The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny to Premiere in Fine Arts

The premiere in Mexico of Rise and fall of the city of Mahagonny, Considered one of the most transgressive operatic scores of the 20th century – due to its artistic proposal and corrosive criticism of capitalism –, it will be the first title of the 2026 Season of the National Opera Company (CNO).

The work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill will be presented at the Palace of Fine Arts under the stage direction of Marcelo Lombardero and the baton of Srba Dinić starting on Sunday, with three more performances, until the 29th.

Maintaining the tradition, established last year, of releasing emblematic titles from the 20th and 21st centuries, the institution has set its sights on this work that, almost 100 years after its creation – it was written between 1927 and 1929 –, returns to the scene with its “overwhelming validity”, according to its makers.

“Mahagonny “It is much more than an opera,” Lombardero said at a press conference. “It is the artistic, ideological and aesthetic struggle between two giants of the last century: Brecht, the great theater reformer, and Weill, a chameleonic composer who came from the post-romantic tradition, but decided to embrace popular music.”

The work tells the story of three fugitives from justice who found a city in the United States desert, an exotic place for the European imagination of the interwar period. The city offers itself as a refuge for those seeking unlimited pleasure, but soon the rules are revealed in all their crudeness: everything is allowed, except not paying debts.

Intensive use of technology

The premiere in Mexico has its antecedents: it emerged in the middle of the last decade due to the collaboration between the Municipal Theater of Santiago de Chile, the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires and the Teatro Mayor of Bogotá.

Also directed by Lombardero, it premiered in Chile in 2016, passed through Argentina in 2017 and was revived in Colombia in 2018. “Rescued” for Mexico, the proposal updates the Brechtian aesthetic through intensive use of technology.

The city is represented as “a gigantic reality show“, in a game about virtuality and the difficulty of distinguishing what is real from what is fictitious in the era of social networks and artificial intelligence, described the stage director. “There is a large screen where the scenery is embodied and virtualized,” he said.

One of the axes of this CNO season is the prominence of local artists: “80 percent of the cast is Mexican, from the house.” Lombardero stressed that he follows the line of 2025, when installations like the one in Elektra They demonstrated “the solvency” of the national interpreters.

The concert director, Srba Dinić, explained the musical challenges of the work. “You cannot speak of a single style (…) There is a after fleeing by Bach, an almost neoclassical duet, a romantic aria with demanding high notes, but also almost atonal music and echoes of the Berlin cabaret of the 1930s.”

He stressed that, in the almost 80 operas in which he has participated, he has never done anything like it. “The orchestra incorporates unusual instruments: banjo, mandolin, saxophones, bandoneon and a fortepiano that plays almost the entire work.”

Srba, who had not participated in an opera production at the Fine Arts Theater since 2019, after leaving his position as director of the Fine Arts Theater Orchestra, admitted his excitement about this return. “Working again with the orchestra and choir (of Bellas Artes) is something I can’t describe,” he said.

Beyond the musical, the premiere in Mexico comes at a time of special political and social resonance. Lombardero established parallels between Brecht’s fiction and the present.

“The work talks about the crisis of the system (…) At one point, the protagonist declares the new laws: if you want money and you see someone with it, take it; if you see a house and you like it, go into it. It is the individualistic discourse, the ‘every man for himself’ that we see in so many places today.”0

He explained that the installation involves a considerable investment, although part of the costs are reduced as it is an already existing production. “In general terms, producing an opera in the world costs between 300 and 500 thousand dollars, including copyright, cast, set design and production,” he explained.