Kurt Weill

Composer

  • Born: March 2, 1900
  • Birthplace: Dessau, Germany
  • Died: April 3, 1950
  • Place of death: New York, New York

German-born American composer

Weill was one of the outstanding composers of the generation that came to maturity after World War I. He broke away from the Romantic, emotional style of Wagnerian opera to create a revolutionary new form: the opera of sharp social satire. After his emigration to the United States, Weill turned away from his earlier “serious” works to become one of the top composers of Broadway musicals in the 1940’s.

Areas of achievement Music, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Kurt Weill (kurt vil) was born in Dessau, Germany. His father, Albert, was the cantor at the synagogue in Dessau, and a composer in his own right. His mother, Emma (née Ackermann), loved literature and maintained an extensive library for the family. Weill was reared as an Orthodox Jew, along with his two elder brothers, Nathan and Hans Jacob, and his younger sister, Ruth. The Weill children were all taught music, and often attended performances of Wagnerian operas at the Ducal Court Theater, or Hofoper, in Dessau.

Weill had begun to compose by the time he was twelve years old. When he was fifteen, his father arranged for him to study with Albert Bing, a respected composer who served as the associate musical director of the Hofoper. In April, 1918, Weill went to Berlin to attend the Hochschule für Musik. There he studied composition under Wagner disciple Engelbert Humperdinck (composer of the opera Hänsel und Gretel, 1893), harmony and counterpoint with Friedrich E. Koch, and conducting with Rudolf Krasselt. He wrote a symphonic poem based on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1906; The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, 1932). This piece was considered good enough to be performed by the Hochschule orchestra, and it won for him a scholarship given by the Felix Mendelssohn Foundation. Despite his success, however, Weill felt stifled by the old-fashioned musical ideas taught at the Hochschule, so he left it after one year to return to Dessau. There, he worked for three months as a repetiteur, or singing coach, at the Hofoper under his former teacher, Albert Bing. In December, 1919, he took a temporary staff conducting job with the tiny Lüdenscheid Civic Opera in Westphalia. There, he received a solid training in making music for the theater.

In September, 1920, Weill auditioned and was accepted into the master class in composition at the Berlin Academy of Art, which was taught by Ferruccio Busoni, an avant-garde composer whom Weill greatly admired. Weill became one of Busoni’s favorite students, and he studied under him for three years, until December, 1923. During that time, Weill wrote several works, including a children’s ballet, Die Zaubernacht, which was performed in Berlin in 1922 and again two years later in New York under the title Magic Night; a Divertimento for orchestra and male chorus; his Sinfonia Sacra op. 6; Frauentanz (women’s dance), a cycle of seven songs for soprano and small instrumental ensemble, which was performed at the Salzburg Festival in 1924 and which won for him a contract with Universal Edition, a leading publisher of new music; and his String Quartet op. 8. This piece was first performed for the Novembergrüppe, an association of radical artists of which Weill was a member.

Life’s Work

In 1922, Weill met Georg Kaiser, perhaps Germany’s most significant expressionist playwright. In January, 1924, Kaiser offered to collaborate with Weill on a ballet based on Kaiser’s play Der Protagonist (1922; the protagonist). They worked for two months on the idea before they decided that the piece would work much better as an opera than a ballet. While Kaiser revised his libretto, Weill took the opportunity to compose his best instrumental work to date, a Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, which was first performed in Paris in June, 1925.

Weill visited Kaiser at his country home during the rest of 1924 and early 1925 to complete the music for Der Protagonist. While he was there, in the summer of 1924, he became acquainted with an actress named Lotte Lenya (née Karoline Blaumauer). By the end of that year, they had taken an apartment together. They were married on January 28, 1926. Lenya was not Jewish, and Weill’s parents disapproved of the match. By that time, however, Weill felt disaffected by the religion of his childhood and rebellious against middle-class conventions in life as well as music, and so his bohemian, Gentile bride suited him very well. Their marriage was sometimes troubled, and once they divorced and remarried, but then they remained together until he died. Afterward, Lenya protected and promoted Weill’s legacy until his music became well known around the world.

Weill and Kaiser completed the opera Der Protagonist in April, 1925. It was a fabulous success at its premiere at the Dresden State Opera on March 27, 1926, and it marked the turning point in Weill’s career. He was now considered one of the leading composers of theatrical music in Germany. Weill started writing another opera with Kaiser, a comic one-act piece called Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (1927; the czar has his picture taken) in March, 1927, the same month in which he began one of the most famous collaborations in twentieth century theater: his association with Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Weill and Brecht began with a plan for a full-length opera called Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1957) based on part of Brecht’s poetry collection, Hauspostille (1927, 1951; A Manual of Piety, 1966). In the meantime, however, Weill received a commission for a short, one-act opera to be performed at the Baden-Baden Festival of German Chamber Music that summer. He decided to use the commission to write five songs as a preliminary study for the opera. The result, Mahagonny Songspiel, premiered at the Baden-Baden Festival on July 17, 1927, with one of the female roles being sung by Lenya. Brecht then arranged to write the play that would open the new theater managed by impresario Ernst Robert Aufricht. Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1949) was based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and featured songs by Weill. After a turbulent rehearsal period, it opened on August 31, 1928, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, to immense and immediate success.

The Threepenny Opera brought Weill popularity and financial security. He completed several other commissions before finishing the score for The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in April, 1929. During that summer, he and Brecht collaborated on another musical play called Happy End, which premiered on September 2, 1929, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Before it opened, however, Brecht decided that the play was too frivolous, that it violated his belief that theater should teach, not entertain. He renounced his authorship of the play, and it closed after a few performances.

In the six months between the disastrous opening of Happy End and the premiere of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Leipzig Opera House on March 9, 1930, the stock market experienced its infamous crash that destroyed the economies of countries all around the world. The unemployment crisis in Germany had given the Nazis a new strength, and they put Weill, who was Jewish, on their list of artists that they reviled. On the opening night of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the Nazis interrupted the performance by starting fistfights in the aisles of the theater. Performances of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in other cities were canceled by Nazi-led town councils. By 1933, the Nazis had succeeded in their campaign to drive the works of Weill off the stages of Germany.

In the meantime, Brecht and Weill were growing apart. Brecht became increasingly autocratic and devoted to Marxism, whereas Weill grew more tolerant, exploring the tensions in his work between the atonality of the modern fashion and the traditional, romantic melodies he remembered from his youth. Their famous, productive partnership came to an end after only three years.

Weill wrote one more opera with Kaiser, Der Silbersee (silver lake), which opened simultaneously to good reviews in Leipzig, Erfurt, and Magdeburg on February 18, 1933. On February 27, Adolf Hitler began his crackdown on his political opponents. On March 21, Weill learned that he was about to be arrested by the Gestapo, so he packed a few belongings in a car and escaped to France. Weill’s music was popular in Paris, and yet his exile there was unhappy. He felt betrayed by his homeland. Also, he had lost all of his money when he left Germany, and his relationship with his wife had become very strained. He reluctantly agreed to write a final piece with Brecht, a ballet called Die sieben Todsünden der Kleinbürger (The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petit Bourgeois, 1961), which premiered at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées on June 7, 1933. He composed several more pieces before being commissioned, late in the summer of 1934, to write the score for Franz Werfel’s biblical drama Der Weg der Verheissung (1935; The Eternal Road, 1936), which tells the story of the wanderings of the Jewish people toward their goal of the Promised Land. Weill’s persecution at the hands of the Nazis caused him to identify again with his Jewish ancestry, and he used the religious music of his youth as the basis for his score. The play was scheduled to open in New York in early 1936, and Weill was to conduct the performance. So, in September, 1935, he and Lenya, with whom he had recently reconciled, sailed for the United States.

For financial reasons, the production of The Eternal Road was delayed, so Weill took a commission from the Group Theatre to write the score for Johnny Johnson, an antiwar satire written by Paul Green, which opened in New York on November 19, 1936, and closed only sixty-eight performances later, the victim of bad reviews. The Eternal Road finally opened on January 7, 1937. Unfortunately, budget overruns doomed this lavish production to financial disaster, even though it played to packed houses.

Weill then collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on a political satire based on Washington Irving’s book A History of New York (1809). Weill’s first Broadway success, Knickerbocker Holiday, the score of which includes the famous “September Song,” opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on October 19, 1938. Weill teamed with Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin for his next Broadway hit. Lady in the Dark, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye, opened at the Alvin Theater in New York on January 23, 1941, and ran for two years. His next musical, called One Touch of Venus, was written with S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash. It opened at the Imperial Theater in New York on October 7, 1943, starred Mary Martin, and was Weill’s greatest Broadway success.

Weill wrote one more play with Gershwin, along with Gershwin’s friend Edwin Justus Mayer, an operetta based on Mayer’s play The Firebrand (1924). The Firebrand of Florence, starring Lenya in only her second American stage appearance, was a complete disaster when it opened on March 22, 1945. After this, Weill deliberately changed his musical style from a slick, Broadway idiom to a simpler, American folk sound. He collaborated with Elmer Rice to write the opera Street Scene, based on Rice’s 1929 play of the same name. It opened in New York at the Adelphi Theater on January 9, 1947, to critical acclaim but only moderate box-office success. Weill wrote a folk opera, Down in the Valley, for the students at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, where it premiered on July 15, 1948. His next musical, Love Life, written with Alan Jay Lerner, opened on October 7, 1948, at the Forty-sixth Street Theater in New York, and received only mediocre critical reviews.

Weill’s last work was written with his good friend Maxwell Anderson. It was a “musical tragedy” based on the novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) by Alan Paton. Lost in the Stars premiered at the Music Box Theater in New York on October 30, 1949. The production did very well, at first. Weill and Anderson began work on a musical based on Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then, in January, 1950, the box office for Lost in the Stars began to deteriorate. Weill became increasingly irritable, and he suffered a terrible attack of the psoriasis that had plagued him all of his life. On the night of March 16, he awoke with chest pains. He was admitted to Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York, where his condition gradually grew worse. He died there, at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, April 3, 1950, with Lenya and his friends Maxwell and Mab Anderson at his bedside.

Significance

From 1924, with the premiere of Der Protagonist, to 1935, when he emigrated to the United States, Weill was considered one of the leading composers in Europe. He worked to simplify music to make it more accessible to a popular audience and pioneered the technique of “alienation” in opera music, that is, writing music that goes against the stage action, thereby causing the listener to think about the message of the opera, rather than merely becoming emotionally involved with it. He believed that art should take a political stand against social injustice. In his music, there is always a tension between an atonal, intellectual sound and the melodious, emotional style of music that he heard as a child.

Weill fervently embraced his new home in the United States and totally rejected his German works, as he believed Germany had done to him. Indeed, after his arrival in New York, he never spoke German again. As he strove to write in an exclusively American idiom, his rebellion against sentiment in art mellowed, and his music became more rich and free. Although his American pieces lacked the intellectual sophistication of his European works, they nevertheless retained a sense of social consciousness that was very courageous, especially in the context of an American society that was growing increasingly nationalistic and conservative.

It is ironic that “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera, a play that denounces capitalism, has been used in an advertising campaign to sell McDonald’s hamburgers. This fact testifies to Weill’s extraordinary success as one of the few twentieth century composers whose music can be considered both “serious” and “popular.”

Bibliography

Drew, David. Kurt Weill: A Handbook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Drew is the foremost authority on Weill. He presents detailed chronologies of Weill’s compositions, as well as a description of his method of composition.

Farnath, David, with Elmar Juchem and Dave Stein. Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000. Comprehensive survey of Weill’s life, musical development, and stage works, much of it explained in his own words and based on letters, interviews, documents, and published articles. Contains more than nine hundred illustrations.

Hirsch, Foster. Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Detailed examination of Weill’s stage works in Germany and the United States, emphasizing the American productions and Weill’s influence on American musical theater.

Jarman, Douglas. Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. This concise but complete biography serves as an ideal introduction to the composer’s life and works.

Kowalke, Kim H., ed. A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. This is a collection of seventeen essays from the 1983 international conference on Weill held at Yale University. They are arranged according to the chronology of his career and are suitable for general readers.

Sanders, Ronald. The Days Grow Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. This detailed biography gives psychological insight to Weill’s music. Sanders also outlines the backgrounds of the people and events who were important in Weill’s life.

Spoto, Donald. Lenya: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Lenya’s fame rests mostly on her interpretation of her husband’s works. Along with that, however, she led a long and fascinating life. This book reveals some of the details of Weill’s and Lenya’s troubled marriage.

1901-1940: July 17, 1927: Brecht and Weill Collaborate on the Mahagonny Songspiel.

1941-1970: February, 1948: Paton Explores South Africa’s Racial Divide in Cry, the Beloved Country.