Apontamentos ecocríticos sobre a peça Mahagonny, de Bertolt Brecht

Abstract

This article presents the musical “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”, dating from the Golden Age of collaboration between Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill in Germany. Our ecocritical reading of the libretto is focusing on the treatment that elements of the natural world receive in the opera and on the human – nature relationship in general. We analyze the threat of destruction of the city by a hurricane in relation to the idea of the sublime formulated by Kant and Schiller and taken up by Lyotard two hundred years later. Finally, we return to the question of the human - nature relationship in the play in order to raise the basic problem that strikes us today: planetary environmental destruction resulting from the globalization of the model named Mahagonny.