WEILL, KURT
Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Kurt Weill began his career in the
early 1920's, after a musical childhood and several years of study in Berlin.
By the time his first opera, The Protagonist (Georg Kaiser), was performed
in April 1926, he was an established young German composer. But he had already
decided to devote himself to the musical theater, and his works with Bertolt
Brecht soon made him famous all over Europe. He fled the new Nazi leadership
in March 1933 and continued his indefatigable efforts, first in Paris (1933-35),
then in the U.S. until his death. Certain common threads tie together his career:
a concern for social justice, an aggressive pursuit of highly-regarded playwrights
and lyricists as collaborators, and the ability to adapt to audience tastes
no matter where he found himself. His most important works: the Violin Concerto
(1925), The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht, 1928), Rise and Fall
of the City of Mahagonny (Brecht, 1930), The Pledge (Caspar Neher,
1932), The Seven Deadly Sins (Brecht, 1933), Lady in the Dark
(Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, 1941), Street Scene (Elmer Rice and Langston
Hughes, 1947), Lost in the Stars (Maxwell Anderson, 1949). He died of
heart failure in 1950, shortly after he and Anderson began work on a musical
adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, leaving behind a large catalogue of works
and a reputation that continues to grow as more of his music is performed.
Weill was raised in a religious Jewish family in
Dessau, Germany. Although he was not observant, he composed a number of "Jewish"
works, from a vast score to The Eternal Road (1937, Franz Werfel) to
a setting of the Kiddush. He married actress Lotte Lenya in 1926; they maintained
a close relationship throughout his life despite their divorce in 1933 (they
remarried in 1937).
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