Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill (1900–1950) was a unique figure in twentieth-century music. He began his career composing complex modernist music that was appreciated by an esoteric elite, then shifted to creating music for the general public. Weill composed works ranging from symphonic music and opera to tangos, jazz songs, and pop hits for the theater, radio, and films. Weill was born in a religious Jewish family in Dessau, where his father was a cantor. In 1915, Weill started taking private lessons with Albert Bing, kapellmeister at the "Herzogliches Hoftheater zu Dessau", who taught him piano, composition, music theory, and conducting. He later enrolled at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik at the age of 18, where he studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, conducting with Rudolf Krasselt, and counterpoint with Friedrich E. Koch. The same year, he wrote his first string quartet (in B minor). In 1920 in Berlin, Weill had an interview with Ferruccio Busoni. After examining some of Weill's compositions, Busoni accepted him as one of five master students in composition at the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1922 he joined the Novembergruppe, a group of leftist Berlin artists that included Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe. To support his family in Leipzig, Weill also worked as a pianist in a Bierkeller tavern. Although he had some success with his first mature non-stage works (such as the String Quartet, Op. 8, or the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, Op. 12), which were influenced by Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Weill tended more and more towards vocal music and musical theatre. His musical theatre work and his songs were extremely popular in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Weill's music was admired by composers such as Alban Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Darius Milhaud and Stravinsky, but it was also criticized by others: Schoenberg, who later revised his opinion, and Anton Webern. His best-known work is The Threepenny Opera (1928), a reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. It contains Weill's most famous song, "Mack the Knife" ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer"). Textually Threepenny Opera—like the Beggar's Opera before it—is satire and social commentary; but for Weill, coming from a musical perspective, it was something else as well: "It gives us the opportunity to make opera the subject matter for an evening in the theater", part of what Weill saw as a lifelong process to "reform" opera for the modern stage. Weill fled Nazi Germany in March 1933. A prominent and popular Jewish composer, Weill was officially denounced for his political views and sympathies, and became a target of the Nazi authorities, who criticized and interfered with performances of his later stage works, such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, 1930), Die Bürgschaft (1932), and Der Silbersee (1933). With no option but to leave Germany, he went first to Paris, where he worked once more with Brecht (after a project with Jean Cocteau failed) on the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. Rather than continue to write in the same style that had characterized his European compositions, Weill made a study of American popular and stage music. His American output contains individual songs and entire shows that not only became highly respected and admired, but have been seen as seminal works in the development of the American musical. Weill enthusiastically collaborated in numerous artistic projects supporting the war effort both abroad and on the home front. He and Maxwell Anderson also joined the volunteer civil service by working as air raid wardens on High Tor Mountain between their homes in New City, New York and Haverstraw, New York in Rockland County. Weill became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943. Weill suffered a heart attack shortly after his 50th birthday and died on April 3, 1950, in New York City.