Kurt Weill (left), composer of many operas and Broadway musicals, with the playwright, Maxwell Anderson.
Kurt Weill’s music is respected by theatre audiences and musicians alike. His operas, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera are revived regularly throughout the world, and his songs are sung in films, cabarets and recital halls. Weill inherited aspects of the German lied (song) tradition and married these to the cabaret style to produce a music uniquely his own, in which his ironic lyricism is the perfect setting for texts such as “Mack the Knife” and “My Ship.”
Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900, in Dessau, Germany, the son of the chief cantor of the synagogue. Kurt Weill studied piano as a child, and wrote piano pieces and songs from his early teens. At 15, he became a pupil of Albert Bing, director of the Dessau Opera House, and in 1918 entered the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Although Weill did well, he left after only a year to return to Dessau as Hans Knappertsbusch’s rehearsal pianist at the Opera House. Just one year later, he was hired as conductor of a new opera company at Lüdenscheid.
However, Feruccio Busoni had begun teaching a master class in composition at the Berlin Academy, and Weill left his job and became Busoni’s student, with a scholarship for full tuition. Weill identified with the poor and his Symphony No. 1 (1921) was subtitled Workers, Peasants and Soldiers—A People’s Awakening to God. A ballet for children, Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night) and a string quartet followed. Among the dancers auditioning for Zaubernacht was the Austrian ballerina Lotte Lenya, whom Weill later married.
Weill then worked as a music critic on German radio and taught composition. Among his students were the conductor Maurice Abravanel and the pianist Claudio ARRAU. He wrote a violin concerto for Joseph Szigeti to be played with band. His first opera, Der Protagonist, with a libretto by the playwright Georg Kaiser, was an instant success at the Dresden State Opera and led to a commission for another chamber opera from Paul HINDEMITH for the Baden-Baden Festival.
This commission was the beginning of Weill’s collaboration with the playwright, Bertholt Brecht, which produced, in the first place, the Mahagonny Songspiel, a setting of poems by Brecht which later became the full-scale opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in 1930. The partnership, in fact, lasted only three years but it produced the works for which Weill is best remembered. The Threepenny Opera had its premiere in Berlin in 1928 to tremen-dous acclaim, with Lotte Lenya playing the part of the prostitute Jenny. The Threepenny Opera was a reworking of The Beggar’s Opera, written in the 18th century by John Gay in reaction against the heroic operas of Handel.
Kurt Weill (left), composer of many operas and Broadway musicals, with the playwright, Maxwell Anderson.
Brecht and Weill used the subject matter of the seedy underworld of London to comment on the pretensions and dangers of right-wing political parties, including the Nazi party, in Germany. Weill’s music uses the deprecatory ironies of cabaret music to simultaneously seduce and repel the audience. The Weill-Brecht team also wrote the 1928 Berlin Requiem, a cantata for radio, The Lindbergh Flight, as well as Happy End, whose first performance ended in a riot after Frau Brecht took the stage to read a political text by her husband. In contrast to The Threepenny Opera, which was designated a “musical play,” Mahagonny (1930) developed into a full-scale opera. The piece took as its theme greed, anarchy, and immorality and was set in some unspecified part of the American West. Its first performance in Leipzig was aborted by Nazi-inspired riots.
Weill felt that his music was becoming subservient to Brecht’s politics, so they went their separate ways after 1930. In 1932, Weill composed incidental music to Kaiser’s play Der Silbersee. However, although his music was now eagerly sought after in opera houses all over Europe, it became clear that, in Germany itself, the composer was about to be banned, if not in physical danger, as the Nazi party took power. Weill emigrated to Paris on March 21, 1933. After the Anschluss in 1938 (Germany’s seizure of power in Austria), his scores at Universal Editions in Vienna were destroyed. In France, he briefly resumed a collaboration with Brecht which resulted in the sung ballet, The Seven Deadly Sins.
Weill went to New York in 1935 to conduct the score he had written for The Eternal Way, Franz Werfel’s seven-hour epic on the history of the Jewish people. The funding of this enormous work ran into difficulties and, while he was waiting, Weill worked with Paul Green on the anti-war protest fohnny fohnson. Both The Eternal Road (as it was eventually known) and fohnny fohnson were flops, but Weill nevertheless felt that his future lay on Broadway, and in 1937 he applied for American citizenship. In his later years, Weill repudiated any interest in “serious” music, in the sense of music written for an elite audience. However, he failed to realise how little Broadway audiences cared about his committed social criticism. In those war years and after, theatre audiences needed to be amused and to forget the realities of war and poverty.
In 1938, he worked with Maxwell Anderson on the political satire, Knickerbocker Holiday, which had a moderate success. Then, in 1940, he collaborated with Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart on Lady in the Dark, which was made into a film starring Ginger Rodgers and Ray Milland. Next came the Perelman/Nash One Touch of Venus, and then Elmer Rice’s Street Scene (1946). Weill had seen this play about life in a tenement block in New York while he was still in Germany. It was a subject after his own heart, a hopeless depiction of poverty and addiction, culminating in murder. The composer managed to woo his audience with a mixture of grim realism and humour, and the opera ran for 21 weeks in New York’s Adelphi Theatre. Weill’s last work was a collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner on Love Life (1948), an ironically titled look at the state of marriage in modern America. Weill died on April 3, 1950.
fane Prendergast
SEE ALSO: CABARET MUSIC; MUSICALS; OPERA.
FURTHER READING
Schebera, Jürgen, trans. Caroline Murphy. Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
Symonette, L., and K.H. Kowalke, eds. Speak Low: Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Happy End; Lady in the Dark; The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; The Seven Deadly Sins; Symphony No. 1; The Threepenny Opera; Violin Concerto.