136. Ich Habe Gelernt (I Have Learned)

Lotte Lenya & Heinz Sauerbaum with Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg, cond.: Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Columbia, 1956);
composed by Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht

This 1930 opera – a fable about an imagined (and geographically confused) American city where the only punishable offense is not being able to pay your bills – was the last project Weill and Brecht did together before Weill bridled at Brecht’s much-harder-left politics and went his own way – and very shortly before both of them had to run for it upon the advent of the Austrian corporal. Not nearly as well-known as Threepenny Opera, it shows the strain of having been expanded from a shorter piece (the Mahagonny-Songspiel). To my ears, the expansion resulted in a comparatively draggy second half, but the first half is a treasure house. The best-known number is the “Alabama-Song” (covered by the Doors), but the prize is this brief anomalous duet between a prostitute and the hapless protagonist Jimmy. After haggling over the fee, she says, “I have learned, whenever I meet a man, to ask him what he is used to. Therefore tell me how you would like me to be.” Accompanied by a solo saxophone playing one of the most melancholy melodies ever written, he tells her. When asked about her wishes, she replies, “It is perhaps too soon to talk of them.”

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.