Weill, Kurt (Julian)

(b Dessau, 2 March 1900; d New York, 3 April 1950). German composer, American citizen from 1943. He
was one of the outstanding composers in the generation that came to maturity after World War I, and
a key figure in the development of modern forms of musical theatre. His successful and innovatory
work for Broadway during the 1940s was a development in more popular terms of the exploratory stage
works that had made him the foremost avant-garde theatre composer of the Weimar Republic.

1. Life.

Weill’s father Albert was chief cantor at the synagogue in Dessau from 1899 to 1919 and was himself
a composer, mostly of liturgical music and sacred motets. Kurt was the third of his four children,
all of whom were from an early age taught music and taken regularly to the opera. Despite its
strong Wagnerian emphasis, the Hoftheater’s repertory was broad enough to provide the young Weill
with a wide range of music-theatrical experiences which were supplemented by the orchestra’s
subscription concerts and by much domestic music-making.

Weill began to show an interest in composition as he entered his teens. By 1915 the evidence of a
creative bent was such that his father sought the advice of Albert Bing, the assistant conductor at
the Hoftheater. Bing was so impressed by Weill’s gifts that he undertook to teach him himself. For
three years Bing and his wife, a sister of the Expressionist playwright Carl Sternheim, provided
Weill with what almost amounted to a second home and introduced him a world of metropolitan
sophistication. Later, in 1917, Bing also found him volunteer work as a coach at the opera.

In April 1918, at Bing’s suggestion, Weill enrolled at the Berlin Musikhochschule where he studied
with Humperdinck (composition), Friedrich Koch (counterpoint) and Rudolf Krasselt (conducting).
Although he had won a bursary from the Hochschule for the following year, he found its musical
climate stifling and applied to Schoenberg to study privately with him in Vienna. Financial
situations intervened, however, and Weill returned in the summer of 1919 to Dessau, where he worked
for three months under Knappertsbusch and Bing at the Hoftheater before taking up a post as a
conductor of a tiny municipal opera company in Lüdenscheid. He remained with the company until the
early summer of 1920, when the announcement that Busoni had been invited to direct a masterclass in
composition at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, encouraged him to apply for membership. The last
and youngest of the applicants, Weill was duly accepted for a three-year period, officially
beginning in July 1921 but in practice earlier.

Busoni had a special regard for Weill’s musical gifts. Recognizing some technical shortcomings, he
referred the young man to his disciple Philipp Jarnach for some rigorous training in counterpoint.
Weill progressed rapidly, and in the summer of 1922 Busoni and Jarnach encouraged him to provide a
score for a ballet-pantomime entitled Zaubernacht, which was successfully staged in Berlin in
November 1922 and presented three years later in New York. The 1922–3 season also witnessed
premières of no fewer than four concert works by Weill, including the Sinfonia sacra op.6 and the
Divertimento op.5, both by the Berlin PO. At the end of his three years in the masterclass Busoni
recommended him wholeheartedly to Universal Edition in Vienna, who were to become Weill’s exclusive
publishers for the next ten years.

Some weeks before Busoni’s death in July 1924 Weill entered an association with the leading
Expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser that was to remain close until Weill left Germany nearly ten
years later. The première, under Fritz Busch, of the Weill–Kaiser opera Der Protagonist in Dresden
in 1926 made Weill’s name known beyond specialist circles and was hailed by Oskar Bie and others as
the first genuine operatic success achieved by a German postwar composer. Largely on the strength
of that success, Weill was invited to write a short opera for Hindemith’s chamber music festival in
Baden-Baden. At first he vacillated between two classical texts, but having already begun his
collaboration with Bertolt Brecht in March 1927, he arranged instead to set the five
Mahagonny-Gesänge from Brecht’s recent verse collection Die Hauspostille. The result, the
‘Songspiel’ Mahagonny, was presented in Baden-Baden in July 1927 to great effect, and encouraged
the two men to proceed with their full-length opera project Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
(1927–9).

Weill and Brecht had thus laid the foundations of a collaboration that, however short-lived, can be
numbered among the most fruitful in 20th-century music. It did not undermine the collaboration with
Kaiser, however, and in 1928 a one-act opera buffa by Weill and Kaiser, Der Zar lässt sich
photographieren, was launched on its highly successful career. A few months later Weill’s and
Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper had its historic première in Berlin, with the part of Jenny played
and sung by Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya, whom he had married in 1926. Other Brecht projects followed
in short order: Das Berliner Requiem (1928), Der Lindberghflug (1929), Happy End (1929) and Der
Jasager (1930), as well as cantatas, workers’ choruses and incidental music for Mann ist Mann
(1931).

The international triumph of Die Dreigroschenoper ensured that after years of financial hardship
Weill was now free to devote himself entirely to composition. Since 1923 he had been giving private
lessons in theory and composition to various young musicians, among them Claudio Arrau, Nikos
Skalkottas and Maurice Abravanel; and beginning in 1925 he was also a prolific contributor to the
radio weekly Der deutsche Rundfunk, providing previews and reviews on a regular basis and
occasionally offering essays on larger cultural issues. By the spring of 1929, however, he was able
to withdraw from all such work, and for the remaining 20 years of his life he depended entirely on
his earnings as a freelance composer, primarily for the stage.

Weill was now the most successful theatre composer to have emerged in the Weimar Republic. This
fact, quite apart from his Jewish ancestry and leftist political associations, ensured that he and
his works became exposed targets when the tide turned against the republic in 1929. The riotous
première of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in Leipzig in 1930 was the prelude to a concerted
campaign to drive his works from the state-subsidized theatres. By the start of the 1932–3 season
this campaign had largely achieved its ends: despite the critical and public acclaim for his opera
Die Bürgschaft (1930–32), the most ambitious of his pieces for the German stage, the work was
shunned by most theatres. The enthusiastic reception given to a concert of his music at the Salle
Gaveau in Paris (December 1932) confirmed his feeling that he should do more to promote his works
outside Germany.

Although Weill’s last work for Germany, the musical play Der Silbersee (also with Kaiser), was
warmly received at its triple première in Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt in February 1933, the
emergency decrees and rigorous censorship that followed upon the Reichstag fire a fortnight later
put paid to his further possibilities in Germany. In circumstances of some danger he fled to Paris
on 14 March 1933, taking with him only a few belongings and the sketches of his Second Symphony.
Soon after his arrival he was commissioned to compose a score for Les Ballets 1933 and reluctantly
renewed his collaboration with Brecht, which had ended, none too amicably, almost three years
earlier. The resultant work, Die sieben Todsünden, choreographed by Balanchine and sung by Lenya,
was hardly more than a succès d’estime in Paris and London. By the end of 1933 Weill realized not
only that the political situation in Germany was no temporary aberration (as the suspension of his
contract with Universal in the summer had already implied), but that it would be very difficult to
consolidate his position in France. Shocked by a pro-Nazi demonstration at a concert performance of
Der Silbersee in Paris, he withdrew to the village of Louveciennes in 1934 and began to focus his
attention on the commercial theatres of Paris, London and Zürich.

The first result of this new focus was Marie galante (1934), a stage play to which Weill
contributed songs and incidental music. Despite the immediate popularity of some of its songs the
play was poorly received. Hardly more successful was the operetta Der Kuhhandel, which reached the
stage only in an English adaptation entitled A Kingdom for a Cow (1935) and failed utterly in
London.

These two disappointments were somewhat alleviated by a major collaboration with Max Reinhardt and
Franz Werfel which had begun in the summer of 1934 and occupied much of Weill’s attention for the
next 18 months. The result, a vast historical spectacle of the Jewish people from Abraham’s time
until the destruction of Solomon’s temple, was originally set to music in German as Der Weg der
Verheissung, but planned for production in New York in December 1935 as The Eternal Road. Weill,
accompanied by Lenya, travelled to New York in September of that year as a member of the production
team. When the production had to be postponed he chose to remain in the United States, where he had
already begun to form new contacts with the theatre scene.

Weill’s first work for the American stage came about at the instigation of the Group Theatre, which
invited him to collaborate with the playwright Paul Green on an anti-war musical play entitled
Johnny Johnson. The piece was duly staged in New York in November 1936, only eight weeks before the
resuscitated première of The Eternal Road. Although the score of Johnny Johnson won Weill some
important new friends and supporters, and The Eternal Road was lauded by press and public alike
before succumbing to financial mismanagement, neither work brought the composer the triumph he so
desperately needed. Nevertheless, with new prospects in Hollywood and little to tempt him back to
Europe, he took the first steps towards American citizenship in May 1937. His material problems
were partially solved by Knickerbocker Holiday, a political satire composed in 1938 to a book by
Maxwell Anderson, the first in an impressive list of American collaborators that was to include Ira
Gershwin, Moss Hart, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, S.J. Perelmann and Ogden Nash. Knickerbocker
Holiday, though often unmistakably European in idiom, introduced Weill to a much wider audience and
produced, in ‘September Song’, what was soon to become his first fully-fledged American hit song.

After the demise of the government-sponsored Federal Theatre in July 1939 and the failure of his
attempts to find a sponsor for a series of radio operas, Weill now strengthened his links with
Broadway, to which, and its Hollywood annexes, he devoted himself for the remaining ten years of
his life. During the early 1940s he produced two resounding successes, the formally innovative Lady
in the Dark (1940) and One Touch of Venus (1943). He also contributed patriotic pieces to the war
effort, culminating in his first and only musical film, Where do we go from here? (1943–4). Less
fortunate was The Firebrand of Florence (1944), an operetta based on the memoirs of Benvenuto
Cellini and his only box-office failure of the 1940s.

Weill’s first new venture of the postwar years was a boldly conceived ‘American opera’ for Broadway
based on Elmer Rice’s prize-winning drama Street Scene (1946). Though only moderately successful at
the time, Street Scene marked, in Weill’s widely publicized view, a culmination in his career as a
theatre composer. It was followed by the equally innovatory ‘vaudeville’ Love Life (1947–8) and the
less ambitious but politically and socially controversial Lost in the Stars (1949), a musical
adaptation of Alan Paton’s anti-apartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country.

If none of Weill’s three postwar musicals could match the success of their predecessors of the
early 1940s, the same cannot be said of his sole venture into the non-Broadway musical stage, the
college opera Down in the Valley (1945–8), which far outstripped his other American works in number
of productions and performances. Plans to develop a series of such works, with Alan J. Lerner as
his collaborator, occupied Weill during the last weeks of his life. Eventually the strain of his
workload proved too great for his constitution, and shortly after he and Maxwell Anderson had
started work on a musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn he died of a longstanding heart ailment.

David Drew/J. Bradford Robinson

2. Early works.

In 1983, 14 items of Weill juvenilia resurfaced in the estate of his sister-in-law, and revealed a
lack of precocity surprising in a composer whose two previously known early works, the B minor
String Quartet (1918) and the Sonata for cello and piano (1919–20), were remarkable precisely for
their individuality. In the quartet particularly, the composer’s distinctive profile is already
discernible. But despite the characteristically unsettling transformation of popular waltz idioms
which interrupts the fugal finale, the quartet still belongs to a relatively stable world where the
later and lighter Reger is the principal modern influence and Mendelssohn the classical model.

The Cello Sonata is already heading in quite another direction, away from classical ideals and
towards the ferment which had begun in pre-war Vienna. Schreker has replaced Reger as the main
influence, and there are signs of some fleeting acquaintance with the Schoenberg of opp.7 and 9.
After the first movement, key signatures are dispensed with, and the last ties with functional
tonality loosened. The surviving fragments of the cantata Sulamith (1920) reveal further
developments on these same lines, reaching at times an almost Skryabinesque luxuriance.

The remarkable one-movement Symphony of 1921 is, in contrast, clearly transitional. Whereas in the
first two sections Weill adapted a basically late Romantic language to new harmonic and motivic
purposes, in the third he attempted to check the flow by reverting to a post-Regerian fugal
texture, but without the tonal constraints observed in the quartet. For reasons partly technical
and partly programmatic, the fuguing soon peters out and the impassioned rhetoric is resumed.
Whatever the programmatic justification, the awkwardness reflects the kind of technical
shortcomings that necessitated Weill’s subsequent studies with Jarnach.

Less than a fully-fledged composition, yet more than a promising student piece, the Symphony is in
a sense explained, amplified and corrected by the two major achievements of the following year: the
Chorale-Fantasy for large string orchestra with horn, trombones and unison male chorus (it became
the finale of the Divertimento op.5) and the Sinfonia sacra. Already in the Fantasy, technical
lessons learned from Jarnach are made subservient to a strikingly personal vision. The idea of
following a sequence of divertimento-style movements with a massive finale envisaging the Last
Judgment is one that could have occurred only to the future composer of Mahagonny.

Zaubernacht (1922), a ballet-pantomime for young audiences, clearly offered Weill an opportunity to
return to the vein of simple lyricism so winningly uncovered in the B minor Quartet. Several ideas
from the quartet are woven into the narrative sections of the score and developed in the set
dances. Among the latter are a waltz and a cortège based on a foxtrot that Weill had written while
working as house pianist and composer in a Berlin cabaret. Without realizing it, he had laid the
foundations for the song style that would make him world famous.

Zaubernacht prepares us for the instrumental song cycle Frauentanz (1923) and the alla marcia
section of the op.8 String Quartet of the same year. In the latter work Weill tries to resuscitate
the final section of his Symphony, but to formally and texturally inappropriate ends. Unlike the
two movements which he discarded, the Quartet as it stands adds little to what he had achieved in
the earlier orchestral piece. Their true successor is the Recordare op.11 (1923), a setting for
large mixed chorus and children’s voices of verses from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Modelled on
Bach’s motets and related to the modern north German choral tradition that leads from Reger to
Distler, the Recordare has claim to be considered Weill’s early masterpiece. The fact that it
remained unpublished, whereas op.8 was accepted by Universal on Busoni’s recommendation, is
attributable only to the technical demands it places on even the most experienced choirs.

The Concerto for violin and wind instruments which Weill composed in the early summer of 1924,
shortly before Busoni’s death, is the first work in which he consciously declares his independence
from his beloved teacher. Despite its elements of harlequinade and its apparent leanings towards an
Italianate style, its home is the Expressionist vein of the early Hindemith. The leap from the
free-tonal classicism of the Recordare to a largely non-tonal harmonic language risks some loss of
coherence in the immediate formal context, but acquires justification as a step toward the one-act
opera Der Protagonist (1924–5).

It says much for Weill’s powers of self-criticism that the critical and public acclaim of Der
Protagonist at its prestigious Dresden première in 1926 did not deflect him from the exploratory
path he pursued in his next two works, the significantly titled cantata Der neue Orpheus (1925) and
the one-act ballet-opera Royal Palace (1925–6), both to texts by the Expressionist poet Yvan Goll.
The excitement and sense of discovery Weill associated with these two works were surely inseparable
from his renewed encounter with certain vernacular and tonal elements. Although still attracted by
the lonely example of Schoenberg, Weill had realized that his own talents and responsibilities lay
elsewhere. Just as the cantata, with its concertante solo violin, can be heard as a critical reply
to the hermetic attitudes of the Violin Concerto, so may Royal Palace be viewed as a plea for
stylistic diversity as opposed to the more uniform compositional fabric of Der Protagonist.

The fact that in Royal Palace Weill made use of syncopated dance idioms for the first time is less
important in itself than in relation to a new concept of style: unity is no longer sought through
the dominance of any one idiom, but through a personal view of a multiplicity of idioms, with a
particular emphasis on those which are discredited or out of fashion (notably those associated with
his early admiration for Schreker). In this work, and in its successor Der Zar lässt sich
photographieren (1927), Weill also sheds most of his inhibitions regarding popular and jazz
materials, although his guide in this matter would seem to be Krenek rather than Milhaud and
Stravinsky. Largely unappreciated at its first performance, Royal Palace is the work in which
Weill’s originality as a theatre composer first manifests itself. Its failure influenced the
rejection of his next work, a full-length opera provisionally titled Na und?, by publishers and
opera houses alike. The few sketches of this work to have survived are sufficient to indicate that,
in its clearcut number form and range of styles, Na und? was the necessary link between Royal
Palace and the radically pluralist Mahagonny opera.

David Drew/J. Bradford Robinson

3. European maturity.

Stylistically Mahagonny has three main musical levels: the neo-classical, the neo-Verdian, and the
popular (coloured by cabaret and popular song). Melodically and motivically these are interlinked,
as were the analogous levels in Royal Palace. But in Mahagonny the fundamental integrating factor
is the harmony. Whereas in Royal Palace and, apparently, in Na und? the harmonic terms of reference
had changed from level to level – non-tonal, free tonal and tonal – in Mahagonny they are constant
throughout and merely subject to changes of emphasis (for instance, the submediant emphasis
characteristic of the popular level).

It is the new consistency and sharper focus of the harmony, and not the influence of popular music
or even of Brecht, that distinguishes Weill’s works of 1927–33 from most of his earlier ones up to
and including the Mahagonny Songspiel. The juxtaposition of tonal songs and non-tonal interludes in
the Songspiel had been his last contribution to the formal experiments of the postwar avant garde.
In transferring the Songspiel material to the opera, he not only removed most of the non-tonal
passages but also clarified the harmony at those points in the songs where elements from the ‘free’
style had been allowed to intrude. The introductory verses of the ‘Alabama-Song’, for instance,
were divested of their Bartók-like dissonances and recomposed in an ostensibly simpler though
actually more personal harmonic idiom.

In the midst of its two-and-a-half-year gestation Mahagonny suffered two interruptions – for Die
Dreigroschenoper and Das Berliner Requiem (both 1928) – that left their mark on the opera’s third
act, which is structurally the weakest of the three and relies on a last-minute borrowing from Das
Berliner Requiem to shore up its finale. Equally damaging to the opera’s unity were the
squeamishness of publishers and opera directors towards some of its scenes (especially the Act 2
brothel scene), which had to be revised, cut or replaced accordingly, and the deterioration of
Weill’s relations with Brecht, which prevented him as late as 1931 from putting the opera into
definitive form. Yet however insoluble the problems of its text, this uncomfortable and
thought-provoking work continues to maintain an uneasy place in the opera repertory and to deliver
its polemical barbs against consumer society and the cultural establishment.

If the Mahagonny opera is likely to remain the best-known of Weill’s full-length through-composed
works from the Weimar period, its historical impact pales beside that of Die Dreigroschenoper, the
most frequently performed piece of musical theatre of the 20th century. Here Weill alluded to an
astonishing range of musical objets trouvés, from broadside ballads and sanctimonious parlour tunes
to operatic recitative and ensemble-finales. The ‘song’ forms, for which the work has become justly
famous, are merely one strand in a score which thrives as much on the manifold contrast of
stylistic levels as on its carefully controlled mixture of the sentimental and the sardonic.
Weill’s handling of the band was immediately recognized as definitive for jazz orchestration in art
music, and his pseudo-tonal harmonizations came to be identified not only with his own inimitable
voice but with the Weimar jazz age as a whole. Yet for all the diversity of its material, the
Dreigroschenoper score, composed against the clock in one broad sweep of passion and amusement, has
the benefit of a few sharply delineated motifs that impart a satisfying if fully intuitive sense of
unity to the entire work.

Weill was momentarily taken aback by the acclaim Die Dreigroschenoper won in intellectual circles
as well as from the general public, and a self-protective withdrawal may be sensed in his two radio
cantatas of 1928–9, Das Berliner Requiem and Der Lindberghflug. Both are austere in mood, and rely
for the most part on a radically simplified and concentrated neo-classical idiom partly beholden to
Busoni’s view of Bach and partly forced on Weill by the primitive radio technology of the time.
Although in theory addressed to a mass audience, neither work makes more than an incidental
allusion to the Dreigroschenoper manner which numerous composers throughout Europe were already
trying to emulate, and both take their bearings from the more introspective passages of Mahagonny.
Not until the second cantata is there a hint of the impression which Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex had
made on Weill.

Although Weill was rightly proud of Die Dreigroschenoper and of his discovery that a ‘serious’
modern composer could still reach a large audience without sacrifice of originality or
contemporaneity, he recognized that the new song style was not, at that stage of its development, a
suitable basis for the continuous musical structures which were his main concern. Nevertheless, not
wishing to abandon his new audience, he felt called upon to develop and refine the song style,
whether by enlarging it into scenas or by diversifying its expression. If the former is apparent in
such sections of Mahagonny as the ‘Anglers’ Quartet’ (no.8), the latter is the main impetus behind
his collaboration on Happy End (1929), a ‘play with music’ to which Brecht supplied apposite song
texts. The resultant set of songs and choruses, though they greatly expanded the range of
possibilities opened up by Die Dreigroschenoper, could not counteract the fiasco of the play’s
première and earned Weill a gentle reprimand from his Viennese publishers to return to the straight
path.

In fact Weill had already resolved to do so, as was evident in his next Brecht collaboration, the
‘school opera’ Der Jasager (1930). In this extraordinary work the classical economy practised in
the two radio cantatas is applied with extreme, almost self-effacing rigour; and yet the
restrictive pressure, related to the stern morality of the libretto no less than to practical
exigencies of non-professional performance, serves to intensify the lyricism that had begun to make
itself heard in parts of Mahagonny and then, more clearly, in the radio cantatas. Although Der
Jasager was conceived by its librettist as a Lehrstück to instruct audiences and performers alike
in collective morality, there is some indication that Weill took the work’s didactic element in his
own special sense, and produced what was in effect a vade mecum for young composers aspiring to
write modern opera. Adopted for use in the Prussian school system, the work quickly achieved a huge
number of performances (exceeding even those of Die Dreigroschenoper at the time) and spawned a
great many imitations, thereby laying the groundwork for a ‘Weill underground tradition’ which
persisted even during the Third Reich and into the postwar era.

The idea of a dialectical relationship between words and music, and between the ingredients of the
music itself, had already been fundamental to the Mahagonny Songspiel, and is one of the reasons
why at this time Weill favoured texts in which affirmative views are indicated by negative
examples. The principle, widely misunderstood or misrepresented by those who castigated the
‘immorality’ of the Mahagonny opera or applauded the ‘morality’ of Der Jasager, and is again
fundamental to Mahagonny’s successor, the three-act opera Die Bürgschaft (1930–31). Here too there
is a triple stratification of styles, although the popular level has become less jazzy (there are
no saxophones and the banjo has been replaced by two Stravinskian pianos). Like Der Jasager, Die
Bürgschaft is a modern morality play in consciously antiquated garb, and owes something to the
example of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex without imitating its music. But unlike Der Jasager, it
criticizes the prevailing order, and is actively supported both by a commenting chorus in the
classic Handelian tradition and by a stage chorus representing the exploited and oppressed masses.
By allowing the stage chorus to emerge, at decisive moments, as the drama’s true protagonist, Weill
created a modern ‘chorus opera’ that drew historical consequences from Verdi and Musorgsky.

By now it was beyond question that whatever his genius as a writer of songs, Weill’s finest
inventions depended on the kind of dramatic momentum that could be accumulated only in a continuous
musical structure. Weill himself was well aware of this; indeed, it was one of the factors that led
eventually to his rupture with Brecht. But as his chances of mounting a full-length opera in
Germany receded, he decided to return to the ‘play with music’ that had been successfully
established in Die Dreigroschenoper. The ‘winter’s tale’ Der Silbersee which Weill and Kaiser wrote
in the second half of 1932 is, in its subject matter, an almost direct continuation of Die
Bürgschaft, being an undisguised response to the political, cultural and economic crisis in the
last year of the Weimar Republic. The Weillian seven-piece jazz band of Die Dreigroschenoper and
Happy End has now been replaced by a medium-sized opera orchestra, and the song style has branched
out towards both opera and cantata in a manner that aspires to a modern version of 18th- and early
19th-century Singspiel.

Expelled from Germany at the height of his powers, Weill wrote two complementary works in 1933
which have some claim to be considered his European masterpieces: the Second Symphony (begun before
his flight to Paris and completed in 1934) and the choral ballet or cantata Die sieben Todsünden.
While the former, championed and first performed by Bruno Walter, releases the neo-Mendelssohnian
symphonic energy latent in the upper levels of Die Bürgschaft, the latter accomplishes with the
song style something that would not have been feasible at any stage in its evolution before Der
Silbersee. Thanks in some degree to Brecht’s tightly structured text and his new-found
understanding of Weill’s musical and aesthetic needs, the song style now evolves into a continuous
and developing musical structure to produce a unique and unrepeatable mixture of cantata and
ballet, half song cycle, half madrigal play.

The symphony and the ballet-cantata were the last pieces Weill wrote for the audience he had left
behind in Germany. Although the two main works of 1934–5, the political operetta Der Kuhhandel and
the biblical drama Der Weg der Verheissung, still have the advantage of a text in his native
language, they are already the works of an expatriate searching for another audience and therefore
anxious to make himself understood. Different as they are in style and aim, both seek to conceal
their German origins – the operetta by way of Latin American inflections appropriate to its
Caribbean setting, the biblical drama by the use of synagogue melodies – and both are harmonically
much milder and more traditional than any of the German works. Yet Der Kuhhandel, a light-handed
satire on war profiteering, might well have been acclaimed as a minor masterpiece had it been
completed and staged in the form Weill originally envisaged; and Der Weg der Verheissung promised,
in scope and stylistic variety, to be a legitimate successor to Mahagonny before it underwent
drastic rewriting as The Eternal Road. In the event, another 60 years lapsed before either work was
heard in its original form, and the musical material amassed for these two failures formed an
enormous quarry which Weill was to mine again and again for the works of his American years.

David Drew/J. Bradford Robinson

4. American works.

For his first work specifically written for the American stage, Johnny Johnson (1936), Weill
attained a diversity of style that far exceeds that of even the most pluralistic of his earlier
works. To a certain extent this resulted from extensive borrowings from his preceding failures
(including Happy End, Der Kuhhandel and Marie Galante), but it also reflects an almost encyclopedic
urge to capture the musical ethos of his host country: patriotic songs of World War I, torch songs
from urban nightclubs, cowboy songs, college glees and a love duet in waltz time redolent of Victor
Herbert vie with a starkly Expressionist vein for the scenes of trench warfare. But if Weill’s
polyglot score is at least justified by the international setting of the plot, and his partitioning
of the musical resources into ‘islands of music’ (Blitzstein, E1936) impressed his colleagues,
there is no overlooking the strain he apparently felt at having suddenly to come to terms with a
new set of theatrical and musical conventions.

Something of the same strain can be sensed in Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), a putative and
well-liked successor to Gershwin’s political operettas which was in fact an Americanized by-product
of Der Kuhhandel and, like that work, made use of Weill’s new-found talent for light music in the
Strauss and Offenbach vein. But the passages in Knickerbocker Holiday where Weill attempted to
Americanize fundamentally European material by the mechanical application of certain jazz and blues
formulae lacked the effortlessness of those emigré art composers who, like Will Grosz or Vernon
Duke, were turning out successful popular songs with apparent ease. More convincing, and
technically more accomplished, than some of the Americanisms in Knickerbocker Holiday is the entire
score Weill wrote for the pageant Railroads on Parade (1938–9).

Such exertions are nowhere to be found in Lady in the Dark (1940), the work that established Weill
as a Broadway composer of the first rank. The European harmony and Pucciniesque bridge of
‘September Song’ have given way, in ‘My Ship’, to smooth 5th-related chord progressions and an
exquisitely gradated melody proceeding from pentatonicism to diatonicism to delicate chromaticism.
Equally virtuoso is Weill’s handling of Broadway reprise conventions, here convincingly wedded to
the dramaturgy in the form of an idée fixe. The work’s three through-composed dream sequences, in
effect one-act operas, gave Weill a renewed opportunity to demonstrate his ‘gestic’ control of
dramatic pacing and momentum. Even the subject-matter, psychoanalysis, was new to American musical
comedy. Exemplary yet inimitable, the score resembles a surreal Broadway montage of Royal Palace
and Die Dreigroschenoper, and was fiercely rejected by admirers of the latter (Stravinsky
excepted).

In its form and style Lady in the Dark inaugurated and set impeccably high standards for Weill’s
series of six Broadway musicals in which, to quote Virgil Thomson’s obituary in the New York Herald
Tribune, ‘every new work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution of dramatic problems’. The
wartime entertainment One Touch of Venus (1943) might be considered an exception, but even there
the incorporation of dance sequences to advance the story was commercially risky, as was the ironic
and parodistic treatment of much that other songwriters and show composers took seriously. More
challenging, however, were the shows that followed. The Firebrand of Florence (1944), a bold
attempt to write a full-blooded Broadway operetta, suffered from Weill’s own public confession of
failure, and has only recently proved successful in revival. Much more successful in its day, and
now regarded as one of the central achievements of his American career, was Street Scene (1946). A
grim tragedy set in a New York tenement district and aptly subtitled ‘an American opera’, it bears
much the same relation to musical comedy as does Weill’s admitted exemplar Porgy and Bess in its
through-composed score, its use of vernacular musical idioms for local colour, and its frequent
nods in the direction of the European opera tradition, in this case verismo. Equally unusual to
Broadway were the highly stylized vaudeville of Love Life (1947–8), whose dramatic structure is
plainly influenced by the theatre of Thornton Wilder, and the themes of racial prejudice and
persecution that inform Weill’s last completed work for Broadway, Lost in the Stars (1949). But a
similar innate urge to innovation is apparent in the non-Broadway works from these years: Where do
we go from here? (1943–4), written in collaboration with Ira Gershwin, was meant to be a first step
leading towards a through-composed film musical, while the one-act college opera Down in the Valley
(1945–8) clearly aspires to the role of an American Jasager in its modest technical requirements
and didactic impetus. Both these works attempted to establish genres non-existent in the American
musical landscape of their day.

Weill retained from his discarded background two notable advantages over his popular competitors,
and was wise enough to exploit them. The first was an aural imagination that freed him from any
dependence on the piano and compelled him to make his own orchestral scores, a practice unknown on
Broadway at the time and one which vastly increased the amount of work involved in each new
production. It is in these scores that his technical mastery in unequalled and his special place in
history as a precursor of Bernstein and Sondheim is assured. The second and related advantage was
his highly cultivated sense of musical character and theatrical form. This is already apparent in
the individual numbers, which are more sharply and variously characterized than even the most
skilful Broadway products of the time, and it becomes decisive and unique in the way it determines
the distinctive profile of each show. Given the multifariousness of Weill’s American stage works,
it is hard to trace a line of development within them, just as it is hard to speculate about the
course he might have followed had he lived on into the 1950s and 60s, when he would have confronted
not only the flowering of the American musical but also, and especially, the renaissance of his own
European stage works. For in the end his greatest American success, indeed one of the most
successful off-Broadway shows of all times, proved to be a posthumously Americanized version of Die
Dreigroschenoper.

David Drew/J. Bradford Robinson

5. Posthumous reputation.

Even during his lifetime Weill’s achievement was never less than controversial. If the success of
Die Dreigroschenoper brought an ill-tempered dismissal from Schoenberg, his abandonment of that
very style earned him the disapproval and disrespect of Adorno and the avant-garde critical
establishment, while admirers of his Broadway work found his European music, to quote the
posthumous assessment of his American publisher, to ‘have no present value at all’. The difficulty
of assessing Weill’s achievement was compounded by the extreme disarray of his European output,
which even before his emigration to America he had made little effort to keep intact, and by the
two problems he bequeathed to his immediate posterity: the ‘Brecht–Weill’ problem and the problem
of the ‘two Weills’.

The former refers to the alleged role of Brecht in the creation of their collaborative works. It
was long thought that Brecht contributed some if not all of the melodies in Die Dreigroschenoper
and the Mahagonny Songspiel, a view which Brecht, with his self-confessed broad-mindedness in
matters of intellectual property, did nothing to dispel. This view was thought to be confirmed by
the discovery, in the early 1980s, of a manuscript containing Brecht’s pre-Dreigroschenoper melody
for ‘Seeräuber-Jenny’ with several remarkable resemblances to Weill’s later setting. A closer
inspection of this and other Brecht tunes reveals, however, that even where Weill used them as a
pre-compositional framework, he made decisive departures in declamation and melodic shape to lend
them a distinctive character, in effect refashioning them into something quite different and
entirely his own.

The problem of the ‘two Weills’ is more fundamental and raises some basic questions in the
aesthetics of musical reception. Obviously Weill’s European works and his American works spoke to
quite different audiences and require different sets of categories for their appraisal. This
difference was long thought to be unbridgeable and to stand in need of special biographical or even
psychological pleading. But the pre- and post-Dreigroschenoper works of his Weimar period likewise
addressed different audiences, and Weill’s Broadway shows contain a sufficient number of
identifying ‘fingerprints’ and self-borrowings from his European works to make their authorship
unmistakable. Similarly, an examination of the sketches for his Broadway musicals reveals that
Weill basically used the same working methods at all stages of his career. Nor did he feel that his
music required any special pleading: reviewing his career in retrospect in 1950, he rightly pointed
out that all his stage works consistently probe a middle ground between musical comedy and opera –
between the play with interpolated music and the through-composed operatic score in the European
tradition. Moreover, following the decline of Berlin as a theatrical capital in the early 1930s, he
was convinced that New York was the only place that offered him the necessary platform, audience
and financial substructure to realize his ambitions for the musical stage.

The problem, as Adorno perceptively if pejoratively remarked in his obituary for the Frankfurter
Rundschau (15 April 1950), has to do with the concept of ‘composer’ altogether. As a confirmed man
of the theatre, Weill was less interested in a sacrosanct work or text than in the reactions of its
intended audience. To achieve his ends he frequently made or sanctioned far-reaching changes in his
scores, albeit never so as to violate the work’s fundamental ethos. But just as the importance of
the ‘text’ recedes in his output, so does the notion of a composer as fashioning an inimitable
personal style and expressing a consistent artistic persona. For Weill each new stage work posed
unique problems of style, organization and musical language that had to be confronted and solved
afresh. If the scores of Der Jasager and Lady in the Dark seem incommensurable, so too were their
audiences, their executants and their generic traditions. What they shared, apart from Weill’s
habitually superior craftsmanship, were their mastery of the musico-dramatic problems at hand. In
this light, his work is best viewed, and assessed, not in terms of 19th-century Ausdruckskunst, but
under the categories of stylistic plurality and applied composition, categories that have some
right to be regarded as his historical contribution to postmodernism.

Weill himself was aware of the uniqueness of his personal aesthetic. Writing to his publisher in
1929, he exclaimed, with justifiable professional pride: For years I have been the only creative
musician to work consistently and uncompromisingly, against the resistance of the snobs and
aesthetes, to create basic forms [Urformen] of a new, simple, popular musical theatre. Even the
least of the theatre works I have produced during this period has arisen under the impress of this
responsibility and from a constant effort to pursue a line of development which seems, to me, the
only one possible.

J. Bradford Robinson

6. Influence.

Although, unlike his contemporary Hindemith, Weill did not bequeath to posterity a corpus of
pedagogical writings or a codifiable musical language, he must be viewed in retrospect as the most
influential German composer of his generation. His example is still invoked today by art composers
interested in pursuing stylistic pluralism, whether this is taken to mean the adoption of popular
idioms, the ‘crossover’ from art to commercial music, or stylistic contrast as a compositional
element in its own right. Equally important was his advocacy of ‘gestic music’, by which he meant a
theatre score that precisely undergirds and pre-defines the pace, timing, character and mood of the
drama. Der Jasager, a casebook example of gestic music reduced to essentials, left an indelible
mark on 20th-century music theatre, whether that of his younger German contemporaries (from Blacher
to Orff), his American colleagues (Copland’s The Second Hurricane, and thus indirectly Britten’s
The Little Sweep) or the minimalist theatre composers of subsequent decades. Another of his
influential characteristics, widely attributed to his association with Brecht and the ‘alienation
effect’, was a supposedly ironic detachment of his music from the text or context. Further, just as
Brecht advocated a ‘separation of elements’ in the art of acting, so Weill’s Weimar scores lend
themselves to the kind of analysis in which the ingredients are seen to conflict dialectically
rather than cohering into a unified whole.

In none of these respects would Weill himself have claimed to be the innovator, however aware he
was of the influence he exerted on his contemporaries. He deferred in his writings to Mozart as a
quintessentially ‘gestic’ opera composer, and the stylistic plurality he avowed is, of course, as
old as Monteverdi. But by presenting these devices forcefully in modern contexts he offered
examples which other composers could, and did, usefully follow. The specific ‘tone’ of Weill’s
works of the late 1920s is often consciously quoted, particularly his distinctive handling of
bitonal harmony, triadic atonality and jazz timbres. In the Broadway musical his influence has
perhaps been less noticeable, partly because of transformations in the genre itself, partly because
none of his shows have remotely approached the iconic status accorded to such contemporary
productions as Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun or Guys and Dolls. Nonetheless, their
importance in elevating the genre’s subject matter, sharpness of characterization and general
craftsmanship is unquestionable. Finally, in the search for new audiences and hybrid forms of music
theatre, Weill’s name and the protean example of Die Dreigroschenoper continue to be invoked by
composers as varied as Hans Werner Henze and John Adams in their own attempts to broaden the base
for contemporary music.

J. Bradford Robinson

Bibliography

A: Documents and catalogues

D. Drew, ed.: Kurt Weill: Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt, 1975)

D. Drew, ed.: Über Kurt Weill (Frankfurt, 1975)

H. Marx, ed.: Weill-Lenya (New York, 1976)

M. Wyss: Brecht in der Kritik: Rezensionen aller Brecht-Uraufführungen (Munich, 1977)

D. Drew: Kurt Weill: a Handbook (London, 1987)

H. Fetting, ed.: Von der Freien Bühne zum Politischen Theater: Drama und Theater im Spiegel der
Kritik, ii: 1919-1933 (Leipzig, 1987)

J. Lucchesi and R.K. Shull: Musik bei Brecht (Berlin, 1988)

M.R. Mercado: Kurt Weill: a Guide to his Works (New York, 1989)

S. Hinton and J. Schebera, eds.: Kurt Weill: Musik und Theater, gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1990,
2/2000)

B. Meyer-Rähnitz: Kurt-Weill-Diskographie: die Grammophon-Schallplatten (1927-1961) (Dresden, 1994)

D. Farneth, J. Andrus and D. Stein: A Guide to the Weill-Lenya Research Center (New York, 1995)

L. Symonette and K. H. Kowalke: Speak Low (when you Speak Love): the Letters of Kurt Weill and
Lotte Lenya (Berkeley, 1996)

D. Farneth: Kurt Weill: a Life in Pictures and Documents (Woodstock, NY, 1999)

N. Grosch: Kurt Weill und die Universal Edition: ein kommentierter Briefwechsel (Freiburg,
forthcoming)

B: Biographies

H. Kotschenreuther: Kurt Weill (Berlin, 1962)

R. Sanders: The Days Grow Short: the Life and Music of Kurt Weill (London and New York, 1980)

J. Schebera: Für Sie porträtiert: Kurt Weill (Leipzig, 1980)

D. Jarman: Kurt Weill: an Illustrated Biography (Bloomington, IN, 1982)

J. Schebera: Kurt Weill: Leben und Werk, mit Texten und Materialien von und über Kurt Weill
(Leipzig, 1983)

E. Hayasaki and T. Iwabuchi: Kuruto Wairu (Tokyo, 1985) [in Jap.]

J. Schebera: Kurt Weill: eine Biographie in Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Leipzig, 1990; Eng.
trans., 1995)

R. Taylor: Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World (London, 1991)

J. Rosteck: Zwei auf einer Insel: Lotte Lenya und Kurt Weill (Berlin, 1999)

J. Schebera: Kurt Weill (Reinbek, 2000)

C: Monographs and essay collections

G. Wagner: Weill und Brecht: das musikalische Zeittheater (Munich, 1977)

K.H. Kowalke: Kurt Weill in Europe (Ann Arbor, 1979)

A New Orpheus: New Haven, CT, 1983

J. Engelhardt: Gestus und Verfremdung: Studien zum Musiktheater bei Strawinsky und Brecht/Weill
(Munich, 1984)

F. Hennenberg: Neue Funktionsweisen der Musik und des Musiktheaters in den zwanziger Jahren:
Studien über die Zusammenarbeit Bertolt Brechts mit Franz S. Brunier und Kurt Weill (diss., U. of
Halle, 1987)

B. Kortländer, W. Meiszies and D. Farneth, eds.: Vom Kurfürstendamm zum Broadway: Kurt Weill
(1900-1950) (Düsseldorf, 1990)

H. Edler and K.H. Kowalke, eds.: A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt Weill Studien (Hildesheim, 1992)

R. Bélicha: Kurt Weill et la France (Villejuif, 1996)

N. Grosch, J. Lucchesi and J. Schebera, eds.: Kurt Weill-Studien (Stuttgart, 1996)

H. Geuen: Von der Zeitoper zur Broadway Opera: Kurt Weill und die Idee des musikalischen Theaters
(Schliengen, 1997)

Kurt Weill: die frühen Werke, 1916-1928, Musik-Konzepte, nos.101–2 (1998)

F. Hirsch: How Can you Tell an American? Kurt Weill on Stage from Berlin to Broadway (New York,
2000)

E. Juchem: Kurt Weill und Maxwell Anderson: neue Wege zu einem amerikanischen Musiktheater
(Stuttgart, 2000)

D: Style, aesthetics

G. Hartung: ‘Zur epischen Oper Brechts und Weills’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg: gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, viii
(1958–9), 659–73

A.L. Ringer: ‘Schoenberg, Weill and Epic Theatre’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, v
(1980), 77–98

A.L. Ringer: ‘Weill, Schönberg und die Zeitoper”’, Mf, xxxiii (1980), 465–72

G. Rienäcker: ‘Thesen zur Opernästhetik Kurt Weills’, JbMP 1980 (1981), 116–34

S.H. Borwick: ‘Weill’s and Brecht’s Theories on Music in Drama’, JMR, iv (1982), 39–67

U. Weisstein: ‘Von reitenden Boten und singenden Holzfällern: Bertolt Brecht und die Oper’, Brechts
Dramen: neue Interpretationen, ed. W. Hinderer (Stuttgart, 1984), 266–99

S.C. Cook: Opera for a New Republic: the ‘Zeitopern’ of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith (Ann Arbor,
1988)

S. Hinton: ‘The Concept of Epic Opera: Theoretical Anomalies in the Brecht–Weill Partnership’, Das
musikalische Kunstwerk: Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 285–94

A. Quinones: ‘Aspekte von Kurt Weills Musiktheaterkonzept’, Studien zur Berliner Musikgeschichte,
ed. T. Ebert-Obermeier (Berlin, 1989), 353–9

K.H. Kowalke: ‘Hin und Zurück: Kurt Weill at 90’, MT, cxxi (1990), 188–92

K.H. Kowalke: ‘Singing Brecht versus Brecht Singing: Performance in Theory and Practice’, Music and
Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. B. Gilliam (Cambridge, 1994), 74–93

J.B. Robinson: ‘Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: in Search of a Shimmy Figure’, ibid., 107–34

K.H. Kowalke: ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism, and Popular Culture: “Öffentlichkeit als Stil”’,
Modernism/Modernity, ii/1 (1995), 27–69

J.B. Robinson: ‘Learning the New Ropes: Kurt Weill and the American Theater Song’, Kurt Weill
Newsletter, xv/2 (1997), 3–7

E: Particular works

Die Dreigroschenoper

T.W. Adorno: ‘Kompositionskritik: Kurt Weill, Kleine Dreigroschenmusik’, Musikblätter des Anbruch,
xi (1929), 316–17

T.W. Adorno: ‘Zur Dreigroschenoper’, Die Musik, xxii (1929–30), 424–8

C. Tolksdorf: John Gays ‘Beggar’s Opera’ und Bert Brechts ‘Dreigroschenoper’ (Rheinberg, 1934)

S. Unseld, ed.: Bertolt Brechts Dreigroschenbuch (Frankfurt, 1960, 2/1978)

R. Speirs: ‘A Note on the First Published Version of Die Dreigroschenoper and its Relation to the
Standard Text’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, xiii (1977), 25–32

W. Ruf: ‘Gebrauchsmusik in der Oper: der “Alabama Song” von Brecht und Weill’, Festschrift Hans
Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart, 1984), 411–22

W. Hecht, ed.: Brechts Dreigroschenoper (Frankfurt, 1985)

F. Hennenberg: ‘Weill, Brecht und die “Dreigroschenoper”: neue Materialien zur Entstehung und
Uraufführung’, ÖMz, xl (1985), 281–91

A. Csampai and D. Holland, eds.: Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper; Igor Strawinsky,
The Rake’s Progress: Texte, Materialien, Kommentare (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1987)

K.H. Kowalke: ‘Accounting for Success: Misunderstanding Die Dreigroschenoper’, OQ, vi/3 (1988),
18–38

K.H. Kowalke: ‘In Trivial (?) Pursuit: Who Sings the “Barbarasong”?’, Kurt Weill Newsletter, vi/2
(1988), 8–11

S. Giles: ‘From Althusser to Brecht: Formalism, Materialism and The Threepenny Opera’, New Ways in
Germanistik, ed. R. Sheppard (Berg, 1989), 1–25

S. Giles: ‘Rewriting Brecht: Die Dreigroschenoper 1928–1931’, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jb, xxx
(1989), 249–79

S. Hinton, ed.: Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera (Cambridge, 1990)

E. Harsh, ed.: K. Weill: Die Dreigroschenoper, a Facsimile of the Holograph Full Score, Kurt Weill
Edition, iv/1 (New York, 1996)

S. Giles: Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the ‘Threepenny’ Lawsuit
(Berne, 1997)

Mahagonny

B. Brecht: ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, Versuche, ii (Berlin,
1930); repr. in Gesammelte Werke, ed. E. Hauptman, xvii (Frankfurt, 1967), 1004–16

K. Weill: ‘Zur Aufführung der Mahagonny-Oper’, Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten und Handelszeitung (8
March 1930)

D. Drew: ‘The History of Mahagonny’, MT, civ (1963), 18–24

Der Jasager

D. Drew: ‘Weill’s School Opera’, MT, cvi (1965), 934–7

P.W. Humphries: Expressions of Einverständnis: Musical Structure and Affective Content in Kurt
Weill’s Score for Der Jasager (diss., UCLA, 1988)

S. Hinton: ‘Lehrstück: an Aesthetics of Performance’, Music and Performance during the Weimar
Republic, ed. B. Gilliam (Cambridge, 1994), 59–73

E. Hayasaki: ‘Klaus Pringsheims Jasager-Projekt in Tokyo 1932 und weitere japanische
Weill-Erstaufführungen der dreissiger Jahre’, Emigrierte Komponisten in der Medienlandschaft des
Exils 1933–1945: Dessau 1997, 159–69

Other works

M. Blitzstein: ‘Weill scores for Johnny Johnson’, MM, xiv (1936–7), 25ff

D. Drew: ‘Topicality and the Universal: the Strange Case of Weill’s Die Bürgschaft’, ML, xxxix
(1958), 242–4

F. Köhn: ‘Das Ruhrepos: Dokumentation eines gescheiterten Projekts’, Brecht-Jb (1977), 52–80

A. Sundgaard: ‘Writing Folk Opera with Kurt Weill: Portrait of the Librettist as a Silenced
Composer’, Dramatists Guild Quarterly, xvi/4 (1980), 24–30 [on Down in the Valley]

D. Farneth: ‘From the Archives: Retracing The Eternal Road’, Kurt Weill Newsletter, vi/1 (1988),
10–13

J. Pritchard: ‘Les Ballets 1933’, Ballet Review, xvi (1988), 13–34 [on Die sieben Todsünden]

G. Diehl: Der junge Kurt Weill und seine Oper ‘Der Protagonist’: exemplarische Untersuchungen zur
Deutung des frühen kompositorischen Werkes (Kassel, 1994)

J. Lee, E. Harsh and K.H. Kowalke: Street Scene: a Sourcebook (New York, 1994)

B.D. McClung: American Dreams: Analyzing Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill’s ‘Lady in the
Dark’ (diss., U. of Rochester, 1995)

M. Krueger: ‘Some Words about Where do we go from here?’, Kurt Weill Newsletter, xiv/2 (1996),
10–12

A. Hauff: ‘Ein Komponist auf Abwegen? Kurt Weills Operette Der Kuhhandel’, Festschrift
Christoph-Hellmut Mahling zum 65. Geburtsgtag, ed. A. Beer, K. Pfarr and W. Ruf (Tutzing, 1997),
501–16

A. Pollock: ‘A Question of Baloney: the Search for a Lost Translation of The Seven Deadly Sins’,
Kurt Weill Newsletter, xvi/1 (1998), 12–13

H. Loos and G. Stern: Auf dem Weg zum ’Weg der Verheissung’ (Freiburg, 2000)

F: Other literature

D. Drew: ‘Musical Theatre in the Weimar Republic’, PRMA, lxxxviii (1961–2), 89–108

S. Amzoll: ‘Kritik der Radioproduktion: Kurt Weill als Rundfunkpublizist’, Musik und Gesellschaft,
xxxiii (1983), 601–5

F. Hennenberg: Das grosse Brecht-Liederbuch (Frankfurt, 1984)

G.S. Cahn: ‘Weimar Music in America: its Reception and Impact’, Centennial Review, xxix (1985),
186–204

A. Dümling: Lasst euch nicht verführen: Brecht und die Musik (Munich, 1985)

B. Meyer-Rähnitz: ‘Drei Groschen und mehr: Werke von Brecht-Weill auf 78er Schallplatten’, Fox auf
78 (1987), 44–50; (1988), 24–8

J. Willett: The Theatre of the Weimar Republic (New York, 1988)

D. Spoto: Lenya: a Life (Boston, 1989)

R.H. Kornick: Recent American Opera: a Production Guide (New York, 1991)

D. Drew: ‘Schoenberg and Weill’, Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library
Collection Presented to O.W. Neighbour, ed. C. Banks, A. Searle and M. Turner (London, 1993),
346–53

B. Gilliam: ‘Stage and Screen: Kurt Weill and Operatic Reform in the 1920s’, Music and Performance
during the Weimar Republic, ed. B. Gilliam (Cambridge, 1994), 1–12

S. Hinton: ‘Grossbritannien als Exilland: der Fall Weill’, Musik in der Emigration 1933–1945:
Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Rückwirkung, ed. H. Weber (Stuttgart, 1994), 213–27

P. Huynh: ‘Bote einer neuen Zeit? Kurt Weills theoretische und praktische Auseinandersetzung mit
dem Rundfunk in der Zeit von 1925 bis 1945’, Das Orchester, xliii/2 (1995), 14–18

T. Levitz: Teaching New Classicality: Ferruccio Busoni’s Master Class in Composition (Frankfurt,
1996)

J.B. Robinson: ‘Tra Broadway e il Metropolitan: il teatro musicale politico nell’America degli anni
Trenta’, Itinerari della musica americana, ed. G. Borio and G. Taglietti (Lucca, 1996), 25–58

E. Juchem: ‘Kurt Weill und die Radiokunst in den USA’, Emigrierte Komponisten in der
Medienlandschaft des Exils 1933–1945: Dessau 1997, 55–72

J. Bradford Robinson

J. Bradford Robinson

Works

Weill’s opus numbering is incomplete and stops at op.23

for full list including incomplete, lost and projected works, see Drew (A1987)

Edition:

The Kurt Weill Edition, ed. K. Kowalke and others (New York, 1996–)

Stage

Das hohe Lied (op, 1, after H. Suderman), 1914, lost

Zriny, 1916 (op, after T. Körner), lost

Ninon von Lenclos (op.1, after E. Hardt), 1920, lost

Zaubernacht (children’s pantomime, 1, V. Boritch), Berlin, Kurfürstendamm, 18 Nov 1922, fs lost, vs
US-NH; arr. Weill as orch suite Quodlibet, op.9, 1923

Pantomime, op.14 (ballet, 3, G. Kaiser), 1924, inc.

Der Protagonist (op, 1, G. Kaiser), op.15, Dresden, Staatsoper, 27 March 1926 (Vienna, 1926)

Royal Palace (ballet-op, 1, Y. Goll), op.17, 1925–6, Berlin, Staatsoper, 2 March 1927, fs lost, vs
(Vienna, 1926); reorchd version, Nederlands Congresgebouw, The Hague, 25 June 1971

Na und? (op, 2, F. Joachimson), 1926–7, unperf., lost, sketches in NH

Mahagonny (Songspiel, 3 pts, B. Brecht), 1927, Baden-Baden, Kurhaus, Grosser Bühnensaal, 17 July
1927 (Vienna, 1964) [inc. Alabama-Song, Benares-Song]

Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (ob, 1, Kaiser), op.21, 1927, Leipzig, Neues, 18 Feb 1928
(Vienna, 1928)

Die Dreigroschenoper (play with music, prol., 3, Brecht and E. Hauptmann, after J. Gay: The
Beggar’s Opera), 1928, Berlin, Schiffbauerdamm, 31 Aug 1928, vs (Vienna, 1928), fs (Vienna, 1972),
facs. edn (New York, 1996) [incl. Moritat von Mackie Messer, Seeräuber-Jenny, Kanonen-Song,
Barbara-Song, Zuhälter-Ballade, Ballade vom angenehmen Leben, Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit
menschlichen Strebens]

Happy End (comedy with music, 3, D. Lane [E. Hauptmann] and Brecht), 1929, Berlin, Schiffbauerdamm,
2 Sept 1929, vs (Vienna, 1958), fs (Vienna, 1981) [incl. Bilbao-Song, Matrosen-Tango,
Surabaya-Johnny, Hosianna Rockefeller]

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (op, 3, Brecht), 1927–9, Leipzig, Neues, 9 March 1930
(Vienna, 1929) [derived in part from Mahagonny; incl. Alabama-Song, Denn wie man sich bettet, so
liegt man]

Der Jasager (Schuloper, 2, Brecht, after Jap. noh play Taniko), 1930, Berlin, Zentralinstitut für
Erziehung und Unterricht, 23 June 1930 (Vienna, 1930)

Die Bürgschaft (3, C. Neher, after J.G. Herder: Der afrikanische Rechtspruch), 1930–31, Berlin,
Städtische Oper, 10 March 1932, vs (Vienna, 1932), fs (Vienna, 1977) [incl. Song der beiden
Verkäuferinnen, Song von der Krone des Gewinns, Der Bäcker bäckt ums Morgenrot, Ballade von Cäsars
Tod, Schlaraffenland-Song]

Der Silbersee: ein Wintermärchen (play with music, 3, Kaiser), 1932–3, simultaneous premières at
Leipzig, Altes; Erfurt, Stadt; and Magdeburg, Stadt, 18 Feb 1933 (Vienna, n.d.)

Die sieben Todsünden (ballet chanté, 8 pts, Brecht), 1933, Paris, Champs-Elysées, 7 June 1933, vs
(New York, 1955) [transposed version], fs (Mainz, 1968)

Der Kuhhandel (operetta, 2, R. Vambery), 1934, inc., concert perf. Dusseldorf, Tonhalle, 23 March
1990; rev. as A Kingdom for a Cow (musical play, 3, R. Arkell; lyrics D. Carter), London, Savoy, 28
June 1935 (Mainz, 1989)

Der Weg der Verheissung (biblical drama, 4, F. Werfel), 1934–5, Chemnitz, 13 June 1999, autograph
lost, copy in Weill–Lenya Research Center, New York; rev. by Weill and L. Lewisohn as The Eternal
Road, 1935–6, New York, Manhattan Opera House, 4 Jan 1937, vs (New York, 1937)

Johnny Johnson (musical play, 3, P. Green), 1936, New York, 44th Street, 19 Nov 1936 (New York,
1936) [incl. Johnny’s Song, Mon ami, my friend]

The Common Glory (pageant, P. Green), 1937, inc.

Knickerbocker Holiday (musical comedy, 2, M. Anderson), 1938, New York, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 19
Oct 1938, vs (New York, 1938) [incl. How can you tell an American, It never was you, September
Song, There’s nowhere to go but up]

Davy Crockett, 1938 (musical play, 2, H.R. Hays), inc., vs NH

Railroads on Parade (pageant, E. Hungerford), 1938–9, New York, World’s Fair, 30 April 1939

Ulysses Africanus (musical play, 2, Anderson), 1939, inc., vs NH

Lady in the Dark (musical play, 2, M. Hart; lyrics I. Gershwin), 1940, Boston, Colonial, 30 Dec
1940, New York, Alvin, 21 Jan 1941, vs, ed. A. Sirmay (New York, 1941), restored fs and vs, ed. D.
Loud and J. Mauceri (New York, 1987) [incl. My Ship, One Life to Live, The Saga of Jenny,
Tchaikovsky, This is New]

The Pirate (musical, S.N. Behrman, after L. Fulda), 1942, inc.

One Touch of Venus (musical comedy, S.J. Perelman and O. Nash), 1943, New York, Imperial, 7 Oct
1943, vs excerpts (New York, 1984) [incl. Speak Low]

The Firebrand of Florence (operetta, E.J. Mayer; lyrics I. Gershwin), 1944, New York, Alvin, 22
March 1945 [incl. Sing me not a ballad, You’re far too near me]

Street Scene (American op, 2, E. Rice; lyrics L. Hughes), 1946, Philadelphia, Shubert, 16 Dec 1946,
New York, Adelphi, 9 Jan 1947, vs (New York, 1947), fs (New York, n.d.) [incl. A Boy Like You;
Lonely House; Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed; Wrapped in a ribbon and tied with a bow; What good would the
moon be?]

Down in the Valley (folk op, 1, A. Sundgaard), 1945–8, Bloomington, IN, School of Music, 15 July
1948 , vs (New York, 1948)

Love Life (vaudeville, 2 pts, A.J. Lerner), 1947–8, New York, 46th Street, 7 Oct 1948, 8 songs (New
York, 1948) [incl. Green-Up Time, Here I’ll stay, I remember it well, Love Song]

Lost in the Stars (musical tragedy, Anderson, after A. Paton: Cry the Beloved Country), 1949, New
York, Music Box, 30 Oct 1949; fs (New York, n.d., 2/1988) [incl. Cry the Beloved Country, The Hills
of Ixopo, Lost in the Stars, Thousands of Miles]

Huckleberry Finn (musical, Anderson), 1950, inc., 5 songs (New York, 1954)

Film scores

You and Me (dir. F. Lang), 1937–8

The River is Blue (Milestone), 1937–8, discarded

Where do we go from here? (dir. G. Ratoff), 1943–4, collab. I. Gershwin

Salute to France (dir. J. Renoir and G. Kanin), 1944

Radio scores

Herzog Theodor von Gothland (Grabbe), 1926, lost

Das Berliner Requiem (radio cant., Brecht), T, Bar, male chorus, wind orch, 1928 (Vienna, 1967)

Der Lindberghflug (Brecht), 1929, collab. Hindemith, withdrawn (Mainz, 1982), rev. as concert work

La grande complainte de Fantômas (R. Desnos), 1933, Radio Paris, 3 Nov 1933, lost

The Ballad of Magna Carta (radio cant., M. Anderson), T, B, chorus, orch, 1940, CBS, 4 Feb 1940
(New York, 1940)

Down in the Valley (radio op, A. Sundgaard), 1945, withdrawn, rev. as school opera

Incidental music

Die Weber (G. Hauptmann), 1920, part lost

Gustav III (A. Strindberg), 1927

Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (Brecht and L. Feuchtwanger, after C. Marlowe), 1928, mostly
lost

Konjunktur (L. Lania, Gasbarra, Piscator), 1928, part lost, no.1 (Vienna, 1929)

Katalaunische Schlacht (A. Bronnen), 1928, lost

Petroleuminseln (Feuchtwanger), 1928, part lost, no.10 (Vienna, 1929)

Mann ist Mann (Brecht), 1931, lost

Marie Galante (J. Deval), 1934; 7 songs (Paris, 1934), no.14 arr. L. Berio (Vienna, 1970)

High Wind in Jamaica, 1936; 2 songs, US-Wc

Madam, will you Walk? (S. Howard), 1939

Two on an Island (E. Rice), 1939, lost

It’s Fun to be Free (B. Hecht), 1941, part lost

Your Navy (Anderson), 1942, part lost

We will Never Die (Hecht), 1943, part lost

A Flag is Born (Hecht), 1946, part lost

Orchestral

Suite, E, 1918–19

Symphonic Poem, after Rilke: Die Weise von Liebe und Tod, 1919, lost

Symphony no.1, 1921

Divertimento, op.5, 1921–2, part lost

Sinfonia sacra, op.6, 1922, fs lost: Fantasia, Passacaglia, Hymnus

Quodlibet, suite, op.9, 1923 [from stage work Zaubernacht]

Concerto, op.12, vn, wind, 1924

Berlin im Licht, military band, 1928

Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, wind, 1928–9 [from Die Dreigroschenoper]

Symphony no.2, 1933–4

Choral and vocal orchestral

Sulamith, choral fantasy, S, female chorus, orch, 1920, part lost

Psalm viii, 6vv, 1921, part lost

Divertimento, op.5, male chorus, small orch, 1921–2, part lost

Recordare (Bible: Lamentations), op.11, SATB, 3-part children’s chorus, 1923

Das Stundenbuch (6 songs, Rilke), T/S, orch, 1923–4, part lost

Der neue Orpheus (cant., Y. Goll), op.[16], S, vn, orch, 1925

Der Lindberghflug (cant., Brecht), T, Bar, chorus, orch, 1929 [after radio score]

Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen (Brecht), TTBB, 1929, also version for 1v, pf [arr. from radio cant.
Das Berliner Requiem]

Die Legende vom toten Soldaten (Brecht), SATB, 1929

Kiddush, T, SATB, org, 1946

Songs

for solo voice and piano unless otherwise stated

[5] Schilflieder (N. Lenau), 1919, lost; Die stille Stadt (R. Dehmel), 1919; Die Bekehrte (J.W. von
Goethe), 1921; [2] Rilkelieder, 1921; Frauentanz (7 songs, medieval), op.10, S, 5 insts, 1923; Ich
sitze da un’ esse klops (anon.), T, 2 pic, bn, 1925; Vom Tod im Wald (ballad, Brecht), op.23, B, 10
wind, 1927; Berlin im Licht (Weill), 1928, arr. military band; Der Abschiedsbrief (E. Kästner),
1933; Fantômas (R. Desnos), 1933; Es regnet (J. Cocteau), 1933; Complainte de la Seine (M. Magre),
1934; Je ne t’aime pas (Magre), 1934; The Fräulein and the Little Son of the Rich (R. Graham), song
drama, 1936

2 chansons pour ‘L’opéra de quat’ sous’ (Y. Guilbert), 1938, no.1 lost; Nanas Lied (Brecht), 1939;
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (R. Frost), 1939, inc.; Buddy on the Nightshift (O.
Hammerstein), 1942; The Good Earth (Hammerstein), 1942; Oh Uncle Samuel! (Anderson), 1942; One
Morning in Spring (McKelway), 1942, lost; Russian War Relief (J.P. McEnvoy), 1942; Schickelgruber
(H. Dietz), 1942; Song of the Free (A. MacLeish), 1942; Walt Whitman Songs, 1942, orchd Weill with
I. Schlein; Song of the Inventory (L. Allan), 1942; Toughen up, buckle down, carry on (D. Fields),
1942; We don’t feel like surrendering today (Anderson), 1942; Was bekam des Soldaten Weib?
(Brecht), 1943; Wie lange noch? (W. Mehring), 1944; Come up from the fields, father (Whitman),
1947, orchd C. Surinach, 1956

Chamber and solo instrumental

String Quartet, b, 1918

Sonata, vc, pf, 1919–20

String Quartet, 1922–3, withdrawn, movts 3–4 incl. in op.8

String Quartet, op.8, 1923

Albumblatt für Erika, pf, 1937 [arr. of no.7 from stage work Der Weg der Verheissung]

Juvenilia

Mi addir, high v/high vv, ?pf/org, 1913; Es blühen zwei flammende Rosen, 1913, 1v, pf, inc.; Ich
weiss wofür (G. von Güllhausen), 4 male vv, 1914 ; Reiterlied (H. Löns), 1v, pf, 1914; Gebet (E.
Geibel), SATB, 1915; Sehnsucht (J. von Eichendorff), 1v, pf, 1916, inc.; [5] Ofrah’s Lieder (J.
Halevi), 1v, pf, 1916; Im Volkston (A. Holz), 1v, pf, 1916; Volkslied (A. Ritter), 1v, pf, 1917;
Das schöne Kind, 1v, pf, 1917; Maikaterlied (O. Bierbaum), 2 S, pf, 1917; Abendlied (Bierbaum), 2
S, pf, 1917, arr. S, pf; Intermezzo, pf, 1917

Arrangements

C.M. von Weber: Piano Sonata no.2: Andante, orch, 1918

F. Busoni: Divertimento, op.52, fl, orch/pf, 1922

[2] Folksongs of the New Palestine, 1v, pf (New York, 1938)

Battle Hymn of the Republic, The Star-Spangled Banner, America, spkr, chorus, orch, 1942

Hatikvah, orch, 1947

MSS in A-Wst, US-NH, NYp, R

Principal publishers: Universal, Chappell, Samuel French, Heugel, Schott