Kurt Weill was born in Dessau, Germany, on March 2, 1900. A
comprehensive musical training took place first with private teachers in
Dessau, then at the Berlin High School of Music, and finally for three
years with Ferruccio Busoni. Weill started out as a composer of
avant-garde music performed at several important German festivals. His
first opera, _The Protagonist_, with a text by Georg Kaiser, was
produced in 1926. From this point on Weill continued writing operas in
which the texts were realistic or satiric, and the music filled with
popular idioms, sometimes even those of jazz. The most important were
_The Royal Palace_ in 1927; _The Three-Penny Opera_, a sensation when
first produced in 1928; _The Czar Has Himself Photographed_, also in
1928; and _The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny_, in 1930, one of whose
numbers, “The Alabamy Song,” was a leading song hit in Germany that
year. With these works Weill became one of the leading exponents of the
cultural movements then sweeping across Germany under the banners of
_Zeitkunst_ (Contemporary Art) and _Gebrauchsmusik_ (Functional Music).
In the fall of 1935, Weill established permanent residence in the United
States, becoming an American citizen in 1943. He soon assumed a position
of first importance in the Broadway theater by virtue of a succession of
outstanding musicals: _Johnny Johnson_ (1936); _Knickerbocker Holiday_
(1938) in which Walter Huston starred as Peter Stuyvesant and out of
which came one of Weill’s most popular musical numbers, “September
Song”; Moss Hart’s musical about psychoanalysis and the dream life,
_Lady in the Dark_ (1941) in which Gertrude Lawrence was starred; _One
Touch of Venus_ (1943), with Mary Martin; _Street Scene_ (1947), a
trenchant musical play based on Elmer Rice’s realistic drama of New
York; _Love Life_ (1948), book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, its main
musical number being another all-time Weill song favorite, “Green-Up
Time”; and _Lost in the Stars_ (1949), a powerful musical drama adapted
from Alon Paton’s novel, _Cry, the Beloved Country_. Weill died in New
York City on April 3, 1950.
_The Three-Penny Opera_ (_Die Dreigroschenoper_) is one of the most
important musical productions of the post-World War I era in Europe; and
since its premiere it has lost little of its initial popularity. This
musical play (or opera, if you will) was based on the historic
18th-century ballad opera of John Gay, _The Beggar’s Opera_. The text
was rewritten and modernized by Berthold Brecht, in whose hands the
comic opera became a brilliant, though often bitter, satire of Germany
in the late 1920’s, with penetrating satirical comments on crime and
corruption in this post-war era. Weill’s opera was introduced in Berlin
on August 31, 1928 and scored a sensation with few parallels in
contemporary German theater. Over one hundred theaters gave it four
thousand performances throughout Germany in its initial year. It was
made into a motion-picture by G. W. Pabst (the first of several screen
adaptations). It was introduced in the leading theatrical centers of the
world; the American première—in New York on April 13, 1933—was, however,
a dismal failure. It has since been revived frequently in all parts of
the civilized world. An off-Broadway presentation in 1954—with a new
modernized text by Marc Blitzstein, but with the Weill music
untouched—made history by accumulating a run of more than five years; a
national company was then formed to tour the country in 1960. During
this long Broadway run, the principal musical number, “Moritat” (or
“Mack the Knife”) became an American hit song on two different
occasions. In 1955 it was given over twenty different recordings and was
often represented on the Hit Parade; revived in 1959 by Bobby Darin, it
sold over a million discs.
Weill’s score is a mixture of opera and musical comedy, of European
stage traditions and American idioms. It opens with a blues and
concludes with a mock chorale, while in between these opposite poles
there can be heard a shimmy, a canon in fox-trot, popular tunes, formal
ballads, light airs, choruses, and ensemble numbers. The style ranges
freely from Tin Pan Alley clichés to atonality, from mock romanticism to
dissonance. Each number was basic to the plot; principal numbers often
became penetrating psychological commentaries on the characters who
presented them. “Moritat” (or “Mack the Knife”) is the main musical
number. But several others are also of outstanding interest including
“Love Song” (“_Liebeslied_”), “The Ballad of Pleasant Living” (“_Ballade
vom angenehmen Leben_”), the Canon-Song, _Barbarasong_, and the Bully’s
Ballad (“_Zuhaelterballade_”).