Kurt Weill: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929)

Kurt Weill (right) and Bertolt Brecht

Like The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a satirical opera, with a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht.  The music was finished in the spring of 1929, but the work was not premiered for another year.

Despite being written for operatic voices, Weill said that The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny “pays conscious tribute to the irrationality of the operatic form”.  He thought operas had become too full of ritual and lacked substance, and Mahagonny, in part, sought to deflate the “arrogance” of traditional opera. With this aim, many traditional operatic themes are subverted and made grotesque; love becomes a commodity and the law is run by criminals.

In 1933 performances of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny were banned by the Nazis, and no significant productions were performed until the 1960s.  Since then it has played in opera houses around the world. Though never achieving the popularity of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny is still considered a work of stature with a haunting score.

1929…

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

– Al Capone

Vatican City

On 11th February 1929, the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See of the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Treaty to establish the Vatican City as an independent sovereign enclave within Rome.  The Pope was pledged to perpetual neutrality in international relations and to abstention from mediation in a controversy unless specifically requested by all parties. Italy was under a Fascist government at the time; but the succeeding democratic governments have all upheld the treaty. In 1947, the Lateran Pacts were incorporated into the democratic Constitution of Italy.

The “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place on 14^th February 1929. Seven mob associates were murdered as part of a Prohibition-era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by Bugs Moran.

Al Capone

Al Capone’s men, dressed as police officers, “raided” the Moran headquarters, lining the seven victims along a wall before shooting with machine guns.  No one was ever brought to trial for the crime; however Capone’s reputation was greatly damaged by the event.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 began in late October and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, when taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout.  The crash signalled the beginning of the 10-year Great Depression that affected all Western industrialised countries and did not end in the United States until the onset of World War II.

The crash brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt.

Also in 1929…

The first Academy Awards were presented on 16th May 1929 in a fifteen minute ceremony at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, honouring the best movies of the previous two years. Tickets cost five dollars and around 270 people attended the event which included a private dinner. Emil Jannings was the first person to ever receive an Academy Award, winning Best Actor for the films The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command and the 1927 film Wings won Best Picture.  This was the only Academy Awards ceremony not to be broadcast on television.

1929 saw the first appearances of two famous comic strip heroes – Tintin and Popeye.

Tintin

Tintin was created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé and was introduced in Le Petit Vingtième a weekly children’s supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle.  Tintin was most recently brought to life in the 2011 film The Adventures of Tintin, which was directed by Stephen Spielberg and produced by Sir Peter Jackson.

Popeye

Popeye first appeared in the daily comic strip Thimble Theatre. Although Thimble Theatre was in its tenth year already, the muscled, spinach-loving sailor quickly became the main focus and Popeye became the strip’s title in later years. The popularity of Popeye helped boost spinach sales – a 2010 study revealed that children increased their vegetable consumption after watching Popeye cartoons. The spinach-growing community of Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of the character in recognition of Popeye’s positive effects on the spinach industry.

Born in 1929

Actresses Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, racing driver Graham Hill, athlete Roger Bannister, diarist Anne Frank, First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos, American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, British criminal Ronnie Biggs and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were all born in 1929.

Check out our Pinterest board for The Roaring 20s, for more images and video clips