Weill studied at Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik in Berlin, Germany.
Career
Gallery of Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill on Stage Reading Score.
Gallery of Kurt Weill
Author Alan Paton, composer Kurt Weill and playwright Maxwell Anderson, sitting together reading a script, circa 1950.
Gallery of Kurt Weill
Gallery of Kurt Weill
German composer. Photographed c1930 by Thedor Fanta.
Gallery of Kurt Weill
Gallery of Kurt Weill
Black and white, close-up, headshot photograph of German composer Kurt Julian Weill, wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses, resting his chin on his hand, facing the camera, looking down and to the side, with a pensive expression on his face, photographed in Berlin, circa 1928, by the German-American portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990), 1928.
Black and white, close-up, headshot photograph of German composer Kurt Julian Weill, wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses, resting his chin on his hand, facing the camera, looking down and to the side, with a pensive expression on his face, photographed in Berlin, circa 1928, by the German-American portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990), 1928.
(The first volume of a fabulous 2-volume set of the songs ...)
The first volume of a fabulous 2-volume set of the songs of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. From The Threepenny Opera to his great final Broadway show Lost in the Stars. Volume 1 contains 63 songs including: Alabama Song * Bilbao Song * Green-up Time * Here I'll Stay * It Was Never You * Lost in the Stars * Mack the Knife * My Ship and dozens of great songs from his early days in Berlin through Broadway and Hollywood triumphs. Cover graphics include color photos of original sheet music covers. Text includes bio and introductory notes.
Kurt Julian Weill was a German composer. He developed productions such as his best-known work The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill also wrote film scores, incidental music, orchestral and vocal works, and chamber and instrumental music.
Background
Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900, in Dessau, Germany. He was the third of four children to Albert Weill (1867–1950) and Emma Ackermann Weill.
Kurt grew up in a religious Jewish family in the "Sandvorstadt", the Jewish quarter in Dessau in Saxony, where his father was a cantor.
Education
From 1914 to 1918, Weill took piano lessons from Albert Bing in Desau. He also studied composition under Krasselt and Engelbert Humperdinck at Berlin Hochschule fuer Musik in Germany, in 1918. From 1921 to 1924, Weill studied music theory under Ferruccio Busoni.
Weill spent much of his early career conducting and teaching. One of his earliest compositions was Die Zaubernacht, a ballet for children. It was performed in 1922 and became quite popular. His first opera, The Protagonist, was performed in 1926 and confirmed his reputation as a composer. William Thornhill, writing in the International Dictionary of Opera, notes that The Protagonist and several of Weill’s other early works “utilize a complex contrapuntal and harmonic vocabulary influenced by the German-Austrian musical language inherited and developed by Arnold Schoenberg and his followers.”
During the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Weill devoted himself to creating more accessible works. Each of these introduces popular musical styles and forms, and shows, to a small extent, the influence of jazz. Eventually, this shift in emphasis proved to the turning point in his theatrical career and helped bind together many of the seemingly disparate elements that appear in his work.
His journeys together with his wife, singer Lotte Lenya (1898-1981), whom he had married in 1926, took him to Paris, where he underwent a period of unsuccessful receptions of his new works, including The Seven Deadly Sins, which he had always considered to be one of his best scores. In 1928, Weill’s The Three Penny Opera was performed. With a libretto by Brecht, it was a modem version of The Beggar’s Opera, an eighteenth-century play by John Gay. According to Ed Decker in Contemporary Musicians, The Three Penny Opera “satirized virtually all aspects of modem culture and incorporated musical styles ranging from blues songs to tangos.” Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, played the lead role. The Three Penny Opera became one of his best-known works. Although it was a critical failure in the U.S. in 1933, a revival was launched in 1954, and it ran for six years. “Mack the Knife,” the best-known song from the production, has been recorded in forty-eight different versions, which have sold more than ten million copies.
The Nazis condemned his work as decadent, and Weill left for New York in 1935 to supervise musical preparations for the premiere of Der Wegder Verheissung, a vast piece of music-theater written together with Franz Werfel and Max Reinhardt. The production was postponed because of insufficient funding. Meanwhile, Weill found work with the Group Theater, collaborating with playwright Paul Green on an antiwar musical play, Johnny Johnson; this was staged in New York in November 1936 and two months later followed the long-awaited premiere of the Broadway version of Der Weg der Verheissung, now known as The Eternal Road.
For the next thirteen years, he devoted all his energies to Hollywood and the Broadway stage, producing operettas and musicals. These included Lady in the Dark (with Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, 1941); One. Touch of Venus (with Ogden Nash and S. J. Perclman, (1943), and, more seriously. Street Scene (1947) and Lost in the Storm (1947). Two of his songs have retained their popularity "September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday and “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera. In 1948 he wrote the music for A Flag Is Born, a pageant by Ben Hecht (q.v.), to celebrate the establishment of the State of Israel. Weill also wrote a violin concerto and two symphonies.
By the age of twenty-eight, he had composed in collaboration with Bertold Brecht - the operas Die Dreigroscheroper (“Threepenny Opera,” 1928, the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927), and Augstieg und Fail der Stadt Mahagonny (“The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," 1930). These Brecht- Weill pieces continue to hold the stage today, and through them, the creation of the “number” opera concept in the context of a meaningful musical play, combined with popular cabaret and jazz music inspired by Austro-German tradition, emerged as a new art form of popular musical theater and opera - Gebrauchtmusik, “musical theater of social consciousness.” Weill suffered a heart attack shortly after his 50th birthday and died on April 3, 1950, in New York City.
After Weill’s Der Silbersee, which included a song that denounced Nazism, was produced in Leipzig in 1933, he quickly was labeled a communist, and his works were banned in Germany.
Views
Although he occasionally was criticized for pandering to popular tastes - especially after he began writing for Broadway - Weill believed there was nothing wrong with trying to reach as large an audience as possible through popular music.
Quotations:
“I have never acknowledged the difference between ’serious’ and ’light’ music. There is only good music and bad music.”
Membership
Weill was a member of the American Society Composers.
Personality
Weill’s background in complex composition gave him a style unique among musical theater composers. His scores deliver echoes of Handel choruses and Bach chorales, as well as idioms of grand opera, hymns, marches, music-hall numbers, and even Tin Pan Alley ditties.
Connections
On January 28, 1926, Weill married Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer, a singer and actress under the stage name Lotte Lenya.
Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents
A look at the life of a legendary composer, from his German-Jewish upbringing through his early political career and beyond, includes all of his songs, as well as the details of his famous affair with Lotte Lenya.
1999
The New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill
In this prizewinning book, leading musical, theatrical, and literary scholars here examine different aspects of the life and work of Kurt Weill, one of the most controversial composers of the twentieth century.
Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life
Kurt Weill - the famed composer of The Threepenny Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Knickerbocker Holiday, One Touch of Venus, Lost in the Stars, and many other musical works - led a life as rich and complex as the music for which he is so justly acclaimed.
1996
The Lives of the Great Composers
An updated and expanded edition of this perennial favorite, tracing the line of composers from Monteverdi to the tonalists of the 1990s.
1997
Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World
In this well-researched and balanced account, Ronald Taylor examines the emotional and intellectual forces that fueled Kurt Weill's unique contribution to twentieth-century music, tracing the shifting career of the enigmatic and underappreciated composer who was forced to trade Berlin for Broadway by the burgeoning Nazi terror of the 1930s.