In times of uncertainty, particularly under the growing threat of totalitarianism, utopian fantasies provide a way to reflect on the situation and, potentially, outline a path toward a positive outcome. This is shown, for instance, in two operas that premiered during the twilight of the Weimar Republic, Der Silbersee: ein Wintermärchen (The Silver Lake: A Winter’s Tale, 1933) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930). Both featured music composed by Kurt Weill, and both fashioned utopian settings for their audiences.

“In them we find utopia depicted—as subject matter, as represented desire, and, crucially, as theme of transformation and agency,” writes Robert Hunter. The operas combined cultural form, social intention, and political possibility in a context marked by the thriving subcultures of the Weimar era, the impact of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the rise of fascism and National Socialism, and the challenge of socialist movements. Both works addressed precarious conditions and, in the case of The Silver Lake, the hope of saving the future.

“They did this through the reshaping of a new music, a new theater, for a new audience with a new social purpose,” writes Hunter.

Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht (libretto) developed The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, henceforth noted as Mahagonny, from a songspiel (literally, “song-play”) they had premiered in Baden-Baden in 1927.

“Weill and Brecht located Mahagonny’s parable of capitalism in Utopia, manifested as content, as subject matter,” Hunter writes, noting that Weill described the “paradise city” of Mahagonny as “a contemporary idyll riven by discontent and the threat of natural disaster.” Within the opera, a character describes Mahagonny as the “City of Nets”: It attracts those alienated by the modern metropolis. Weill weaves in twenty-one musical tableaux that he referred to as “morality pictures of our time,” all devoid of a conventional narrative arc. There’s “no character development, no plot intrigue or suspense over what comes next,” Hunter writes.

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Mahagonny is “a mythical place at once historical and contemporary: it resonates with the biblical cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, or Babylon; it draws upon folk representations of Cockaigne and its German equivalent, Schlaraffenland,” he observes.

The city sounds too good to be true, and indeed, its nature disturbs the character Jimmy Mahoney, who claims that there “not a man will ever be happy / because too much peace reigns / and too much harmony / and because there is too much / on which you can depend.” When singing about a forecast hurricane, he states that “we need no hurricane / we need no typhoon / for the horrors it can bring / that we ourselves can do.”

Once the hurricane arrives and leaves, the denizens of Mahagonny engage in “gluttony, sexual prostitution, prizefighting, drunkenness—desire represented here as its conflation with appetite and the corrupted conditions for its gratification,” as Hunter describes it. Jimmy is eventually arrested and sentenced to death for failing to pay for a round of drinks. No one steps up to cover his tab. As characters look for an alternative city to settle in, they consider Benares, but alas, it had been destroyed by an earthquake.

“So much for hope then,” Hunter writes.

Mahagonny presents a parable that could easily translate across in space and in time, but The Silver Lake, with Weill’s music and a libretto by Georg Kaiser, specifically focuses on the condition of Germany in the twilight of the Weimar Republic. With its subtitle “A Winter’s Tale,” the opera is framed by Kaiser and Weill as a social critique in the guise of a fantasy, guided by the themes of social solidarity and reparation for injustice.

These ideas are laid out early in the first act, when an encounter between a policeman, Olim, and a fruit-stand thief, Severin, is presented to the audience. Severin, somewhat inexplicably, attempts to shoplift a pineapple (“an exotic promise of future happiness,” Hunter interprets). Olim, who shoots and wounds Severin, spends some time trying to figure out the thief’s motivation. Why steal exotic fruit instead of “real” food? Prompted by the chorus, Olim decides Severin is no ordinary thief. In fact, Olim owes him restitution for the bullet wound. Olim can’t save the world from cruelties like hunger, but he can save Severin—in theory. “If only I had money!” he laments.

Ultimately, Olim stands for political social democracy, Hunter explains. Severin, on the other hand, represents the revolutionary proletariat. The fortune that Olim later wins in the lottery represents the resources of the state. Rounding out the character lineup is Frau von Luber, an erstwhile aristocrat who’s reduced to being the housekeeper in newly wealthy Olim’s castle—which used to belong to her. This turnabout symbolizes the fate of the Wilhelmine aristocracy, while von Luber’s niece, Fennimore, is an agent of reconciliation and hope who “dreams of liberation from the ties of kinship as a necessary prelude to wider social solidarity.”

By the end of Mahagonny, the characters haven’t undergone any significant transformation: Jimmy is left to his execution, Mahagonny is destroyed.

“This is entirely in keeping with a work whose content from first to last is a determined negation of a decayed capitalist order, with no aim ‘to fill in the outlines of a future world,’” writes Hunter.

This contrasts with The Silver Lake, in which Olim and Severin undergo significant change, and their solidarity and reconciliation represent a “positive message of a reconstituted humanity and social order.” When von Luber manages to take over the castle and drive the two men out, they wade through a winter storm, headed toward a silver lake. Winter magically turns into spring even as a layer of ice miraculously allows them to cross the titular lake.

The Silver Lake’s “message of ‘informed hope’ for the future could still resonate today, but perhaps less loudly than in 1933 given the specificity of its historical argument, when its reference points were sharply present in the social discourse of its audience in Germany,” writes Hunter. “By contrast, freed—at least in its setting—from its limitation to its place of origin, Mahagonny’s utopianism today might inhere in a number of features, as long as we keep them in mind as a sort of template for new production rather than a copy of the original.”

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