The Whole of the Law

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht were both residents of Berlin in the late 1920s when they started work on the modest cantata that would -with much revision and expansion- eventually become Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, and it is certainly possible that their own city served as a source of inspiration for the frontier town of unbridled vice that forms the setting of the opera. Nearly a century later, as Berlin strides towards what is certain to be an intolerable half-decade of post-pandemic excess, Mahagonny would seem an ideal cautionary tale to throw in its path. While Barrie Kosky’s tremendously bleak new production -which opened the Komische Oper’s new season- held nothing back in its depiction of licentiousness, it ended up being less a critique of a declining society than a dark parable on the dangers of attempting to assert…