garde, merely stating his preferences. "The culture of the Weimar Republic was like a big, big bomb," he adds. "A movement that would normally have required 50 years to develop was squeezed into 15 – everything from the Expressionists and Bauhaus artists to the jazz influence flooding in from America."
The last of these appealed directly to Weill. As a composer who was later to find fame as an exile in New York's world of musical theatre, he soaked up jazz and assimilated it into his own masterpieces. It was a popular formula. Up to 1933, Weill and Paul Hindemith were the acknowledged torchbearers of new music in Germany. It was not unusual for one of Weill's operas, for instance, to be premiered in three major cities on the same night. He became very rich as a result. But it all changed when the Nazis burned the Reichstag and expelled the Jews from Germany, Weill included. At the age of 33, he and Lenya fled to Paris, then on to America, with only a suitcase of scores.
"He was a genius boy," declares Gruber, who views …Mahagonny as unquestionable evidence of us. "He was only 30 when it was premiered in 1930, and 26 when he first put the ideas down on paper as the original Mahagonny Songspiel, a concert sequence based on songs by Brecht. But it was Weill's idea, not Brecht's, to turn the …Songspiel into an opera where there would be no arias in the traditional sense, only songs, and a libretto in which the biggest crime was being poor."
As with the premature curtailment of Weill's career in Germany, performances of …Mahagonny stopped after 1933. It was only when renewed interest in Weill in the 1980s – including a critically acclaimed production of …Mahagonny at the New York Metropolitan Opera – brought his music back into vogue that the opera's fundamental and ageless message could once again make its political and moral mark.
For Gruber, though, the message was never lost. "It's there in the music," he says. "All you have to do is listen."
HK Gruber conducts The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny tonight at the Usher Hall. It will be reviewed in later editions of tomorrow's newspaper.
