Kurt Weill

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Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German Jewish composer active in his native country and later in his years in the United States.

He was a leading composer on the stage, best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht.

He created stage productions for Brecht, including the ballad "Mack the Knife."

Weill aimed for writing music that served a socially useful function.

He has produced several works for the concert hall as well.

On August 27, 1943, he became a United States citizen.

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Musical career

Weill's family suffered financially in the aftermath of World War I, and in July 1919, Weill dropped his studies and returned to Dessau, where he was employed as a repetiteur at the Friedrich-Theater under the new Kapellmeister's direction, Hans Knappertsbusch. During this period, he created an orchestral suite in E-flat major, a symphonic poem based on Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke" and Schilflieder ("Reed Songs"), a series of five songs to poems by Nikolaus Lenau. Weill was appointed Kapellmeister at the newly founded Stadttheater in Lüdenscheid, where he directed opera, operetta, and singspiel for five months in December 1919, with the assistance of Humperdinck. He subsequently created a cello sonata and Ninon de Lenclos, a now-lost one-act operatic recreation of Ernst Hardt's 1905 work. Weill spent a few months in Leipzig, where his father was the head of a Jewish orphanage from May to September 1920. He composed Sulamith, a choral fantasy for soprano, female choir, and orchestra before returning to Berlin in September 1920.

Weill had an interview with Ferruccio Busoni in December 1920, who was back in Berlin. Busoni accepted him as one of five master students in composition at the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin after reviewing some of Weill's works.

Weill studied music composition with him from January 1921 to December 1923, as well as a Berliner counterpoint against Philipp Jarnach. During his first year, he composed his first symphony, Sinfonie in a Satz, as well as Die Bekehrte (Goethe) and two Rilkelieders for voice and piano. Busoni, who was then just finishing his life, was a major influence on Weill. Busoni, a Neoclassicist, was one of Weill's early compositions capturing the post-Wagnerian Romanticism and Expressionism prevalent in German classical music of the time. Busoni's influence can be seen particularly in Weill's vocal and stage performances, where the music gradually evolved from being reflected in the characters' emotions to being used as (often humular) analysis. This was Weill's own journey to some of Epic theater and the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) advocated by his future collaborator Brecht.

Weill lived as a pianist in a Bierkeller tavern to help his family and relatives in Leipzig. Weill formed the November Group's music group in 1922. He composed a psalm, a composer's deferralment of orchestra, and Sinfonia Sacra: Fantasia, Passacaglia, and Hymnus for Orchestra in that year. His children's pantomime Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night) premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm on November 18, 1922; it was the first public performance of any of Weill's plays in the field of musical theatre.

Weill taught music theory and composition to private students from 1923 to 1925, out of monetary need. Claudio Arrau, Maurice Abravanel, Heinz Jolles (later known as Henry Jolles), Nikos Skalkottas, and Esther Zweig were among his students. Arrau, Abravanel, and Jolles were surviving members of Weill's circle of friends after the Nazi era in 1933, and Jolles' solesurviving composition prior to the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 is a fragment of a four pianos he and Weill wrote jointly.

Quodlibet, an orchestral suite of Die Zaubernacht; Frauentanz, seven medieval poems for soprano, flute, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon were among Weill's compositions during his last year of study; and the Book of Lamentations. The Hindemith-Amar Quartet's rendering of Weill's String Quartet, Op. 16, was one of the first premieres of the year. Heinz Unger conducted Divertimento for Orchestra by the Berlin Philharmonic under Heinz Unger's direction on April 10, 1923. On June 24, 1923, there were 8 children on the island of June 24, 1923. Weill's studies with Busoni ended in December 1923.

He joined the Novembergruppe, a group of Berlin artists that included Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe in 1922. In February 1924, conductor Fritz Busch introduced him to dramatist Georg Kaiser, with whom Weill would have a long-running creative collaboration that culminated in several one-act operas. Weill met singer and actress Lotte Lenya in 1924 at Kaiser's house in Grünheide. In 1926 and 1937 (after their divorce in 1933). She took great care to help Weill's career, and after his death, she took it upon herself to raise his musical interests, founding the Kurt Weill Foundation. Weill's influential and detailed radio program guide Der deutsche Rundfunk was published in November 1924 to May 1929; Hans Siebert von Heister had already worked with Weill in the November Group and then offered Weill the job right after he became editor-in-chief.

Although he had some success with his first mature non-stage performances, (such as the String Quartet, Op. Op. 8, or the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, Op. 8. Weill's 12), which were influenced by Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, have shifted toward vocal music and musical theatre. In Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his musical theatre performances and his songs were extremely popular. Weill's music was lauded by composers including Alban Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Stravinsky, but other groups chastised it: Schoenberg, who later revised his position, and Anton Webern.

The Threepenny Opera (1928), a reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, was his best-known work. In 1928, Engel directed the first performance of the Threepenny Opera. "Mack the Knife," Weill's most popular song ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer") is included in the book. Textually Threepenny Opera, which was preceded by Beggar's Opera, is both satire and social commentary; but for Weill, it was something else entirely: "It gives us the opportunity to make opera the subject matter for an evening in the theater" is another aspect of what Weill called a lifelong process to "reform" opera for the modern stage.

G. W. Pabst produced the stage performance in two languages: Die 3-Groschen-Oper and L'opéra de quat' sous. Weill and Brecht attempted to stop the film adaptation through a well-publicized lawsuit, which Weill won and Brecht lost. Weill's long-serving friendship with Brecht came to an end in 1930 over politics. Despite Weill's socialism, after Brecht tried to push the play even further into a left-wing direction, Weill said that he was unable to "set the Communist Manifesto to music," according to his wife Lotte Lenya.

Weill left Nazi Germany in March 1933. Weill, a well-known and popular Jewish composer, was denounced by his political convictions and sympathies, and he was also a victim of the Nazi authorities, who criticized and interfered with his later stage performances, including Rise and Fall of Mahagonny (1932), Die Bürgschaft (1933). With no other choice but to leave Germany, he went first to Paris, where he worked with Brecht once more on the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins.

His musical The Threepenny Opera premiered on Broadway on April 13, 1933, but it was canceled after 13 performances to mixed reviews. He completed his Symphony No. 1932. 2, his last strictly orchestral work, conducted in Amsterdam and New York by Bruno Walter, as well as the music for Jacques Deval's play Marie Galante. He came to London in 1935 as part of his operetta Der Kuhhandel (A Kingdom for a Cow) and later that year, he went to the United States in connection with Franz Werfel's "Biblical Drama" (Eternal Road), a "Biblical Drama" by New York's Jewish community that had been on view at the Manhattan Opera House, running for 153 performances.

On September 10, 1935, he and Lotte first lived at the St. Moritz Hotel before moving to a 231 East 62nd Street between Third and Second Avenues. While finishing Johnny Johnson, they rented an old house with Paul Green in Nichols, Connecticut, the summer home of the Group Theatre. Elia Kazan, Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Will Geer, Clifford Odets, Howard Da Silva, and Irwin Shaw were among the other artists who summered there in 1936.

Weill wrote an analysis of American popular and stage music rather than continuing to write in the same style that had characterized his European compositions. His American output includes individual songs and entire shows that have not only been highly regarded and admired, but also appeared as seminal contributions to the American musical history. He wrote the music for railroads on Parade in 1939, a musical triumph put on at the 1939 World's Fair in New York to honor the American railroad industry (book by Edward Hungerford). Weill, one of the time's Broadway composers, insisted on writing his own orchestrations (with some notable exceptions, such as the dance music in Street Scene). He collaborated with writers such as Maxwell Anderson and Ira Gershwin and produced a film score for Fritz Lang (You and Me, 1938). Weill himself was looking for a new way to produce an American opera that would be both commercially and artistically profitable. Street Scene is Elmer Rice's most interesting attempt in this direction, with lyrics by Langston Hughes. The inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score was given to Weill for his work on Street Scene.

Weill spent his childhood in downstate New York near the New Jersey border and made frequent trips to New York City and Hollywood for his theatre and film. Weill was involved in political movements urging Americans into World War II, and after America joined the war in 1941, Weill eagerly collaborated on countless artistic campaigns supporting the war effort both internationally and nationally. Both Maxwell Anderson and Maxwell Anderson joined the voluntary community by serving as air raid wardens on High Tor Mountain in Rockland County, New York. In 1943, Weill became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Weill had aspirations to write music that was socially appropriate. He wrote Down in the Valley, an opera in the United States based on the same name and other American folk songs. He wrote a few songs in support of the American war effort, including the satirical "Schickelgruber" (with lyrics by Howard Dietz), "Buddy on the Nightshift"), and "Und was bekam der Soldaten Weib" (with Brecht's earlier career). The song, intended for broadcast to Germany, chronicles the evolution of the Nazi war machine, from the gifts sent to her husband at home by her man at the front: furs from Oslo, a silk dress from Paris, etc., until finally, from Russia, she receives her widow's veil.

Other than "Mack the Knife" and "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera, Johnny's most well-known songs include "Alabama Song" (from Mahagonny), "Speak Low" (from One Touch of Venus), "My Ship" (from Lady in the Dark), and "September Song" (from Knickerbocker Holiday).

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