Royal Opera’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny review: far too well behaved

Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one years separate them, but it seems, as one looks back, enormously more than that. Think of 1994 and now, no time at all, and not only for an ageing opera reviewer. Both works tend to be routinely referred to as masterpieces, but seeing them both in the space of three days — Mahagonny at the Royal Opera, The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music — I felt fairly strongly that they are both patchy pieces, neither representative of their composer at or even near his best. What is most interesting about them is their relationship to other music, both of their own time and of the preceding period; and both are clearly at least half in love with what they seem to be rejecting, both musically and — since both of them are heavily moralistic — morally.