The Mahagonny-Gesänge were five texts Bertolt Brecht published in 1926. Brecht and Weill were busy enlarging their idea of the City of Mahagonny—a mythic, wide-open frontier city in America—into an opera when they were asked to contribute to an evening of short chamber operas. They decided to use the "Gesänge" as a "style study" for the opera project and Weill set the Brecht texts, adding an epilogue. The resulting "Songspiel" was given a simple staging. It is in Weill's cabaret-like style, including two English-language songs, somehow capturing the decadence of late 1920s Berlin. The original version has a remarkable formal cogency. This and the full-length opera (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) are the only authentic versions. In 1932 Weill sanctioned an extended version of the Songspiel devised by Maurice de Abravanel, which added a few numbers from the opera. He probably did so as a stopgap because any prospect for staging the opera had by that time disappeared. A 1960 mushing together of the Songspiel and texts and music from the opera into a kind of theater piece with incidental music, called Das kleine Mahagonny should be considered inauthentic.

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