Kurt Weill
Selected Songs
The son of a cantor in Dessau, Germany, Kurt Weill was encouraged by the director of the Dessau Hoftheater to study musical composition. His first theatrical collaboration was with playwright Georg Kaiser in 1926, Der Protagonist, which met with enough success that he joined up with Brecht a year later. Their Mahoganny-Songspiel (1927) launched a minor pop hit in Europe, “Alabama Song,” and was followed by the extremely successful Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in 1928.
But the growing winds of war blew Weill no good. By 1933 the Nazis began campaigning against the biting social satires that Weill had created with both Brecht and other playwrights. Weill, who was Jewish, felt forced to divorce his wife, singer Lotte Lenya, and flee Germany for Paris. However, in 1935 he was able to travel with Lenya to New York, to oversee Max Reinhardt’s production of Franz Werfel’s biblical epic Der Weg der Verheissung (The Promised Way), with Weill’s oratorio-like score. By the time the work was staged in 1937, as The Eternal Road, Weill and Lenya had remarried and applied for American citizenship. Like Igor Stravinsky, Weill contributed to the war effort by writing scores for American war movies.
Weill collaborated with many of the leading playwrights of the day, including Moss Hart and lyricist Ira Gershwin, with whom he completed his first true Broadway hit, Lady in the Dark (1940). In this “psychoanalytic comedy,” successful businesswoman Liza Elliot undergoes psychotherapy in order to understand why she won’t marry one of the several eligible men who are interested in her. The musical numbers are presented only during dream sequences, and it is Liza’s recollection of a childhood song that helps her to understand her problems. Today’s concert features “The Saga of Jenny” from this show, about a woman who learns that being too decisive may lead to unexpected results. (Incidentally, the show’s male star was Danny Kaye, who brought down the house with a song called “Tchaikovsky” in which he rattled off the names of fifty Russian composers in thirty-nine seconds.)
Weill’s success with this play and the S.J. Perelman/Ogden Nash production One Touch of Venus (1943) gave him the influence to try more experimental productions with stronger social themes. In 1946 the influential Playwrights Producing Company sponsored a musical version of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Street Scene, with Weill’s music and lyrics by poet Langston Hughes. Many saw this work, a gritty depiction of life in a New York tenement, as the first real successor to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and in fact the show received better reviews than Gershwin’s work and ran on Broadway longer. The play centers on Anna Maurrant, an unhappy wife who is having an affair with the milkman and trying to help her teenage daughter Rose gain a better life. When Anna’s husband learns of the affair he kills Anna, and Rose decides to leave the tenement behind. The song, “What Good Would the Moon Be?” is sung by Rose, who says she doesn’t want fortune, dreams come true, or even the moon if she can’t be with someone she loves.
Weill’s last Broadway work was even more ambitious: a musical version of Alan Paton’s novel of life in South Africa under apartheid, Cry, the Beloved Country. The play, called Lost in the Stars, follows a black minister, Stephen Kumalo, in rural South Africa. His children have moved to Johannesburg, and there his son Absalom is accused of murdering a white man who advocated greater freedom for black South Africans. Although Absalom confesses and is sentenced to death, Stephen meets and reconciles with the father of the murder victim. The poignant song, “Lost in the Stars,” describes the feeling of being abandoned by God to fend for ourselves, “lost out here in the stars.”