Weill, Kurt (1900–50), composer. The German‐born composer came to America in 1935 as a refugee from Nazism, accompanied by his wife, Lotte Lenya. American playgoers had already heard his unique, often jittery and staccato jazz‐influenced music in an earlier production of The Threepenny Opera (1933), which had a short run on Broadway. Shortly after his arrival his incidental music for Max Reinhardt's The Eternal Road (1937) was played in the New York production of the play. Weill's American musicals were Johnny Johnson (1936), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Lady in the Dark (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), The Firebrand of Florence (1945), Street Scene (1947), Love Life (1948), and Lost in the Stars (1949). At the time of his death he was working with Maxwell Anderson on Raft on the River, a musicalization of Huckleberry Finn. A 1954 revival of Threepenny Opera became one of the most successful of all Off‐Broadway offerings and revived interest in his work, especially after “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” became widely popular. However, attempts to present his other German musicals have not met with success, although opera companies have staged such works as The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny. Weill was a unique composer, mixing European influences with Broadway razzamatazz and coming up with a distinctive sound of his own. He was also a master of the haunting, melancholy ballad, as seen in song standards like “September Song” and “Speak Low.” Biography: Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, Foster Hirsch, 2002.

• Period: Modern (1870-)
• Country: Germany/USA
• Genres: Vocal, Concerto, Orchestral, Music Theater, Opera, Ballet, Choral, Symphonic

Biography

The son of a cantor, Kurt Weill was born in Dessau into a family that took in operatic performances as a main form of entertainment. When Weill was in his teens the director of the Dessau Hoftheater, Albert Bing, encouraged him in the study of music. Weill briefly studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and was already working professionally as a conductor when he attended composer Ferruccio Busoni's master classes in Berlin. Delighted to see the positive responses of an audience to his first collaboration with playwright Georg Kaiser, Der Protagonist (1926), he thereafter resolved to work toward accessibility in his music. In 1926 Weill married actress Lotte Lenya, whose reedy, quavering singing voice he called "the one I hear in my head when I am writing my songs."

In 1927 Weill began his collaboration with leftist playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht; their first joint venture, Mahagonny-Songspiel (1927), launched the number "Alabama Song," which, to their surprise, became a minor pop hit in Europe. The next show, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three-Penny Opera, 1928) was a monstrous success, in particular the song "Moritat" (Mack the Knife). Nonetheless, strain in their association was already being felt, and after the completion of their magnificent "school opera" Der Jasager (1930), the two parted company. Brecht and Weill were brought together once more in Paris to create Die Sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) (1934). In the meantime, Weill collaborated with Caspar Neher on the opera Die Bürgschaft (1931) and Georg Kaiser again on Der Silbersee (1933), works that garnered the hostile attention of the then-emerging Nazi party. With the rise to power of Hitler, Weill and Lenya were forced to dissolve their union and flee continental Europe. Weill found his way to New York in 1935; rejoining Lenya, Weill became a citizen and devoted himself to American democracy with a vengeance, preferring his name pronounced like "wile" rather than "vile." After a series of frustrating flops, Weill hit his stride with playwright Maxwell Anderson, producing his first hit, Knickerbocker Holiday (1938). In the dozen years left to him, Weill's stature on Broadway grew with a series of hit shows, including Lady in the Dark (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), Love Life (1948), and Lost in the Stars (1949). Weill had ambitions to create what he regarded as "the first American folk opera"; the closest of his American works to reach that goal is Street Scene (1946), a sort of "urban folk opera" based on a play by Elmer Rice with lyrics by Langston Hughes.

On April 3, 1950, Weill unexpectedly suffered a massive coronary and died in Lenya's arms. Weill's estate was valued at less than 1,000 dollars, and Lenya realized that his contribution to musical theater was likewise undervalued. She commissioned composer Marc Blitzstein to adapt an English-language version of Die Dreigroschenoper; it opened off-Broadway in 1954 and ran for three years, touching off a Weill revival that continues. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

(b Dessau, 2 March 1900; d New York, 3 April 1950). German composer, American citizen from 1943. He was a pupil of Humperdinck, Busoni and Jarnach in Berlin (1918-23); their teaching informed his early music, including the choral Recordare (1923) and the Concerto for violin and wind (1924), the latter also influenced by Stravinsky. But the deeper influence of Stravinsky, coupled with an increased consciousness of music as a social force, led Weill to a rediscovery in the mid-1920s of tonal and vernacular elements, notably from jazz, in his cantata Der neue Orpheus and one-act stage piece Royal Palace, written between two collaborations with the expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser: Der Protagonist and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren. In 1926 he married the singer Lotte Lenya, who was to be the finest interpreter of his music.

His next collaborator was Brecht, with whom he worked on The Threepenny Opera (1928), The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) and Happy End (1929), all of which use the corrupted, enfeebled diatonicism of commercial music as a weapon of social criticism, though paradoxically they have beome the epitome of the pre-war culture they sought to despise. Yet this is done within the context of a new harmonic consistency and focus. These works have also drawn attention from the theatre works in which Weill developed without Brecht during the early 1930s, Die Bürgschaft and Der Silbersee (with Kaiser again).

In 1933 he left Germany for Paris, where he worked with Brecht again on the sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. Then in 1935 he moved to the USA, where he cut loose from the European art-music tradition and devoted himself wholeheartedly to composing for the Broadway stage, intentionally subordinating aesthetic criteria to pragmatic and populist ones. Yet these works are still informed by his cultivated sense of character and theatrical form.

works:
Dramatic music

• Der Protagonist (1926)
• Royal Palace (1927)
• Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (1928)
• Die Dreigroschenoper (1928)
• Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1929)
• Happy End (1929)
• Der Jasager, school opera (1930)
• Die Bürgschaft (1932)
• Der Silbersee (1933)
• Die sieben Todsünden, sung ballet (1933)
• Johnny Johnson, fable (1936)
• Knickerbocker Holiday, operetta (1938)
• Railroads on Parade, pageant (1939)
• Lady in the Dark, musical play (1941)
• One Touch of Venus, musical comedy (1943)
• Street Scene, Broadway opera (1947)
• Down in the Valley, college opera (1948)
• Love Life, vaudeville (1948)
• Lost in the Stars, musical tragedy (1949)
• film, theatre and radio music

Orchestral music

• Sym. no. 1 (1921)
• Divertimento (1922)
• Sinfonia sacra (1922)
• Conc., vn, wind (1924)
• Sym. no. 2 (1933)

Vocal music

• Recordare, chorus (1923)
• Der neue Orpheus, S, vn, orch (1925)
• Vom Tod im Wald, B, wind (1927)
• Das Berliner Requiem, T, Bar, B, chorus (1928)
• Der Lindberghflug, T, Bar, chorus (1929)
• Kiddush, T, chorus (1949)
• songs

Chamber music

• 2 str qts (1919, 1923)
• Vc Sonata (1920)

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The operas and other stage works of Kurt Weill (1900-1950), German-American composer, had considerable influence on contemporary Western musical theater.

Kurt Weill was born in Dessau, Germany, on March 2, 1900. He studied piano as a child and composed several works before enrolling at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik at age 18. He left to work in provincial opera houses, returning to Berlin to study with Ferruccio Busoni from 1921 to 1924.

Weill's early compositions were largely instrumental concert works written in the current "advanced" style, but in 1926 he composed a one-act opera, Der Protagonist (The Protagonist; libretto by Georg Kaiser), and concentrated henceforth on stage works. Two short operas containing elements of popular music followed: Royal Palace (1926; by Kaiser) and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (1927, The Czar Has His Photograph Taken; by Ivan Goll).

As a composer, Weill achieved maturity in his collaboration with the poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht. On the eve of the Nazi victory in Germany, the team produced thinly veiled attacks on status-quo social attitudes and corrupt politics. Weill's music - trenchant, ironic, bittersweet - was the perfect setting for Brecht's pessimistic texts. Die Dreigroschenoper (1928, The Threepenny Opera) is their most famous work. This play with music, starring Lotte Lenya (Weill's young bride), was an immediate sensation and was performed throughout Europe. An English-language revival in 1955 ran for over 2, 000 performances.

Other Weill-Brecht stage works included the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1927-1929, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), the musical play Happy End (1929), and the school opera Der Jasager (1930, The Yes-sayer). With other librettists Weill composed the operas Die Bürgschaft (1930, The Pledge) and Der Silbersee (1932, The Silver Lake) before his works were banned by the Hitler regime and he fled Berlin in February 1933.

Weill lived briefly in Paris and London. His last collaboration with Brecht was an unusual ballet with songs, Die Sieben Todtsünden (1933, The Seven Deadly Sins), with choreography by George Balanchine, and he composed the scores for two musical plays, Marie Galante (1934) and A Kingdom for a Cow (1934). He became a naturalized American citizen in 1936.

The larger American compositions of Weill comprise 10 stage works, including the operas Street Scene (1946; by Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes) and Down in the Valley (1948; by Arnold Sundgaard); the musicals Johnny Johnson (1936; by Paul Green), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938; by Maxwell Anderson), Lady in the Dark (1940; by Moss Hart); and the "musical tragedy" Lost in the Stars (1949; by Anderson).

Weill was a creative genius, an innovator worthy of considerable study, whose music always bears unique stylistic traits of melody, harmony, rhythm, and orchestral color. His best stage works contain a sophistication of technique and a grasp of character delineation often belied by the use of simple means and "ordinary" elements from German folk tradition and the contemporary dance hall. As a whole, the works are innovative in their mixing of singing actors with opera singers, use of films and unconventional staging and design, and their explosive political and social content. Two Weill songs are worldwide popular standards: "Moritat" (or "Mack the Knife") from Threepenny Opera and "September Song" from Knickerbocker Holiday, both characteristic of his best work. He died on April 3, 1950.

Further Reading

Weill's career is recounted in David Ewen, European Light Opera (1962) and The World of Twentieth Century Music (1968). His work with Brecht is discussed in Frederick Ewen, Bertolt Brecht (1967).

Additional Sources

Jarman, Douglas, Kurt Weill, an illustrated biography, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Sanders, Ronald, The days grow short: the life and music of Kurt Weill, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press; Hollywood, CA: Distributed by Samuel French Trade, 1991.

Schebera, Jurgen, Kurt Weill: an illustrated life, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Taylor, Ronald, Kurt Weill: composer in a divided world, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.

For more information on Kurt Julian Weill, visit Britannica.com.

Weill, Kurt, (Dessau, 1900-50, New York) studied music with Humperdinck and Busoni in Berlin. In 1926 he married the actress Lotte Lenya (Caroline Blamauer, 1898-1981) and in the same year composed an opera, Der Protagonist, to a text by G. Kaiser. His experimental style came into its own during his three-year collaboration with B. Brecht: he provided the music for Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), Happy End (1929), and Der Jasager (1930), and for the radio cantata Der Lindberghflug (1929, see Ozeanflug, Der). Kaiser wrote the text for Der Zar läßt sich photographieren (1928), Weill the music for Kaiser's play Der Silbersee (1933). The text of Die Bürgschaft (1932) was by Caspar Neher. His only ballet, Die sieben Todsünden, was premiered in Paris in 1933. Weill also set poems by R. M. Rilke and composed incidental music to works by F. Werfel, A. Strindberg, A. Bronnen, and L. Feuchtwanger.

Weill's work attracted the hostility of the National Socialists who branded him as a ‘decadent’ Jewish composer. In March 1933 he fled to France and in September 1935 went to New York for the production of Der Weg der Verheißung (1937), a pageant recounting the history of the Jewish people written in collaboration with Werfel and Reinhardt. This led to the anti-war musical play Johnny Johnson (1936). Though both works proved unpopular with Broadway audiences, he settled in New York, taking American citizenship and writing musicals more suited to American popular taste such as Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) to a text by Maxwell Anderson. Weill's creative exile culminated with his ‘Broadway opera’ Street Scene (1946) and the ‘musical tragedy’ Lost in the Stars (1949), inspired by the novel Cry the Beloved Country by the anti-apartheid South African writer Alan Paton.

(kʊrt' vīl) , 1900–1950, German-American composer, b. Dessau, studied with Humperdinck and Busoni in Berlin. He first became known with the production of two short, satirical, surrealist operas, Der Protagonist (1926) and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren [the czar has himself photographed] (1928). More popular than these, however, was his melodious Dreigroschenoper (1928), a modern version of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, with book by Bertolt Brecht. Translated and adapted by Marc Blitzstein as The Threepenny Opera, it was first produced in New York City in 1933; revived in 1954, it ran for more than six years and has become one of the classics of the musical stage. Brecht was also the librettist of Weill's satiric opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [rise and fall of the city Mahagonny] (1927; revised and expanded 1930). All these works were condemned as decadent by the rising followers of Hitler, and, in 1933, Weill left Germany for France.

In 1935 he emigrated to the United States, where he began writing sophisticated musicals, the most notable being Johnny Johnson (1936), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938; written with Maxwell Anderson), Lady in the Dark (1941), and One Touch of Venus (1943; written with Ogden Nash). In these works Weill employed with great facility advanced techniques, including multiple rhythms and polytonality, combined with the idiom of American popular music and jazz. His last works, in a more serious vein, included Street Scene (1947), Down in the Valley (1948), and Lost in the Stars (1949; written with Maxwell Anderson). His wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, played many of the leading roles in his works and was his defining interpreter. Weill also wrote some instrumental works; a cantata, Lindbergh's Flight (1929); and The Eternal Road (1934), a pageant of Jewish history originally composed in German with text by Franz Werfel. Weill became a U.S. citizen in 1943.

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