World Theater, Opera, and Performance: Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht | "Moon Over Alabama" ("Alabama Song") from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny / 1930

Listening yesterday to over 10 versions of Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s central song in their Sprechstimme operetta, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), I realized that this just pre-Hitler work (the music was composed in the late 1920s), was perhaps the culmination of the Weimar Republic’s cynical visions of the need for alcohol, love, and, most importantly, money. There has never been a more cynical song, particularly in its bid of goodbye to the “moon over Alabama,” which remains also simply a beautiful ballad. It’s a song that you can hate and love equally, yet you want to listen to over and over again. And apparently anyone, with a good voice and the guts to perform such a raunchy piece, has attempted it.

Lotte Lenya, the original singer, still sounds best to me, with her raspy German cabaret voice; she was after all the composer’s wife, a perfect interpreter, which, in one recording, Weill performs alongside her. But you can’t not love David Bowie’ (I have included only one of at least performances by Bowie), Marianne Faithfull’s, and Audra McDonald’s later performance of it.

Nina Simone tunes it down, actually using the Sprechstimme techniques to tell the story of the early choruses, before suddenly breaking into her wonderful renditions of the “Moon of Alabama” interjections. She’s also such a wonderful pianist that she can torture all the dissonance out of the song. The Doors’ version may be one of the best! Patti Lupone (whose version I’ve not included) turns it, alas, into a winking travesty. But Nina Hagen does an almost drag version, which is perhaps not a bad interpretation of the women who want whiskey, pretty boys, and dollars as fast as they can get them—or they will die:

Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar!

Oh don't ask why,

Oh don't ask why!

For we must find the next whiskey bar

For if we don't find the next whiskey bar,

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mamma

And must have whiskey

Oh, you know why.

Oh show us the way to the next pretty boy!

Oh don't ask why

Oh, don't ask why!

For we must find the next pretty boy

For if we don't find the next pretty boy

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mama

And must have boys

Oh, you know why.

Oh show us the way to the next little dollar!

Oh don't ask why,

oh don't ask why!

For we must find the next little dollar

For if we don't find the next little dollar

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mama

And must have dollars

Oh, you know why.

This is a world in which everything important of the past has died, and the survivors expect that they won’t survive either, the fact of which, obviously was borne out in Hitler’s World War II destructions of his own people; yet here, the same fate is projected onto the American experience.

It’s utterly amazing to me how such a truly ugly view of the world is rendered tragically beautiful in Kurt Weill’s version, with its memory of the moon of Alabama constantly vying with the terrible demands of human sexuality, drugs, and need of money. This song is a lesson in human failure and depravity without consigning its singers to Hell. No American-born writer could possibly write such a remarkable piece of music, I am certain. It came right out of the raw Weimar experience, even though it pretends to be in a fantasy America somewhere between Alaska and Alabama.

Los Angeles, February 27, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2018).

World Theater, Opera, and Performance

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Friday, January 24, 2025

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht | "Moon Over Alabama" ("Alabama Song") from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny / 1930

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