kurt weill

kurt weill  Those to whom the name Kurt Weill means Threepenny Opera and little else could do much worse than to consult these two very different but nicely complementary recent books focusing on aspects (professional, amorous, and otherwise) of the German composer's life. The lives of musical composers are often admittedly of limited interest to non-musicologists, but Weill is exempt for several reasons. First, his career (he was born in 1900) follows the historical trajectory of this century in some remarkable ways, from his small-town German-Jewish upbringing as the prodigiously gifted son of a cantor, to his musical training under the twin influences of Busoni and Stravinsky, his ascent into the first ranks of the artistic avant-garde of the Weimar Republic, his vaunted collaboration with Brecht in Berlin, and finally to his exile in Paris and New York. Second, Weill's sharp mind and philosophical acuity on aesthetic and theatrical matters are evident throughout. Third, a veritable Kurt Weill renaissance is underway in this country at last. It's worth the effort to spend some time learning about Weill, the musician and the man. Kurt Schebera's book bills itself as "an illustrated life," but it is less a biography in the conventional sense (Schebera lacks all personal prurience and psychological interest and coyly refuses to dwell on incidents or deliver juicy details) than a sober, chronologically arranged documentation of Weill's career and compositions. His wife Lotte Lenya said of him, "For Weill there really was nothing but his music" (79), and indeed Schebera's Weill is a man of all-consuming and single-minded energy, restlessly pursuing project after project until his early death from a heart attack at age 50. For an oeuvre of such scope -- and the virtue of this study is to remind us how richly varied Weill's work was -- the documentary approach works well. The book is divided into three uneven parts. "The Early Years" outlines Weill's childhood in provincial Dessau (from his father he had both the musical talent and a deep loyalty to Jewish culture and spirituality), his studies with such luminaries as Humperdinck in Berlin and his first compositions, and in culmination the brief but tremendously influential time spent under the tutelage of the formidable Ferrucio Busoni who became Weill's first mentor. In 1922, Weill composed his first work for the theatre, the pantomime Die Zaubernacht, and made a discovery that became key to his work: "that the stage has its own musical form, which develops organically out of the flow of the plot, and that important events can truly be expressed only through the simplest, least conspicuous means" (42). Part 2, "Berlin," justifiably takes up the bulk of Schebera's book. The postwar capital was a maelstrom of cultural cross-currents, and Weill, the dedicated modernist (to his brother he wrote: "my imagination is not a bird, it is an airplane!" [19]) seems to have absorbed them all. Friendships with Expression‎ist playwrights Georg Kaiser and Yvan Goll led to collaborations on three one-act operas that critics quickly recognized as formally innovative and that primed Weill for his most celebrated association, that with Brecht. Unfortunately, Weill's uncanny, catalytic ability to collaborate with playwrights is largely left unexplored. But Schebera shows that it was Weill who initiated the Brecht contact and who pushed for the renewal of opera in Mahagonny, their first mutual project, hoping to give "appropriate expression‎ to the completely transformed manifestations of life in our time" (101-2). Threepenny Opera, completed at "lightning speed" (105), became the hit of 1928 and made both men wealthy... Kurt Weill was one of the most inventive and prominent composers for musical theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote for the German stage during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and for Broadway, after he emigrated to the United States (1935–1950). His stage works written on both sides of the Atlantic display remarkably versatile styles, including classicism and jazz. Best known for his collaborative efforts with dramatist-poet Bertolt Brecht for Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930), Weill enjoyed additional success with other playwrights and librettists who also conveyed the despair of Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s. A number of successful and innovative Broadway shows added to his reputation as the paramount composer active in modern theatre during the 1940s. Kurt Weill seems the opposite of a Modernist when compared with Schoenberg, or with the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s Doktor Faustus–composers who seem furiously to reject the warm-hearted, gemütlich aesthetic of much nineteenth-century art. But in such works as Die Dreigroschenoper and Der Jasager, Weill, like Thomas Mann himself, shows himself a Modernist of a sophisticated sort by devising a new sort of irony, an irony that does not reject bourgeois values but instead dwells in an interspace between derision and warmth. English and American Literature and Language Accepted Manuscript Die Jahre 1933 bis 1945, in denen Kurt Weill wie zahlreiche andere Künstler vor der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur die Flucht ins US-amerikanische Exil antrat, waren zugleich prägende Jahre für die Radiolandschaft in den USA. Aus vergröberter Sicht repräsentieren die Eckdaten dieser Periode die Etablierung des Radios als Massenmedium sowie seinen Bedeutungsverfall durch das Aufkommen des Fernsehens, wie er sich Mitte der vierziger Jahre zumindest abzuzeichnen begann. Wenn man also von einer goldenen Ära des amerikanischen Rundfunks spricht, dann mag dieser Zeitraum in etwa dem Kernstück der Epoche entsprechen. Der gleiche Zeitraum steht jedoch auch für eine Phase in den USA, die Barbara Zuck als »the final flowering of musical Americanism in all its aspects« bezeichnet hat.1 Mit der Besinnung auf nationale Ideale und der Loslösung von europäischen Einflüssen erwies sich dieser isolationistische »Americanism« als das genaue Gegenteil zum Amerikanismus europäischer Prägung, der in den zwanziger Jahren Liberalität und Aufbruchsstimmung symbolisiert hatte.2 Vor diesem — noch näher zu beleuchtenden — Hintergrund soll im folgenden untersucht werden, in welcher Weise Kurt Weill nach seiner Ankunft in den USA sich den amerikanischen Rundfunk als Betätigungsfeld erschließen konnte. Die relativ geringe Zahl seiner Rundfunkkompositionen scheint in einem Mißverhältnis zu seinem unermüdlichen Enthusiasmus für das Massenmedium zu stehen. What a marvellous sight, looking out the window during the rehearsal and seeing the students sitting around listening, some even singing the ‘Moritat’ [‘Mack the Knife’] already. I don’t think I will ever hear the music played as beautifully as when Lenny did it. It was so magical and effortless. lotte lenya So recalled Kurt Weill's widow about the performance of The Threepenny Opera at Brandeis University's Festival of the Creative Arts on 14 June 1952. The concert featured Bertolt Brecht and Weill's 1928 work, Die Dreigroschenoper, in an English translation by Marc Blitzstein, who also served as narrator. Nearly five thousand people filled the new Adolph Ullman Amphitheatre, and Lenya stopped the concert cold with her rendition of ‘Pirate Jenny’ (see Plate 15). The following year, a fully staged Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village. It ran for ninety-six performances, but closed because of a previous booking at the theatre. Reopening the following season, The Threepenny Opera ran for 2,611 performances to become (for a time) the longest-running musical in American history. Lenya won the Tony for best featured actress in a musical, and the production garnered a special Tony, highly unusual for an off-Broadway show. The conductor for the 1952 concert performance of The Threepenny Opera had been Leonard Bernstein, then a Brandeis faculty member. The concert proved a turning point for both Weill's and Bernstein's careers. Weill, who died in 1950 at the age of fifty, had fled Germany in 1933 and emigrated to the United States two years later. The Brandeis concert ushered in the so-called ‘Weill renaissance’ and the rediscovery of his German works by American audiences. The Threepenny Opera's ‘Mack the Knife’, in renditions by Louis Armstrong, Dick Hyman, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, successively climbed the hit parade to sell over ten million records. © Composed in 1929, with a libretto by Berthold Brecht, the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny numbers among Kurt Weill’s most important works for the stage, though as Jürgen Schebera has remarked, it may also be considered “the great antithesis of traditional opera.” Even as the work uses many of the trappings of opera—overture, bel canto arias, ensembles and chorus—it also employs jazz and cabaret tunes, some spoken dialogue, and eschews some of the narrative flow of traditional opera in favor of a sequence of twenty-one closed scenes. Moreover, courtesy of Brecht, Mahagonny also serves as a work of socio-political satire: an uncompromisingly severe critique of the contemporary bourgeoisie and capitalism, it offers a bleak and unironic portrayal of modern life and the self-interested pursuit of wealth. Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny is set somewhere in the American west, and tells the story of an opportunistic trio of fugitives who build a city in the desert, in the hopes of attracting nearby gold prospectors and their money. The city soon draws the disenfranchised and disaffected: “sharks,” including prostitutes like Jenny Smith and her girls, along with lumberjacks like Jimmy Mahoney and his friends. Mahoney soon begins to rail against the city’s strictures, advocating instead a philosophy of indulgence and permissiveness. After days of fighting, drinking, cavorting and gambling, he runs out of money, cannot pay his bills and is locked in jail. Following a farcical public trial, Jim is sentenced to death. As Jim goes to the electric chair and the city slowly descends into chaos, the residents of Mahagonny mock God—who cannot condemn them to hell because they are trapped in a kind of hell on Earth—and mourn their lot: they are doomed, unable to help themselves, or anyone else. The most striking differences between the DVD recordings of Mahagonny under review here—the Salzburger Festspiele and Teatro Real Madrid performances—are obvious from the outset. The Salzburg production is traditional: it is sung in the original German (with a few English numbers) and employs rather literal staging, setting the opera somewhere in the American west, roughly during the gold rush era, as the libretto suggests. The Madrid performance is very contemporary, combining modern dress with more abstract and provocative staging; it is also sung in English throughout. Ultimately, both interpretations are reasonable and valid. At Madrid, for instance, the opera opens with a completely bare stage, in accordance with the libretto’s references to a desert landscape; Mahagonny is then built up upon this barrenness, and the stage is gradually filled in with buildings. At Salzburg, the interpretation is more metaphorical: the opera opens with the stage awash in junk and garbage; the city is then literally and figuratively built upon this foundation of trash and corruption, which remains visually present in the background throughout. The soloists and orchestral performances on both DVDs are unimpeachable; the chorus on both discs is particularly strong. The Madrid version sounds a little warmer and fuller (it is a much more recent recording—the Salzburg performance was recorded in 1998, the Madrid performance in 2010), and Measha Brueggergosman as Jenny is an undeniable presence, both musically and dramatically (though some of her numbers, like the famous “Alabama Song” are over-sung and fuzzy). Salzburg is simply a very solid and traditional production, sticking close to the libretto, with consistently good singing in the main roles: Jerry Hadley as Jimmy and Catherine Malfitano as Jenny are especially well paired. Malfitano is also a more compelling Jenny: her world-weary prostitute is like a washed-out Carmen; Brueggergosman’s Jenny is less damaged and a little too robust. Ultimately, the Salzburg production, if less imaginative, feels truer to Weill’s and Brecht’s original intent, which was to bridge opera and popular musical theatre. By contrast, the Madrid production—while it features a powerful performance by Brueggergosman and nicely brings the opera’s nihilistic vision into the 21st century—is heavy, and ultimately more firmly rooted in the realm of art music. The Salzburg disc contains a full set of notes, including a biographical sketch of Weill, a short essay on... Between the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939, Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson began working together on a musical comedy entitledUlysses Africanus, which was intended to be performed on Broadway. The play tells anOdyssey-like story set in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Various problems attended attempts to stage the play, and the project was eventually abandoned. Weill and Anderson later mined the play for elements of plot and several songs that were subsequently incorporated intoLost in the Stars, their best know work. While several scholars have studied the music originally written for the play, no one has yet studied its relationship to theOdyssey. While in no sense a masterpiece of dramatic art,Ulyasses Africanus—if more widely known—would certainly win a modest place among twentieth-century works influenced by Homer’sOdyssey. With the resumption of musical life in Germany following World War I, three young composers came to the fore as the dominant members of the new republican generation: Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith. Ernst Krenek was the first of the three to produce what came to be called a Zeitoper, his Jonny spielt auf (1927), which attained an unprecedented success following its premiere in 1927. Weill and Hindemith then followed with Der Zar lasst sich photographieren (1928) and Neues vom Tage (1929), respectively. Though Zeitoper is a term which appears with some regularity in histories of this period, the term, generally translated as "topical opera," has never been adequately defined nor the genre thoroughly examined. This study attempts not only to define Zeitoper but to provide the context for its creation. The Zeitoper emerges as a genre which arose directly out of concerns on the part of these composers to prove their commitment to opera and to bring modern opera in to line with the spirit which characterized the new republican age. Thus Zeitopern are of modern life in their choice of subject matter and characters, scene settings, staging, and musical idioms. Essays by Krenek and Weill give proof of their aesthetic aims, and Hindemith's activities during the same time speak to his similar concerns. Other topics addressed in this study include: the perceived crisis of operatic direction, the affinity of the Zeitoper with the artistic movement of Neue Sachlichkeit, and the influences exerted by current popular entertainment and theatrical media and , more importantly, by American jazz and popular dance music. The Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith are examined in detail, and related works by other contemporaries are discussed briefly. Appendices include lists of other compositions showing the influence of American jazz, a translation of one of Krenek's essays, plot synopses, and a performance history of the works covered. Like many musical theater composers, Kurt Weill often incorporated set pieces into his stage work. Sometimes, as in The Threepenny Opera, his scores consisted of little else; other times, as in Mahagonny or Down in the Valley, he imbedded songs into larger through-composed structures. In either case, during his lifetime, publishers released individual numbers—or sometimes medleys of such numbers—from his dramatic work, usually for voice, but also arranged for chorus, jazz band, and solo instrumentalists. Most of this music was brought out by either his principal European publisher (Universal), or his main American one (Chappell). The Kurt Weill Foundation, after scouring the earth for all such items, has devoted a volume of the Kurt Weill Edition to this phenomenon. Entitled Popular Adaptations 1927–1950, and edited by Charles Hamm, Elmar Juchem, and Kim H. Kowalke, this publication forms the second volume of the edition’s fourth series, “Miscellanea,” and exhibits the sort of meticulous care that characterizes the edition as a whole. Such lavish treatment for what is largely ephemera might be regarded as something of an extravagance. And yet, in their introduction to the volume, Kowalke and Stephen Hinton offer this rationale for its publication: . . . this volume can lay claim to being an indispensable part of the Kurt Weill Edition, not least because of the crucial questions it provokes. Were such adaptations a symptom or a cause of his popularity? How can popularity be measured: by conformance to stylistic norms, by means of dissemination, by extent of circulation, by longevity of interest? How popular were Weill’s songs during his lifetime? What was the financial impact for Weill and his publishers? To what extent were his songs actually adapted for commercial exploitation? How did such adaptations then influence, in turn, the performance and reception of Weill’s theatrical works? What follows, first, is a gallery of color plates and a catalog of all 176 items that the foundation has been able to locate. (The editors imagine that other such items were published during Weill’s lifetime but disappeared without a trace for one reason or another, including the destruction wreaked by the Nazis.) These items are arranged chronologically according to the “work from which these adaptations derive” as opposed to their publication dates, so that, for instance, all the published versions of “September Song” are grouped together. Although this catalog essentially limits itself to those items published during Weill’s lifetime, the posthumous 1951 publication of one number is included for reasons stated in the helpful notes (p. 17) that precede the gallery and catalog. The catalog itself includes, to the extent that such things can be determined, the title, lyricist, publisher, plate number, publication date, cover design (sometimes a simple description, other times the name of an illustrator), and archival source for each item. The volume then proceeds to a scholarly essay by Charles Hamm, “Popular Adaptations of Weill’s Music for Stage and Screen, 1927–1950,” keyed to thirty-eight facsimiles that make up the bulk of this publication. Hamm and his fellow editors apparently selected those thirty-eight items that they felt best illustrated the topic’s scope in terms of medium, language, genre, and popularity. The oversized dimensions of this volume and the grey tones of the facsimiles militate against easy use by performers, but the major point of this undertaking seems in any case to be more academic than practical. Moreover, all the numbers represented by the catalog can be found elsewhere in the Weill Edition, and most are commonly available in songbooks and the like as well, although not necessarily in these particular guises. Hamm’s dense essay, supplemented by an impressive 370 endnotes, constitutes a monograph in its own right. The author surveys all of Weill’s stage and screen works that generated sheet-music publications— which is virtually all of them—and methodically discusses which numbers were published, how these publications differed from their original stage versions, how successful they were (including, in many instances, how many copies sold and how much money they brought their composer), and what famous popular and jazz artists performed and recorded them. Those not inclined to read through Hamm’s... Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker. Theater 30.3 (2000) 97-105 We have all grown accustomed to thinking of Kurt Weill as someone whose identity was "authentically plural": he was simultaneously or alternatively, so it seems, a German, a Jew, and an American, to name just a few of his more obvious allegiances. From our historical perspective, it even seems possible to grant Weill the culturally pluralistic identity that the historian Paul Mendes-Flohr argues was the aspiration of German Jews since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, however, we live in a world that is not ready to make that step. The German reception of Kurt Weill's Der Weg der Verheißung demonstrated with particular virulence that the critics were utterly unable to accept Weill's work in the generous terms of multiple identities. On the contrary, they insisted on narrowly defining it in terms of Weill's conflicting German and Jewish sides. Perhaps it is not surprising in the aftermath of the recent Holocaust memorial and Martin Walser debates in Germany that German critics would choose to polarize and judge Weill's Germanness and Jewishness in this way. It is, nevertheless, painful to witness how they proceed to define the German and Jewish identities on either side of the historical expression‎ German Jew that defines Kurt Weill as irreconcilable and incompatible. In responding to Der Weg der Verhei- ßung they seem to be asking Peter Gay's nagging question: "Why Germans and Jews? The two now appear to be mutually exclusive categories. One is either German or Jew." In the following essay, I will compare how Jewish identity was understood in The Eternal Road at its premiere in New York in 1937, and last year in Chemnitz, Germany, in order to demonstrate the difference in attitude that has led to the unfortunate polarization of the German and Jewish sides of Weill's identity in the current German reception of The Eternal Road. I would like to emphasize that I am referring to only a representative selection of the German music critics who wrote about this work, not to the German people in general and how they feel about Kurt Weill. I have chosen to critique these reviews because I am concerned about them and about the way they contribute to shaping public opinion in Germany about Kurt Weill. My comments apply only to the criticisms in question, not to the entire German press. The Eternal Road was originally received in New York in the spirit of Jewish assimilation into American life. Inspired by this dream, the production organizers and critics did not define it narrowly as a Jewish work composed, written, and staged by Jewish émigrés but rather as a story of human suffering with universal significance. The contributors to the official program reminded their readers of this universality with an urgency that betrayed what was perhaps their underlying fear about the attractiveness of the work to a broad public: "[The Eternal Road] is much truer than any play can be that deals only and exclusively with the so-called facts of life and leaves out or leaves only to the imagination the far broader and far deeper truths of which all facts are only symbols," the synopsis told its readers. "Let it not be forgotten that the meanings are universal." In his contribution to the program, Ludwig Lewisohn likewise spoke of "universal and prophetic symbols" and of Weill's contribution as "the music of universal meanings." In an interview for the New York Times in October 1935, Weill contributed to the impression that the work was universal by referring to the Old Testament as "a great human document belonging in its appeal, not to any particular era, but to all time," and by insisting that in order to capture its eternal messages, he intended to avoid all "local color" and instead compose his music in a contemporary style. The critics who attended the premiere of The Eternal Road in January 1937 made a point as well of emphasizing its universal appeal. Frequently, they commented on its value as entertainment for both Jews and gentiles: "To Jews The Eternal Road--which is the eternal road of...