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This March will mark 120 years since Kurt Weill’s birth in the German city of Dessau, and 90 years since the premiere of his final collaboration with the influential Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Such an anniversary, one would presume, is responsible for the recent resurgence in demand for his work. But Markus Stenz, who will be conducting Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny with the Dutch National Opera early next year, believes there is more to it than simply nostalgia. “I do think the piece is incredibly relevant in our times,” he tells me over the phone from Germany. “The subject themes are as present today as they were back then, and I’m fully expecting the production to hit that chord. There’s no way you can do an historic version and not be aware of the bridge between our times.”
He should know. This isn’t the first time he’s been in the pit for Mahagonny. Back in the early 1990s, whilst chief conductor of the London Sinfonietta, Stenz took part in a production at the Staatsoper Stuttgart with legendary director Ruth Berghaus. The Berlin Wall had come down three years before, but the wounds of division still oozed, and East German-born Berghaus would have been well aware of the present-day connotations of Brecht’s caustic libretto.
Read the rest of the interview here…