Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill: Two Lives, One Ear

His first surviving composition, written at thirteen in 1913, was called "Mi Addir: Jewish Wedding Song." Fifteen years later he wrote a sardonic street-ballad about a murderer for a Berlin theatre piece, and "Mack the Knife" became, by way of Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin, a jazz standard sung in cocktail lounges by people with no idea it was written to indict them. Weill had two complete careers, on two continents, in fifty years, and purists have spent the decades since arguing about which one was real.

Dessau and Busoni

Kurt Julian Weill was born on 2 March 1900 in Dessau, Saxony, the third of four children of Albert Weill, a cantor, and Emma Weill née Ackermann. He grew up in the Sandvorstadt, Dessau's Jewish quarter, in a religious household where liturgical music was the family trade. Piano lessons began at twelve. In 1915 he started private study with Albert Bing, kapellmeister at the Dessau court theatre, covering piano, composition, theory and conducting, and made his first public appearance as accompanist and soloist the same year.

After his Abitur in 1918 he entered the Berliner Hochschule für Musik, studying composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, conducting with Rudolf Krasselt and counterpoint with Friedrich E. Koch. The decisive teacher came next: from 1920 to 1923 he was a master student of Ferruccio Busoni at the Preussische Akademie der Künste, adding counterpoint with Philipp Jarnach. Busoni's neoclassicism pulled him away from post-Wagnerian romanticism toward music that could comment rather than merely swell.

He served his apprenticeship in the pit — répétiteur at Dessau's Friedrich-Theater in 1919 under Hans Knappertsbusch, then kapellmeister at the Stadttheater in Lüdenscheid for five months from December 1919. He wrote the choral fantasy *Sulamith* in 1920 and a one-movement symphony in the early 1920s, joined the leftist Novembergruppe in 1922 alongside Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe, and saw his children's pantomime *Die Zaubernacht* staged at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm on 18 November 1922 — his first public music-theatre work. He taught private students including the pianist Claudio Arrau, the conductor Maurice Abravanel and the composer Nikos Skalkottas, and between 1924 and 1929 wrote hundreds of reviews for the radio guide *Der deutsche Rundfunk*. In 1924, at the dramatist Georg Kaiser's house in Grünheide, he met the singer Lotte Lenya. They married in 1926, divorced in 1933, and married again in 1937.

Brecht

Weill's governing idea was *Gebrauchsmusik* — music with a socially useful job to do — and it made him the ideal collaborator for Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, where the score is not there to sweep the audience up but to hold it at a distance and comment. *The Threepenny Opera* (1928), a reworking of John Gay's *The Beggar's Opera*, was the result and the sensation. For Weill it was also strategic: the show offered, in his terms, "the opportunity to make opera the subject matter for an evening in the theater," part of a lifelong campaign to drag opera onto the modern stage. *Happy End* followed in 1929 with "Surabaya Johnny" and the "Bilbao Song," then the children's opera *Der Jasager* and *Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny* in 1930, whose "Alabama Song" would later be recorded by The Doors, and the ballet *The Seven Deadly Sins* in Paris in 1933.

The partnership broke in 1930 over politics. Weill moved in socialist circles but had limits; Lenya reported that he said he was unable to "set the Communist Manifesto to music." When G. W. Pabst filmed *The Threepenny Opera* in two language versions in 1931, Weill and Brecht sued to stop it. Weill won his case. Brecht lost his.

Exile

As a prominent Jewish composer officially denounced for his politics, with Nazi authorities disrupting performances of *Mahagonny*, *Die Bürgschaft* (1932) and *Der Silbersee* (1933), Weill fled Germany in March 1933. That April a Broadway *Threepenny Opera* closed after thirteen performances. He completed his Second Symphony in 1934, conducted by Bruno Walter in Amsterdam and New York, spent time in London, and on 10 September 1935 moved to New York with Lenya.

Broadway

He did not import his European manner. He studied American popular and stage music and rebuilt, and the American works came to be regarded as seminal in the development of the American musical. *The Eternal Road* (1937), a biblical drama commissioned by New York's Jewish community, ran 153 performances at the Manhattan Opera House. He scored Fritz Lang's *You and Me* (1938), wrote *Railroads on Parade* for the 1939 World's Fair, and gave *Knickerbocker Holiday* (1939) "September Song." *Lady in the Dark* (1941) with Ira Gershwin, the folk opera *Down in the Valley* (1946), and *Street Scene* (1947) — from Elmer Rice's play, with lyrics by Langston Hughes — followed; *Street Scene* is regarded as the most interesting attempt of its era at an American opera that could be both commercially and artistically successful, and won the first Tony Award for Best Original Score. Uniquely among Broadway composers of his generation, Weill insisted on writing his own orchestrations, with almost no exceptions.

He backed American entry into the war from 1941, wrote propaganda songs including "Schickelgruber" with Howard Dietz, "Buddy on the Nightshift" with Oscar Hammerstein and the "Ballad of the Nazi Soldier's Wife" with Brecht, intended for broadcast into Germany, and served as an air raid warden on High Tor Mountain with Maxwell Anderson. He became a U.S. citizen on 27 August 1943. He suffered a heart attack shortly after his fiftieth birthday and died in New York on 3 April 1950. His gravestone carries Anderson's lyric from *Lost in the Stars*: "This is the life of men on earth: / Out of darkness we come at birth / Into a lamplit room, and then – / Go forward into dark again."

Why Kurt Is Called a Genius

Weill's gift was a compositional one, and it can be named precisely: the ability to write a tune of immediate popular grip that is simultaneously a critique of itself. "Mack the Knife" is a hurdy-gurdy jingle about a killer; the pleasure and the accusation arrive in the same bar. That double function — melody as bait and as indictment — is technically hard, requiring absolute command of harmony and orchestral colour used against the emotional grain rather than with it, and it is why Alban Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Igor Stravinsky admired the European scores. His insistence on doing his own orchestrations, alone among his Broadway peers, is the concrete evidence: he would not let anyone else decide what the sound meant.

The counter-case is the one his defenders have fought for seventy years. Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern initially criticized his work; to the serialist wing, Weill was a theatre composer writing tunes, not an advancer of musical language. He wrote no symphonic body of consequence, and the second career invites the charge of dilution — that the man who set Brecht went to Broadway and wrote "September Song." A fairer reading is that the American works were the same project under different constraints: *Street Scene* and *Down in the Valley* pursue *Gebrauchsmusik* in a new vernacular, not in place of one. But it should be conceded that Weill's genius is not the kind that expands what music can do; it is the kind that makes music do a job with unimprovable efficiency. Maxwell Anderson caught the limit that mattered most: "I wish, of course, that he had been lucky enough to have had a little more time for his work."

Legacy

Lotte Lenya founded the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in 1962, which runs the Lotte Lenya Competition, the Kurt Weill Prize and the Kurt Weill Edition; the Kurt Weill Centre opened in Dessau in 1993 in a house designed by Walter Gropius. He is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. His songs have been recorded by Nina Simone, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Nelson, David Bowie, Marianne Faithfull and The Doors, and Hal Willner's 1985 tribute album *Lost in the Stars* drew Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Sting, Charlie Haden and Todd Rundgren. Few composers of the twentieth century are so thoroughly claimed by both the opera house and the bar.