The Music of Change: Utopian Transformation in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Der Silbersee

On the cusp of the Weimar Republic's transition to the Nazi era the production and public reception of these works of music theater by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Kaiser embody the social and ideological conditions of the time and were founded on a critique of these same conditions.

Weill's and Brecht's opera unfolds in a mythical place which serves as a parable for capitalist utopia/dystopia, Mahagonny being the emblematic city of dreams and disillusionment. Kaiser's play, with music by Weill, takes utopian longings as its subject in various ways, from petty bourgeois aspirations to liberation for the workers. Silbersee combines a sharp political allegory about the rise of Nazism with a symbolist drama about the promise of a better world.

Using examples of Weill's music this article will explore how these works dramatize Utopia as explicitly modelled content, represented desire and transformative agency.