The Creation of Kurt Weill

Today marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Kurt Weill (1900-1950). (I sure love his music, but pictures of him always make me think he would have been good in the lead role in M. This was one of the better ones I could find. I sure hope he didn’t go around whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King”!).

This is the point in the article where a more musically informed writer would include information about Weill’s musical training and influences. But the theatre is our jam, and Weill’s too, else we wouldn’t be here. That, and the somewhat timely element of politics, and that’s what we’ll jump into first.

It’s not widely known or understood by most Americans, but World War One actually led to a leftist revolution in Germany, much as it did in Russia. The German one gets lost in the rapid shuffle of events that included the Armistice and the formation of the Weimar Republic. Widespread revolts had actually led to the fall of the Kaiser’s government PRIOR to the end of the war, essentially an internal development. For a few months (1918-1919) there was even an independent Bavarian Soviet Republic! For about a week it was led by the expressionist playwright Ernst Toller! Eat your heart out, Vaclav Havel! As we all know, the republic that was founded in the months after the peace was an untenable hodgepodge, created to placate not just numerous German factions but also the victorious Allies, who helped steer the Weimar Government towards the middle, and away from full-on Communism.

But the Communist faction remained virulent throughout the life of the Weimar Republic. From the earliest days an association of artists formed calling themselves The November Group, after the date of the incomplete November Revolution in 1918. Their goal was to finish the job. It should be noted that the Russians hadn’t even completed their own Revolution at this early date. Initially founded by visual artists, the November Group quickly expanded to embrace all the arts. Modernist composers Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe, both disciples of Schoenberg, were associated with it, and that is how Weill was drawn in.

Meantime, Weill was beginning to get his feet wet composing for the Expressionist theatre. Early works included a children’s pantomime called Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night) in 1922, and two collaborations with Georg Kaiser, best known for his Gas trilogy: Der Protagonist (1926) and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (1928). He would collaborate with Kaiser one last time on Der Silbersee (1933). Weill met his foremost interpreter Lotte Lenya in 1924. The pair married in 1926, and were essentially together until the end of Weill’s life, with the exception of a short period (1933-35) when they split up.

What we think of as Weill’s classic Weimar period, his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, was surprisingly brief, for a body of work that cast such a long shadow. It consists of The Threepenny Opera (1928, after the John Gayoriginal), Happy End (1929, which I discovered through Michael Feingold’s translation), and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930, based on their own 1927 songspiel), as well as the lesser known children’s opera He Said Yes (1930) and the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins (1932). Weill’s training suited Brecht’s radical theories of stage aesthetics to a tee. Under the tutelage of Ferrucio Busoni, Weill had begun exploring the idea of composing stage music that commented on the action rather than being an expression of the emotions underlying scenes. The qualities of dissonance and atonality he also brought to the table jibed with Brecht’s prescribed Alienation Effect, intended to wake the audience out of its stupor so that it could actively register the socialist messaging his plays contained.

Even so, Weill’s melodic knack could not prevent auditors from taking great pleasure in the many tunes of his that became standards, such as “Mack the Knife” (a 1959 hit for Bobby Darin) and “The Alabama Song” (recorded by The Doors on their eponymous first album), as well as “Pirate Jenny’s Song”, “Surabaya, Johnny”, and others. Honestly the entire scores of these shows, or operas, or musicals, or whatever you want to call them, are haunting. I must have played the soundtrack of the 1954 Broadway production of Threepenny 100 times, and have spent countless hours listening to interpretations by Lenya, and the late Marianne Faithfull.

Weill was Jewish of course, not to mention politically and aesthetically unacceptable to the Nazis when they assumed control of Germany in 1933, making flight a necessity. He worked briefly in Paris and London, then finally settled in the U.S. (He had already begun to part ways with Brecht, who by then had moved into full blown Marxist didacticism). He worked first with the leftist Group Theatre, composing music for Paul Green’s 1936 Americanization of The Good Soldier Švejk, which Brecht also adapted in 1927 and 1943.

Weill rapidly found that American theatre culture was worlds away from that of Berlin, and there was much less appetite (none at all really) for the kind of modernist techniques he had applied in his home country. (An exaggeration, I guess, for Leonard Bernstein certainly went in experimental directions later, but the Broadway of the ’30s was still a hiccup away from Tin Pan Alley.) At this stage, Weill did something extraordinary: this quintessentially German-sounding composer became an American tunesmith. While remaining committed to politically progressive themes in his work, he tacked in the direction of aesthetic populism, drawing largely from America’s folk culture in much the same way as Aaron Copland did. He even composed works inspired by Davy Crockett and Huckleberry Finn, though both went unfinished. And he devised a folk opera for radio built out of American folk songs called Down in the Valley, and set some of Walt Whitman’s poetry to music.

With Maxwell Anderson he wrote Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), based on Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York. Next came Railroads on Parade, a pageant for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The high esteem in which he was held can be measured by the caliber of his collaborators. He worked with Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin on Lady in the Dark (1941) and with Gershwin again on The Firebrand of Florence (1944, about the Renaissance painter Cellini) and the film Where Do We Go From Here? (1945), with Ben Hecht on two Jewish-themed pageants We Will Never Die (1943) and A Flag is Born (1945), with Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman on One Touch of Venus (1943), with Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes on a musical version of Street Scene (1947), with Alan Jay Lerner on Love Life (1948), and with Anderson again on what is probably his best known Broadway work Lost in the Stars (1950). He also scored the 1938 Fritz Lang film You and Me.

Perhaps you’ll notice that amidst all that (1949), a Communist Germany finally came into being, but unlike Brecht, Weill did not go and move there. There are some on opposite ends of the political spectrum who would judge him for this. But anyone with a particle of sense knows there is an ocean of possibility between dictatorship and the dog-eat-dog.

Weill died of a heart attack at age 50 and it’s not surprising in light of the work he produced, not just these named, but the scores, perhaps hundreds, of individual songs and pieces of music he composed for the concert hall. For much more on the enduring legacy of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya go to the official website here.

For more on show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.