REFERENCE: KURT WEILL

"…the most original single workman in the whole musical theatre, internationally considered, during the last quarter century... Every work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution to dramatic problems."

Since my childhood in Brazil, Kurt Weill was a reference to me. Ever since, in my mind, his songs are directly related to Berlin’s atmosphere as well as its Imagery.

Kurt Weill was born on 2 March 1900 in Dessau, Germany and displayed musical talent early on. After studying theory and composition with Albert Bing, Kapellmeister of the Theater, Weill enrolled at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.

After a season as conductor of the newly formed municipal theater in Lüdenscheid, he returned to Berlin and was accepted into Ferruccio Busoni's master class in composition. He supported himself through a wide range of musical occupations, from playing organ in a synagogue to piano in a Bierkeller, by tutoring students (including Claudio Arrau and Maurice Abravanel) in music theory, and, later, by contributing music criticism to Der deutsche Rundfunk, the weekly program journal of the German radio.

By 1925, a series of performances in Berlin and at international music festivals established Weill as one of the leading composers of his generation, along with Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek.
By this time in his career, Weill's use of dance idioms associated with American dance music and his pursuit of collaborations with the finest contemporary playwrights had become essential strategies in his attempts to reform the musical stage.

During the 40’s, already in USA he established himself as a new and original voice in the American musical theatre.
" Weill's first hit was Lady in the Dark, a musical play about psychoanalysis by Moss Hart with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

The even greater success of One Touch of Venus (1943, book by S.J. Perelman, lyrics by Ogden Nash) gave Weill the credibility to embark on a series of bold ventures. He was elected as the only composer-member of the distinguished Playwrights Producing Company, which brought Elmer Rice's Pulitzer-Prize winning drama Street Scene to Broadway as an American opera, the first real successor to Porgy and Bess.

Now considered the first "concept musical," its first genuine successor was Cabaret (1965), and even Stephen Sondheim found Love Life "very useful" for his own work.

He died in New York on 3 April 1950.

Collaborations with Brecht

A commission from the Baden-Baden Music Festival in 1927 led to the creation of Mahagonny (Ein Songspiel), Weill's first collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, whose Mann ist Mann and whose poetry collection, Die Hauspostille, had captured Weill's imagination and suggested a compatible literary and dramatic sensibility. The succès de scandale of Mahagonny encouraged Weill and Brecht to continue work on the full-length opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (premiered at Leipzig in March 1930).

Exploiting their aggressive popular song-style, Weill and Brecht also wrote several works for singing actors in the commercial theatre, including Die Dreigroschenoper and Happy End. They explored other alternatives to the opera establishment in the school-opera Der Jasager and the radio cantatas Das Berliner Requiem and Der Lindberghflug. Increasingly uncomfortable with Brecht's restriction of the role of music in his political theater, Weill then turned to another collaborator, the famous stage designer Caspar Neher, for the libretto of his three-act epic opera, Die Bürgschaft (1931), and again to Georg Kaiser for the daring play-with-music Der Silbersee (1932). In both he refined his musical language into what he called "a thoroughly responsible style," appropriate for the serious and timely topics he addressed.

These later works outraged the Nazis. Riots broke out at several performances and carefully orchestrated propaganda campaigns discouraged productions of his works. In March 1933, Weill fled Germany; he and Lotte Lenya divorced soon thereafter. In Paris, Weill completed his Second Symphony and renewed briefly his collaboration with Brecht for Die sieben Todsünden, a "ballet with singing" for George Balanchine's troupe "Les Ballets 1933." He also wrote a number of cabaret chansons, as well as the score for Jacques Deval's Marie galante.