Kurt Weill

• 1. Introduction

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  Kurt Julian Weill was born on the 2nd of March 1900 in Dessau, the son of a synagogue cantor, and he died in New York City on the 3rd of April 1950, just days after turning fifty. In that half-century he crossed continents, languages, and artistic worlds that rarely spoke to each other. He wrote some of the most unsettling and memorable melodies of the twentieth century, then reinvented himself entirely on a new continent. The questions his life raises are not easy ones. How does a composer steeped in the German classical tradition become one of the defining voices of the American musical theater? What drove him to walk away from the avant-garde, and what exactly was he trying to build in its place? And what does it mean that a song he wrote for a petty criminal in 1928 would eventually become a jazz standard recorded by Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin?

• 2. Roots and Early Formation

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  Growing up in the Sandvorstadt, the Jewish quarter of Dessau, Weill absorbed two things early: religious music and financial precarity. His father Albert was a cantor, and the household was devout. At twelve, Weill began piano lessons, and his earliest preserved composition, written in 1913, was a piece called "Mi Addir: Jewish Wedding Song." That choice of subject was not incidental.

  By 1915, Weill was studying with Albert Bing, the kapellmeister at the Herzogliches Hoftheater zu Dessau, learning piano, composition, theory, and conducting all at once. That same year he performed publicly for the first time. In 1918 he enrolled at the Berliner Hochschule fur Musik, where his teachers included the composer Engelbert Humperdinck and where he also attended philosophy lectures by Max Dessoir and Ernst Cassirer. The range of that education mattered: Weill was not training to be a narrow specialist.

  World War I's economic aftermath cut the studies short. In July 1919, Weill returned to Dessau and took work as a repetiteur at the Friedrich-Theater under the new Kapellmeister Hans Knappertsbusch. Even while employed there he composed steadily: an orchestral suite, a symphonic poem drawn from Rainer Maria Rilke, and a song cycle on poems by Nikolaus Lenau. By December 1919 he had been appointed Kapellmeister at the newly founded Stadttheater in Ludenscheid, directing opera, operetta, and singspiel for five months. He was nineteen years old.

• 3. Busoni and the Road to Epic Theater

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  In December 1920, Weill walked into an interview with Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin. Busoni examined his scores and accepted him as one of only five master students at the Preussische Akademie der Kunste. That acceptance redirected everything.

  From January 1921 to December 1923, Weill studied composition with Busoni and counterpoint with Philipp Jarnach. Where Weill's earlier work had absorbed the post-Wagnerian Romanticism and Expressionism common to German music of the time, Busoni was a Neoclassicist, and the collision left a permanent mark. Busoni's influence pushed Weill's vocal and stage works away from music that mirrors a character's inner feelings and toward music that functions as ironic commentary on the action. That shift turned out to be Weill's own route to some of the same ideas that his future collaborator Bertolt Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt, the distancing effect.

  To keep money coming in, Weill played piano in a Bierkeller tavern and from 1923 to 1925 taught private students in music theory and composition. Among those students were Claudio Arrau, Maurice Abravanel, and Nikos Skalkottas. Arrau, Abravanel, and a student named Heinz Jolles stayed within Weill's circle of friends long after those lessons ended. On the 18th of November 1922, Weill's children's pantomime Die Zaubernacht premiered at the Theater am Kurfurstendamm, marking the first public performance of any of his work in musical theater. His Divertimento for Orchestra was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Heinz Unger on the 10th of April 1923, and the Hindemith-Amar Quartet played his String Quartet, Op. 8, on the 24th of June 1923.

• 4. The Brecht Years

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  In 1922, Weill had joined the Novembergruppe, a collective of leftist Berlin artists that included Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe. In February 1924 the conductor Fritz Busch introduced him to the dramatist Georg Kaiser, beginning a long creative partnership. That same summer, at Kaiser's house in Grunheide, Weill first met the singer and actress Lotte Lenya. They married in 1926.

  The collaboration with Brecht that followed produced work that changed the German stage. Their best-known joint effort, The Threepenny Opera, premiered in 1928. It was a reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera from the early eighteenth century, and it contained what would become Weill's most durable single piece, "Mack the Knife," known in German as "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer." Weill described the work as giving the theater the chance to make opera itself the subject matter for an evening, part of what he called a lifelong effort to reform opera for the modern stage.

  The stage success was filmed by G. W. Pabst in two language versions, and when Weill and Brecht tried to block the adaptation through a lawsuit, Weill won and Brecht lost. Further collaborations followed: the musical Happy End in 1929, the children's opera Der Jasager in 1930, and the full opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, also 1930, which included "Alabama Song," a piece later recorded by The Doors among many others. The working partnership ended over politics in 1930. According to Lotte Lenya, Weill said he was unable to "set the Communist Manifesto to music."

  Between November 1924 and May 1929, Weill also wrote hundreds of reviews for the radio program guide Der deutsche Rundfunk. His music attracted admiration from Alban Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Stravinsky, though Schoenberg and Anton Webern were critical. Schoenberg later revised his view.

• 5. Flight and Reinvention

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  In March 1933, Weill fled Nazi Germany. As a prominent Jewish composer with known political sympathies, he had become a direct target. The authorities had already criticized and interfered with performances of his stage works, including Die Burgschaft in 1932 and Der Silbersee in 1933. He went first to Paris, where a planned project with Jean Cocteau failed, but where he and Brecht reunited long enough to produce the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins.

  On the 13th of April 1933, The Threepenny Opera opened on Broadway and closed after thirteen performances to mixed reviews. A production of his operetta Der Kuhhandel drew him to London in 1935. Later that year he traveled to the United States in connection with The Eternal Road, a biblical drama by Franz Werfel commissioned by members of New York's Jewish community that eventually ran for 153 performances when it opened at the Manhattan Opera House in 1937.

  He and Lotte moved to New York City on the 10th of September 1935. They lived first at the St. Moritz Hotel, then at 231 East 62nd Street. During the summer of 1936 they rented a house near Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut with Paul Green, finishing the musical Johnny Johnson. Among the artists who summered there that year were Elia Kazan, John Garfield, Clifford Odets, and Irwin Shaw.

  Rather than replicate his European sound in a new country, Weill studied American popular and stage music deliberately. He worked with Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, and Langston Hughes. For the 1939 World's Fair in New York he wrote Railroads on Parade, a musical celebrating the American railroad industry. On the 27th of August 1943 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. That same period saw him and Maxwell Anderson serve as volunteer air raid wardens on High Tor Mountain in Rockland County.

• 6. American Theater and the War

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  Street Scene, based on a play by Elmer Rice with lyrics by Langston Hughes, stands as Weill's most sustained attempt to create an American opera that worked both commercially and artistically. For that work Weill received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score. Unique among his Broadway contemporaries, he insisted on writing his own orchestrations, making only rare exceptions such as the dance music in Street Scene itself.

  During World War II, Weill threw himself into projects supporting the war effort. He collaborated on the satirical song "Schickelgruber" with lyricist Howard Dietz, wrote "Buddy on the Nightshift" with Oscar Hammerstein, and returned once more to Brecht for "Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?," the "Ballad of the Nazi Soldier's Wife." The song was intended for broadcast into Germany; it traced the progress of the Nazi military campaign through the gifts a soldier sent home to his wife, furs from Oslo and a silk dress from Paris, until the final gift from Russia was her widow's veil.

  He also composed Down in the Valley, an opera built around American folk songs. In 1946 his "Kiddush," commissioned by cantor David Putterman, premiered at Park Avenue Synagogue on the 10th of May. Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Lost in the Stars, and Knickerbocker Holiday all contributed songs that have since become independent standards: "My Ship," "Speak Low," "Lost in the Stars," and "September Song" among them.

• 7. Legacy and Afterlife

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  Weill suffered a heart attack shortly after his fiftieth birthday and died on the 3rd of April 1950. He was buried at Mount Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw, New York. The text on his gravestone comes from the song "A Bird of Passage" in Lost in the Stars, itself drawn from a quotation attributed to the Venerable Bede. The lyric was Maxwell Anderson's. Anderson's eulogy expressed a wish that Weill had lived longer and that his times had been less troubled, but noted that "Kurt managed to make thousands of beautiful things during the short and troubled time he had."

  After his death Lotte Lenya worked to sustain awareness of his music and founded the Kurt Weill Foundation in 1962. The non-profit administers the Lotte Lenya Competition, a grant program, the Weill-Lenya Research Center, and publishes the Kurt Weill Edition and the Kurt Weill Newsletter. Trustees have included Harold Prince, Jeanine Tesori, and Teresa Stratas.

  Recordings of his work have come from performers as varied as Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, The Doors, Willie Nelson, Ella Fitzgerald, David Bowie, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 1985 Hal Willner produced a tribute album, Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill, featuring Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Lou Reed, Sting, and Charlie Haden. A second tribute, September Songs, appeared in 1997 with Elvis Costello, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. In 1991 the Swiss band The Young Gods released a full album of his songs. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls placed Kurt Weill's name on the front of her keyboard as a tribute.

  In Dessau, where the cantor's son grew up, a statue of Weill and Brecht stands at the intersection of Kurt-Weill-Strasse and Karlstrasse. The Kurt Weill Centre, founded in 1993 and housed in a building designed by Walter Gropius that once belonged to the artist Lyonel Feininger, forms part of the Bauhaus World Heritage Site. The annual festival it organizes keeps the music in circulation, as does the gravestone inscription that asks no questions and answers all of them: out of darkness at birth, into a lamplit room, and then forward into dark again.