Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill was born in Dessau, Germany, on March 2, 1900. A comprehensive musical training took place first with private teachers in Dessau, then at the Berlin High School of Music, and finally for three years with Ferruccio Busoni. Weill started out as a composer of avant-garde music performed at several important German festivals. His first opera, The Protagonist, with a text by Georg Kaiser, was produced in 1926. From this point on Weill continued writing operas in which the texts were realistic or satiric, and the music filled with popular idioms, sometimes even those of jazz. The most important were The Royal Palace in 1927; The Three-Penny Opera, a sensation when first produced in 1928; The Czar Has Himself Photographed, also in 1928; and The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny, in 1930, one of whose numbers, “The Alabamy Song,” was a leading song hit in Germany that year. With these works Weill became one of the leading exponents of the cultural movements then sweeping across Germany under the banners of Zeitkunst (Contemporary Art) and Gebrauchsmusik (Functional Music). In the fall of 1935, Weill established permanent residence in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1943. He soon assumed a position of first importance in the Broadway theater by virtue of a succession of outstanding musicals: Johnny Johnson (1936); Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) in which Walter Huston starred as Peter Stuyvesant and out of which came one of Weill’s most popular musical numbers, “September Song”; Moss Hart’s musical about psychoanalysis and the dream life, Lady in the Dark (1941) in which Gertrude Lawrence was starred; One Touch of Venus (1943), with Mary Martin; Street Scene (1947), a trenchant musical play based on Elmer Rice’s realistic drama of New York; Love Life (1948), book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, its main musical number being another all-time Weill song favorite, “Green-Up Time”; and Lost in the Stars (1949), a powerful musical drama adapted from Alon Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. Weill died in New York City on April 3, 1950.
The Three-Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) is one of the most important musical productions of the post-World War I era in Europe; and since its premiere it has lost little of its initial popularity. This musical play (or opera, if you will) was based on the historic 18th-century ballad opera of John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera. The text was rewritten and modernized by Berthold Brecht, in whose hands the comic opera became a brilliant, though often bitter, satire of Germany in the late 1920’s, with penetrating satirical comments on crime and corruption in this post-war era. Weill’s opera was introduced in Berlin on August 31, 1928 and scored a sensation with few parallels in contemporary German theater. Over one hundred theaters gave it four thousand performances throughout Germany in its initial year. It was made into a motion-picture by G. W. Pabst (the first of several screen adaptations). It was introduced in the leading theatrical centers of the world; the American première—in New York on April 13, 1933—was, however, a dismal failure. It has since been revived frequently in all parts of the civilized world. An off-Broadway presentation in 1954—with a new modernized text by Marc Blitzstein, but with the Weill music untouched—made history by accumulating a run of more than five years; a national company was then formed to tour the country in 1960. During this long Broadway run, the principal musical number, “Moritat” (or “Mack the Knife”) became an American hit song on two different occasions. In 1955 it was given over twenty different recordings and was often represented on the Hit Parade; revived in 1959 by Bobby Darin, it sold over a million discs.
Weill’s score is a mixture of opera and musical comedy, of European stage traditions and American idioms. It opens with a blues and concludes with a mock chorale, while in between these opposite poles there can be heard a shimmy, a canon in fox-trot, popular tunes, formal ballads, light airs, choruses, and ensemble numbers. The style ranges freely from Tin Pan Alley clichés to atonality, from mock romanticism to dissonance. Each number was basic to the plot; principal numbers often became penetrating psychological commentaries on the characters who presented them. “Moritat” (or “Mack the Knife”) is the main musical number. But several others are also of outstanding interest including “Love Song” (“Liebeslied”), “The Ballad of Pleasant Living” (“Ballade vom angenehmen Leben”), the Canon-Song, Barbarasong, and the Bully’s Ballad (“Zuhaelterballade”).