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Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

Anyone who does not enjoy himself in Mahagonny has only himself to blame. For in the paradise city constructed in the opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, everything is permitted. Boundless pleasures, intoxication to excess. Gorging, boxing, boozing, love-making – anything goes. Only one thing is strictly forbidden: being unable to pay at the end. This is the experience of the pleasure seeker Paul Ackermann, who ends up on the electric chair. Brecht/Weill’s Mahagonnyopera is a series of large-scale images from the workshops of epic musical theatre: anarchical protest and caustic social criticism. Kurt Weill’s apparently simple but always ambiguous music gains a zany momentum as it dances above the abyss, ranging from the tone of high opera to adaptations of shimmy and foxtrot rhythms to choral pastiche. Brecht wrote that the opera was culinary, but that it also put the culinary up for debate. It attacks a society that needs such operas. It is both an opera and an anti-opera, and ends with the demise of the “you can” paradise: it chokes on itself. Mahagonny has lost none of its topicality since its 1930 première, which was one of the biggest scandals in operatic history. Today, the laws of human happiness that Paul Ackermann discovers at a moment of great crisis can be read as a paean to 21^st-century turbo-capitalism: “Take the money – you can!”

Our new production will be staged by the experienced Brecht director Sebastian Baumgarten, who achieved great artistic success at Zurich Opera House two years ago with Wolfgang Rihm’s Hamletmaschine. Could the flamboyant character part of Widow Begbick be more attractively cast as the star soprano Karita Mattila? The Finnish grande dame will be singing for the first time in an opera production at Zurich Opera House, débuting in the role of the determined founder of the city and bawd. The wonderful German soprano Annette Dasch will be giving her role début as the whore Jenny. Fabio Luisi will conduct this work, which he specifically requested.

They were last to be seen as Elsa and Lohengrin on the stage of Zurich Opera House, and will now return to Zurich as Leonore and Florestan: South African soprano Elza van den Heever and German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt. At the centre of Andreas Homoki’s compelling Fidelio production is the strong and courageous Leonore, who insinuates herself into a state prison disguised as a man by the name of Fidelio in order to free her husband Florestan. Beethoven’s only opera was written over a ten-year period as a work in progress. It combines Singspiel elements with those of dramatic opera, and ends with a piece of music that not only lends prodigious expression to the idea of liberation, but also already anticipates the Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy. Andreas Homoki has removed the plot from its petit bourgeois, light opera context, telling the story in an abstract prison space and thus focusing on the utopian idea of universal brotherhood and global humanity that is at the core of Beethoven’s work. Simone Young, who has already conducted the Philharmonia Zurich in Wagner’s Lohengrin, will be at the rostrum for this revival.

They were last to be seen as Elsa and Lohengrin on the stage of Zurich Opera House, and will now return to Zurich as Leonore and Florestan: South African soprano Elza van den Heever and German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt. At the centre of Andreas Homoki’s compelling Fidelio production is the strong and courageous Leonore, who insinuates herself into a state prison disguised as a man by the name of Fidelio in order to free her husband Florestan. Beethoven’s only opera was written over a ten-year period as a work in progress. It combines Singspiel elements with those of dramatic opera, and ends with a piece of music that not only lends prodigious expression to the idea of liberation, but also already anticipates the Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy. Andreas Homoki has removed the plot from its petit bourgeois, light opera context, telling the story in an abstract prison space and thus focusing on the utopian idea of universal brotherhood and global humanity that is at the core of Beethoven’s work. Simone Young, who has already conducted the Philharmonia Zurich in Wagner’s Lohengrin, will be at the rostrum for this revival.

They were last to be seen as Elsa and Lohengrin on the stage of Zurich Opera House, and will now return to Zurich as Leonore and Florestan: South African soprano Elza van den Heever and German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt. At the centre of Andreas Homoki’s compelling Fidelio production is the strong and courageous Leonore, who insinuates herself into a state prison disguised as a man by the name of Fidelio in order to free her husband Florestan. Beethoven’s only opera was written over a ten-year period as a work in progress. It combines Singspiel elements with those of dramatic opera, and ends with a piece of music that not only lends prodigious expression to the idea of liberation, but also already anticipates the Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy. Andreas Homoki has removed the plot from its petit bourgeois, light opera context, telling the story in an abstract prison space and thus focusing on the utopian idea of universal brotherhood and global humanity that is at the core of Beethoven’s work. Simone Young, who has already conducted the Philharmonia Zurich in Wagner’s Lohengrin, will be at the rostrum for this revival.

They were last to be seen as Elsa and Lohengrin on the stage of Zurich Opera House, and will now return to Zurich as Leonore and Florestan: South African soprano Elza van den Heever and German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt. At the centre of Andreas Homoki’s compelling Fidelio production is the strong and courageous Leonore, who insinuates herself into a state prison disguised as a man by the name of Fidelio in order to free her husband Florestan. Beethoven’s only opera was written over a ten-year period as a work in progress. It combines Singspiel elements with those of dramatic opera, and ends with a piece of music that not only lends prodigious expression to the idea of liberation, but also already anticipates the Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy. Andreas Homoki has removed the plot from its petit bourgeois, light opera context, telling the story in an abstract prison space and thus focusing on the utopian idea of universal brotherhood and global humanity that is at the core of Beethoven’s work. Simone Young, who has already conducted the Philharmonia Zurich in Wagner’s Lohengrin, will be at the rostrum for this revival.

They were last to be seen as Elsa and Lohengrin on the stage of Zurich Opera House, and will now return to Zurich as Leonore and Florestan: South African soprano Elza van den Heever and German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt. At the centre of Andreas Homoki’s compelling Fidelio production is the strong and courageous Leonore, who insinuates herself into a state prison disguised as a man by the name of Fidelio in order to free her husband Florestan. Beethoven’s only opera was written over a ten-year period as a work in progress. It combines Singspiel elements with those of dramatic opera, and ends with a piece of music that not only lends prodigious expression to the idea of liberation, but also already anticipates the Ninth Symphony’s Ode to Joy. Andreas Homoki has removed the plot from its petit bourgeois, light opera context, telling the story in an abstract prison space and thus focusing on the utopian idea of universal brotherhood and global humanity that is at the core of Beethoven’s work. Simone Young, who has already conducted the Philharmonia Zurich in Wagner’s Lohengrin, will be at the rostrum for this revival.