Suddenly, within the limited world of New York opera, Kurt Weill is all the rage. During the 1979-80 season, the Metropolitan Opera produced Weill’s 1929 collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and also chose it for one of the company’s valuable evenings on nationwide television. The New York City Opera has given similar exposure this past season to its revival of Weill’s 1947 setting of Langston Hughes’s adaptation of the Elmer Rice play Street Scene. The City Opera, furthermore, has just introduced an augmented adaptation of the Weill-Georg Kaiser play with music, Silverlake (1932); this new production, a kind of world premiere, was recorded shortly after the opening performance by Nonesuch for early release.
Not only have the stagings of Weill been seen and heard in New York opera houses and on television screens across the country. Reams of writing about Weill and his music are also becoming available to the interested reader. Journalists and music historians—building on the work of David Drew, an English critic and lonely laborer in the Weill vineyard for the past generation—have been emerging to tell the story of Weill’s life and evaluate his pieces. Thus, beyond the flurry of newspaper and magazine coverage of the recent performances, there has just appeared a discursive and admiring biography of the composer, The Days Grow Short, by Ronald Sanders,1 and the past year has also seen the publication of what reads like an expanded doctoral dissertation, Kurt Weill in Europe,2 by Kim H. Kowalke.
Because Weill was highly successful twice while he lived—the first time after the 1928 premiere of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin, and the second as a composer of Broadway musicals just before and during World War II—and then again just after his death with the New York production of The Threepenny Opera in 1954, the present interest cannot be understood simply as the discovery of a relatively unknown figure. It is rather a current manifestation of the appeal of a composer at once easy to grasp and difficult to categorize, and of a music at once off-putting and pleasing.
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As a man, Kurt Weill was a product of the cultural flowering, under conditions of relative toleration, of German Jewry. . He was born in 1900 in Dessau, also the birthplace of the most famous exemplar of the German-Jewish tension between particularism and universalism, Moses Mendelssohn. Whereas Mendelssohn was the son of a Torah scribe, Weill’s father was a cantor and a composer of sacred music; as such he participated in the assimilation of traditional Jewish chanting to the then regnant oratorio style associated with German Protestantism.
Of three siblings, Weill was the least inclined toward religion. Nevertheless, an outlet for his natural musicality was easily found in the rich secular musical life of Dessau—in particular an operatic theater strongly Wagnerian and patronized by the local nobility. In a minor way, Weill (who began composing at the age of ten or eleven) was the direct beneficiary of this patronage, as he was also of the contact with Jewish music lovers so often available then to the young and artistically gifted.
His first entry into a larger musical world came in 1918 with his matriculation at the famous Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. During his single semester there he studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, the disciple of Wagner and the author of Hansel and Gretel. In the difficult economic conditions following the German defeat in World War I, he made an attempt at supporting himself through minor conducting jobs in provincial opera houses. Meanwhile he continued to compose—a string quartet, a cello sonata, two one-act operas, and an oratorio based on the Song of Songs (all still unpublished and in some cases lost). Then, in December 1920, Weill was accepted as a student at the Prussian Academy of Arts in the master class of Ferruccio Busoni, the Italo-German composer whose greatest fame was as a legendary piano virtuoso. Before his encounter with Busoni, Weill had been under the spell of the German romantics; under the influence of Busoni’s idiosyncratic combination of modernism and classicism, Weill’s music began to reflect the stirrings of the avant-garde and the concomitant rejection of the 19th century.
An early document of this turn to the present may be found in Weill’s First Symphony, begun in 1920 but drastically altered upon its completion in the first months of his association with Busoni. As the symphony stands now, it is a piece of absolute music in the sense that it employs only instruments and sets no words, but it was in fact written under the inspiration of a socialist-pacifist play by Johannes Becher. Becher was soon to discover the Marxism which allowed him to end his life as a culture bureaucrat in East Germany after World War II; prophetically enough, the play which inspired Weill was called Workers, Peassants, and Soldiers: The Awakening of a People to God. In its final form, Weill’s First Symphony owes something to the harsh expressionism of early-modern Schoenberg, and something also to the melodic ethos of Mahler.
But after a few other pieces, including the Violin Concerto of 1924 with its Stravinsky-like timbre, Weill stopped writing purely instrumental music (and would only make one further essay in that area, the Second Symphony of 1934) in favor of music utilizing the power of words. This turn no doubt owed something to Weill’s background, which combined the worlds of synagogue music and the provincial opera theater. But a more important cause must have been the impulse which has so often driven composers toward opera: the desire to find a wider audience. The audience Weill had in mind was not the kind which had in the past supported what he called “socially-exclusive, ‘aristocratic’ art”; instead he envisioned a public composed of “simple, naive, unassuming and traditionless listeners, who, trained by work, sport, and technical skill, bring along their healthy sense of fun and seriousness, good and bad, old and new.” It may be questioned whether Weill ever made a serious attempt to find this pot of artistic gold at the end of the proletarian rainbow. It is, however, clear that the very act of looking for a broad audience meant a drastic change from the sophisticated and relatively inaccessible world of musical modernism to which Weill was in other ways sympathetic; in fact the rest of Weill’s compositional career was to be marked by precisely the search for effect which lies at the heart of 19th-century romanticism.
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Weill’s first mature attempt at opera was the nondescript—though initially successful—Der Protagonist (1924-25), a collaboration with the German expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser. Heard today in an obviously poor tape of an Italian radio broadcast, the music seems heavy for all its dryness of texture; one excerpt, a Pantomime for both instruments and voices, has been recorded, but possesses little distinct musical character.
Another 1925 work makes a more attractive impression. Der neue Orpheus, a cantata for soprano, violin, and orchestra written to a text by the poet Iwan Goll, is a retelling of the famous Greek legend in the setting of modern Berlin. The work marked an important way station on Weill’s road to a more accessible style, employing suggestions of popular music drawn from the burgeoning cabaret world. This tendency became more pronounced in the 1925-26 Royal Palace, again to a text by Goll, which incorporated such popular dance forms as the tango and the foxtrot, and was marked by the sharp, insistent rhythms later so characteristic of Weill. One more work of these years closed out Weill’s searchings: Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (“The Czar Has His Picture Taken”), a 1927 collaboration with Kaiser, in which Weill again used popular dance forms. Clearly for his breakthrough only one thing was lacking—a librettist with his finger on the pulse of the times.
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That librettist, of course, turned out to be Bertolt Brecht. The partisans of Weill and Brecht differ as to the relative importance of each in their joint efforts. Neither Sanders in his Weill biography nor Kowalke in his musicological study is immune to this kind of special pleading for Weill. And on Brecht’s behalf, Eric Bentley goes so far as to claim basic authorship for some of Weill’s most famous music. Whoever influenced whom must remain a moot question; Weill and Brecht were both overflowing with theories about what they thought they were doing and what others should be doing.
Much critical writing has been devoted to these theories—in particular Brecht’s idea of epic theater and alienation, and Weill’s conception of “gestic” music and opera as a return to the dramatic musical theater of Mozart. Though the precise application of these notions seemed vague, their general drift was clear enough: the world of individual and private concerns was to be transvalued through a simplified and schematic presentation of generalized symbols and mass emotions. In art similar movements were involving the replacement of the easel painting by the poster; in the theater it produced the rise of the agit-prop play. But whatever the art-form, the artist’s goal was to find and merge with the audience of the democratized future—the people.
In theory this new audience was located in the working class, but where Brecht and Weill actually found it was in the same middle class which had for so long supported high culture. This once proud social alignment had, however, been mortally weakened by military defeat and economic disintegration, and in its weakened condition it was open to the fatal allure of two creations of its enemies—radical politics and popular culture. Brecht, who was soon to become an out-and-out Marxist and, some highly trumpeted divagations notwithstanding, would remain a Communist hero for the rest of his life, recognized the implications of all this more clearly than Weill. Yet despite the fact that Weill seems to have shunned organizational affiliations and loyalties and that according to his wife and exponent, Lotte Lenya, he was (at this time in Berlin) “a liberal like everyone else,” it is obvious from the work he did with Brecht just how closely their views coincided.
Their first collaboration, in 1927, involved a setting by Weill of several poems from Brecht’s Die Hauspostille (“Domestic Breviary”) about life in Mahagonny, an imaginary American boom town where the possession of money is the only virtue, opportunism the only standard of conduct, and alcohol the universal solvent. Weill’s musical parody of a cantata, called the Mahagonny Songspiel, contained one of his greatest hits, the “Alabama Song,” a sinuous melody, fairly dripping with sexual insinuation and languorous eroticism. Elsewhere the music is prevailingly light, tuneful, and attractive. The style is unabashedly popular, and the influence of American jazz—Weill was a great admirer of Louis Armstrong—everywhere apparent. Gone altogether are the clotted sonorities and the free tonality of Weill’s earlier music.
The Mahagonny Songspiel was first staged at the Baden-Baden Festival, at that time the shrine of contemporary music, in the summer of 1927. The work was a sensation, both for the music and for the production which placed Lotte Lenya in the middle of a boxing ring and employed actors wearing overalls to troop around with placards bearing left-wing slogans. The reclame was sufficient to inspire Brecht and Weill to enlarge the short work into a full-length opera, portentously called Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (“The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”).
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Before completing this task, however, they took the time to produce a work which more than anything else was to make their fame. Die Dreigroschenoper—in its English version The Threepenny Opera—was written for a young Berlin producer who was looking for a modern play with a musical score. The idea of updating John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) had come to Brecht from one of his assistants, and it immediately impressed the producer as “smelling of theater.” The story is, as can quickly be seen, at heart the same as that of Brecht’s Mahagonny poems. Morality is reversed: the hero is a highwayman, beggars are millionaires, and true aristocracy comes from success in crime.
In his score Weill now continued the procedure he had followed in the Mahagonny suite—a succession of musical numbers, each constituent song being complete in itself. In The Threepenny Opera, as in so much of what he was to write from now on, the musical momentum, insofar as it existed at all, was interrupted at regular intervals for spoken dialogue and stage action. For Weill this was a personal discovery linking his work to Mozart and to Der Freischütz of Weber; for those who had come to expect music to absorb the drama, all Weill had managed was to write incidental music for the theater.
These niceties aside, the Dreigroschenoper was a phenomenal success. The combination of the gutter cynicism so beloved of Brecht and the jazzy tunefulness of Weill scored instantly; eventually the biggest hit was the opening “Ballad of Mack the Knife,” inserted at the last moment to please an actor who wished to show off his fancy clothes (though it was later given to someone with a less pleasant voice). Just how broad was the appeal of this recital of the hero’s evil deeds may be gathered from its fourth stanza (the words written, it must be remembered, by a supporter of proletarian internationalism and set by a Jewish composer):
Und Schmul Meier bleibt ver-
schwunden
Und so mancher reiche Mann
Und sein Geld hat Mackie Mes-
ser
Dem man nichts beweisen
kann.3
(And Samuel Meier disappeared
for good,
As well as many a rich man,
And Mack the Knife has all his
money
Though you cannot prove a
thing.)
How percipient to have found, in the Berlin of 1928, a sentiment on which Left and Right could both agree!
Barely hidden beneath the nihilism and the romanticizing of violence was a vein of maudlin sentimentality informing both Brecht’s dramatic conception and Weill’s music. To the themes of true love among the fallen and the romantic pirate of legend Brecht added the happiest of happy endings—reprieve from the gallows combined with instant accession to the aristocracy—while Weill’s music alternated honky-tonk melodies with jazzy ostinatos and an occasional parody of a religious chorale. This mockery of middle-class conventions could only profit from middle-class self-hatred, and from the remaining attachment of the audience to the sentiments being parodied.
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Neither Weill nor Brecht could have been altogether happy with the reputation for frivolity they so quickly gained from the Dreigroschenoper and they made several ineffectual attempts at thoroughgoing seriousness: notably the Berliner Requiem of 1928, written on commission from the German Radio to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Spartacist uprising, and a “didactic cantata” on the subject of Lindbergh’s transatlantic solo flight, Der Lindberghflug of 1929—high-minded, mostly solemn, and dull.
The full-length operatic version of Mahagonny possesses more interest. As the recent Metropolitan Opera production makes clear, Brecht’s book is immensely powerful and fascinatingly perverse in its presentation of man as a beast. Weill’s music, however, again cast in the form of conventional song numbers and orchestral interludes, with most of the action carried by spoken dialogue, is thinner in content than the score of Dreigroschenoper, and overall there is an air of repetition.
His score for the next collaboration with Brecht, Happy End (1929), the story of a Salvation Army effort to save some gangsters, was replete with what had by now become his familiar banalities—marches, hymns, ballades. In the case of this work, Brecht’s book was no better than Weill’s music. The explicit social message here overwhelmed the sentimentality, and not surprisingly the price was lack of popular success.
So too, and even more clearly, with Der Jasager (“The Yessayer”), of 1930. Intended for performance by high-school students, it concerns a boy’s desire to obtain medicine from a distant place for his sick mother, his inability to sustain the pace of those with whom he is traveling to that place, and his agreeing to being killed in order to allow the others to proceed safely. The twin themes of totalitarian acquiescence and the subordination of the individual to the group were to occupy Brecht for much of his creative life. Indeed, the similarity of Der Jasager to Brecht’s notorious Die Massnahme (“The Measures Taken”)—written in collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler the same year and asserting the need for revolutionaries to liquidate those who even unwittingly betray them—only confirms his ultimate moral decision to come down on the side of tyranny.4
Weill’s music for the parable of Leninist virtue Brecht produced in Der Jasager is plain, plodding, and repetitious, though in its treatment of the relationship between mother and son it is not without its mawkish aspects. Indeed, given the means to which Weill restricted himself in order to make the work performable by young and untrained students, such a musical outcome was no doubt inevitable. And yet the very plainness and repetition of Weill’s music seem to reinforce the idea of obedience to a simple, clear, and efficient authority.
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On several grounds—his progressivism, his work with Brecht, his use of mockery, and above all his Jewish origin—Weill was anathema to the coming Hitler regime. The premiere of Mahagonny had been greeted by a popular disturbance in which the Nazis may well have had a hand; a subsequent performance in Oldenburg was canceled under Nazi pressure. Still more ominous was the reaction to Weill’s final large work of his German period, Der Silbersee (“The Silverlake”) of 1932, a collaboration with Georg Kaiser. Though ideological radicalism here went by the boards, as Weill’s musical radicalism had gone sometime before, the Nazis disrupted a performance in Magdeburg and soon made performance anywhere in Germany impossible.
In Silbersee Weill wrote a score remarkable, even for him, in its indulgence of pastiche: parody and sincerity, conventional opera and cabaret, waltz and tango—all are thrown into the pot. Just how little the effort succeeded in arousing the audience may be gathered from the wholesale changes and additions the New York City Opera has found it necessary to make in its current production. Uniquely in the case of what we are told is a major work by a composer deserving serious attention, the published credits for the production read:
Silverlake, opera in two acts by Kurt Weill. Libretto by Hugh Wheeler, based on the original libretto by Georg Kaiser. Lyrics by Lys Symonette. Additional music from Weill’s incidental music to Strindberg’s “Gustaf III” and Leo Lania’s “Konjunktur” integrated by Miss Symonette.
Like so many artists of his time and place, Weill was now to be on the run. His first stop was France where, in addition to composing some trifles à la française, he wrote the music to his final work with Brecht, the ballet with singing Die sieben Todsünden (“The Seven Deadly Sins”), a title Brecht later made more explicit by adding der Kleinbürger (“of the Petit Bourgeoisie”). This tale of two sisters, one speaking for respectable virtue, the other indulging instinct and desire, ends with virtue cynically rewarded as they retire from their wanderings to a small house purchased by the licentious one’s earnings. What could earlier in Weill’s music career have been construed as at least on one level hostile parody here became mere entertainment, for with Die sieben Todsünden Weill was in fact well on the way to his later American career as a composer of Broadway musicals.
Further evidence of this trend can be adduced from Weill’s Second Symphony (1934), his last purely instrumental composition. Written in Paris, it represented an unambiguous rejection of the modernism of its 1921 predecessor; unhappily, like so many artistic retreats, it issued in vapidity.
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In emigrating to America in 1935, Weill joined a flood of refugee intellectuals who were about to establish the first resident cosmopolitanism this culture had ever known. Viewed from the vantage point of today’s hard-headed cultural internationalism, some of the early stirrings of this new sophistication are embarrassing. Such was the case with Weill’s first major American project, a grandiose scheme hatched in the fertile brain of Meyer Weisgal, the fabled Zionist fundraiser. Weisgal aimed at nothing less than staging the entire history of the Jewish people, written by Franz Werfel and directed by Max Reinhardt. The size of the undertaking—it was found necessary to gut and then restructure a large Manhattan theater—guaranteed both endless delays and eventual financial failure. Weill’s score has almost totally disappeared, along with the hopes of everyone involved.
His next major project was an anti-war musical, with a text by the mildly left-wing writer Paul Green. Johnny Johnson, which was revived and recorded in the 1950’s by an excellent cast, seems now merely puerile in its sentimental pacifism, looking backward as it does to World War I rather than to the looming menace of Hitler. Artistically the effect is one of an incongruous linkage between a music which still retains European elements and a libretto exuding the comfortable certainties of American provincialism.
Everything changed for Weill, however, with his first real American success, Knickerbocker Holiday, written in 1938 to an anti-fascist (but also anti-Roosevelt) book by Maxwell Anderson. Heard today, the show seems an unintentionally funny mixture of piety and oafish humor surrounding the wistful “September Song.”
Success beckoned again in 1941, with Weill’s score for Lady in the Dark, in which Moss Hart brought to Broadway the emergent cultural interest in psychoanalysis. No greater contrast to the showy social nihilism of Weill’s Brecht years could have been found. The use of fantasy to enable a successful career woman to accept the reality of her life—and the implicit celebration of the American values of success and prosperity—are telling evidence both of the power of this country to absorb its immigrants and of Weill’s essential adaptability to the winds of ideological change. Nothing now appears especially memorable about Weill’s music, and it seems a safe bet that the work was carried, on the stage, as it is on a surviving recording, by Gertrude Lawrence’s brilliant performance in the title role.
Now that the war was on, Weill devoted much attention to the provision of entertainment for workers in defense plants. This project, perhaps not altogether happily named the “Lunch Time Follies,” pleased him greatly, for it was an opportunity to reach a different and even less sophisticated audience than his Broadway successes allowed. He returned to Broadway, however, in 1943, with One Touch of Venus, to an S. J. Perelman story with lyrics by Ogden Nash. Once again the moral is one of acceptance: a man falls in love with a statue of Venus he has inadvertently summoned to life, but eventually settles willingly for her homey, real-life lookalike. As with his other American scores, most of what remains to be heard today is only the oily polish of Broadway, rather than any real musical or dramatic penetration.
Much less commercially successful was his 1945 musical, The Firebrand of Florence, a collaboration with Ira Gershwin; what little of the score has been recorded sounds like an artificial combination of would-be seriousness and uninspired patter. Two years later Weill attempted a full-fledged Broadway opera, Street Scene, adapted from Elmer Rice’s 1929 play and supplied with lyrics by the Negro poet Langston Hughes. Rice was here expressing the disgust felt by intellectuals at the end of the 1920’s as they viewed American life; Hughes’s adaptation after World War II was backward-looking rather than pertinent to its moment and Weill’s music played on this inherent character of dated sentimentality. What he wrote has been called by a historian of the American musical theater “thoughtful and appropriate,” but it might more accurately be described as tear-jerking without being memorable.
Now Weill became involved in yet another school opera—but this one a world away from the Jasager of his Brechtian days with its heavy moral message and its essentially colorless, neutral music. In Down in the Valley (1948) Weill used Arnold Sundgaard’s story—of a man who is to be hanged for killing the tormentor of his true love—as the basis for an American folk opera, employing actual folk songs as melodic material. The work has been widely performed in colleges and universities; it has served for many young people as their first introduction to opera. Unfortunately, the whole is again marked by musical thinness and the practiced exploitation of audience sympathy.
Weill’s last completed work was the Broadway musical Lost in the Stars (1949), based on Alan Pa-ton’s then bestselling novel about racial oppression in South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country. It was only fitting that Weill’s American career, which had gotten off the ground with Maxwell Anderson in Knickerbocker Holiday, should have ended in collaboration with Anderson on this congenial subject, so presciently reflecting the rise of the color problem in the United States itself. Weill’s music eschews any serious attempt at African folk realism, and, like all his Broadway efforts, now seems the very model of glossy, high-minded commercialism. He died on April 3, 1950, during the musical’s moderately successful run.
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For all the talk about Kurt Weill’s contribution to our native musical style, his American career is difficult to take seriously in artistic terms. Four musicals, a Broadway opera, a host of projects large and small: all this has left behind only a few songs beloved by aficionados of the genre.
Some of this disappointing record is implicit in the nature of popular culture in general and the Broadway musical in particular. Because popular culture is fleeting and ephemeral, its specific manifestations are necessarily short-lived; the very intensity of success bears within itself the seeds of obsolescence and replacement. As for Broadway, it represents at best an uneasy marriage between musicians of generally serious background and the lure of show-business fame. Yet even among Broadway composers, it is hardly self-evident that Weill stands apart from his rivals, among whom may be counted (in ascending order of musical talent) Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, and—on the level of real if flawed genius—George Gershwin. Certainly nothing Weill wrote can compare musically with Porgy and Bess.
He was, it is true, remarkably malleable in his ability to echo national styles. Harold Clurman, for example, has written of Weill: “If he had landed among the Hottentots, he would have become the outstanding Hottentot composer of the Hottentot theater.” Yet how far Weill was from penetrating the American psyche is obvious from comparing his Down in the Valley with such an authentic piece of Americana as Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956). Moore’s melodies bear the stamp of the American past; his musical architecture seems particularly attuned to the place of the frontier in our history; most of all, his well-made music, though ultimately minor, gives an impression of depth and richness. In the final analysis, where Moore evokes America, Weill evokes Broadway.
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There are, to be sure, important features common to Weill’s American and European careers. Chief among these similarities is the use at important moments of easily comprehensible tunes made up of repeated fragments at once short and lush. The element of motoric excitement, which often seems in Weill rattle for rattle’s sake, tended to diminish as he selected subjects more reflective of conventional pieties. He usually set words so that they could be clearly heard; much of this clarity was, however, a result of the sparseness of the musical texture surrounding them. And further easing the problems of performance, most of his music is comfortably singable by non-operatic vocalists.
Weill’s reliance on relatively untrained singers is deeply related to the essential nature of his musical aims. The kinds of performers for whom he writes are more at home in the communication of words than in music per se; his wife and greatest interpreter, Lotte Lenya, has been a prime example of what his work needs to be most effective. But such performers are not really musicians; they are actors and entertainers who happen to sing. So it is hardly surprising to find that, for all of Weill’s statements in the 1920’s about the power of music and its properly independent role in opera, his work marks a retreat from the high ambition and accomplishment of the 19th century. For Wagner as for Beethoven, music was in practice as well as in theory a universal language with an all-inclusive vocabulary describing every human emotion, thought, and activity. In Weill, on the other hand, music was at its best restricted to heightening mood and feeling, to fixing a moment in the audience’s mind, to being attractive even when what was happening on the stage was not.
Weill thus remains a composer of music for the theater rather than a composer of opera. The audience for which he wrote, after all, was not primarily a musical one. It was not interested in a permanent musical creation meant to be heard and reheard, but rather in a one-time theatrical experience. In Berlin his audience came from the cabaret; in America its home was the Great White Way.
This is why Weill was at his best where the theater to which his music was incidental was at its best—in the Dreigroschenoper and, to a lesser extent, Mahagonny. When Brecht was not at his best, as in Happy End and the Sieben Todsünden, Weill slipped from sentimentality into banality. And where Weill’s collaborators were drawn from Broadway, there his music remained.
Just how little Weill’s music stands on its own, how superficial and pallid it is when deprived of staging and words, becomes obvious from his own instrumental arrangement of the score for The Threepenny Opera (Kleine Dreigroschenmusik). And yet it would be a mistake to underestimate Weill’s contribution to the Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny. That contribution was to provide the open, unashamed emotion needed to make palatable and even cloak Brecht’s cynicism and nihilism. Weill was the sugar coating on Brecht’s bitter pill; it was he who sensed that in maudlin tunefulness lay the key to a successful attack on the bastions both of bourgeois respectability and of high culture.
By now, of course, we have been vaccinated a thousand times against Weill-Brecht and against Weill-Broadway. What once was shocking in the one and brightly new in the other is now merely pleasant and beguiling, melody and lyrics for a night on the town. Perhaps the most important meaning of the current interest in Weill, then, is that New York’s two opera companies—one of them among the leading houses in the world—have chosen to cater so prominently to just such a taste.
1 Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 469 pp., $16.95.
2 University Microfilms International Research Press, 589 pp., $34.50.
3 Those words, not surprisingly, were cut from the 1954 New York revival by the work's adapter, Marc Blitzstein, and replaced by innocuous filler.
4 In this connection it is significant for Brecht's commitment to his position and for Weill's commitment to Brecht that they both decided to withdraw Der Jasager from the Neue Musik Berlin 1930 festival because it had rejected Die Massnahme.
