The Evolution of a ‘Weill Renaissance’ : His music has finally achieved the long-sought crossover effect

When Los Angeles Music Center Opera unveils Jonathan Miller’s new production of Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny” tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, it will have far more than local significance. The premiere is one of the kickoff events in a worldwide observation of Weill’s 90th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his death.

A cantor’s son born in Dessau and educated in Berlin, Weill rose to the top of Hitler’s black list as an enemy of genuine German art. Fleeing Germany in 1933, he arrived in New York in 1935, never to return to his homeland.

In the two disjunct sections of his abbreviated career, he managed to rival Paul Hindemith as the leading composer of his generation in Germany and Richard Rodgers at the cutting edge of musical theater in America. The pervasive dichotomies explicit in his biography and implicit in his music have never really been reconciled. No other major 20th-Century composer “crossed over” so extensively and so successfully, from such “difficult” works as his Violin Concerto and expressionist one-act opera, “Der Protagonist,” to such standards as “Mack the Knife” and “September Song,” with collaborators so diverse as Bertolt Brecht and Ira Gershwin.

There will be ample opportunity to explore Weill’s music and related cultural issues during the 1989/90 season, which will feature more performances of his works than at any time since 1929, when “The Threepenny Opera” swept through Europe with more than 10,000 performances. (That play-with-music will figure prominently in this season’s events too. See related article.)

Why such widespread and diversified interest in Weill, and why now ?

This isn’t the first so-called “Weill-renaissance.” In 1950 the appraiser of his estate declared that “none of Weill’s compositions can be considered ‘popular’ music in the sense that they have been or will be widely played . . . From my personal familiarity with the decedent’s compositions published abroad, I would state that such foreign works have no present value at all as they carry a very limited appeal.” Indeed, at the time of Weill’s death, not one of his European works had been produced professionally in the United States, and only the educational opera “Down in the Valley” had crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction.

“Mack the Knife” was still the “Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” known to only a few aficionados through the Telefunken discs, when Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera” opened in a small Off-Broadway theater in 1954. With Lotte Lenya recreating her original role of Jenny, the production ignited the first sustained revival of interest in Weill’s works. During the seven years the production ran at the Theatre de Lys, “Mack the Knife” sold more than 10 million records in 40 renditions, including Louis Armstrong’s and Bobby Darin’s.

The intellectual community’s belated recognition of Bertolt Brecht as a major playwright coincided with the backlash to McCarthyism in the ‘50s. That discovery quickly subsumed and overshadowed any renewed interest in Weill per se . Although the Brecht/Weill works were one-by-one unearthed, recorded and accepted into the repertory, there was no sustained exploration of the uncharted regions of Weill’s non-Brecht output. In fact, when “Street Scene” strayed into the opera house in Dusseldorf in 1955, German critics ambushed it; despite a very different attitude toward American musical theater today, to date not even the most daring German theater has risked it again. Such events elevated to axiomatic status earlier accounts of Weill’s “sellout in America,” which had been vividly reported by such assimilation-resistant emigres as Otto Klemperer, T.W. Adorno and indeed Brecht himself. By the mid-’60s the first Weill-revival had fizzled out, and only sporadic flashes thereafter illuminated the remaining facets of his work.

In retrospect one can trace the evolution of the current trend to the early ‘70s, when the focus fell on the music itself rather than its politics or fantasies about its exotic origins in the deliciously decadent Weimar Republic. Premieres of Weill’s forgotten works at major European music festivals coincided with a decline in performances of Brecht’s non-Weill plays. German critics and scholars began to speak of a “Brecht-fatigue,” and the Weill/Brecht collaboration was re-examined with emphasis on Weill’s contribution. His American works, however, were still consistently turned back at the border.

Perhaps the turning point in the United States, at least symbolically, can be identified as the Metropolitan Opera’s production of the “Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny” in 1979. Telecast nationally, it legitimized a composer who had been an outsider throughout much of his career. Posthumously dismissed as a popular tunesmith in the context of a New Music inspired by Webern and dominated by Boulez and Stockhausen, Weill had finally crossed the tracks in reverse and regained a place in institutionalized opera. Soon “crossover” would describe not only performers who tried to traverse the boundaries between “popular” and “serious,” but also composers in search of an audience beyond a small circle of academics and devotees.

A musical climate conducive to such younger composers as Steve Reich and John Adams (both avowed admirers of Weill) proved to be a restorative for Weill, who had adumbrated many issues of post-Modernist music and theater. In fact, questions raised in and by Weill’s music and essays now seem almost clairvoyant to an international musical culture still searching for a way to break out of 19th-Century aesthetic assumptions and hierarchies. How can the polarities of “popular” and “serious,” “high” and “low” be reconciled within art and society? Without a wider audience, can contemporary composition justify its existence? Can art again entertain? How can music function within modern theater?

To place the renewed interest in Weill in such a global context does not, of course, account for it. Plenty of other composers in his generation who shared ideas, aspirations and experiences remain unrevived and may be, for all we know, unrevivable. Weill had some very practical advantages. Unlike obstructionist widows of several other composers, Weill’s devoted herself almost single-mindedly to his music and in so doing carved out an international career of her own. Outliving three more husbands and having had no children, Lenya established the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc. to continue her promotion and protection of Weill’s legacy, handpicked its board of trustees, and in her will named successors to administer the musical copyrights, all of which she bequeathed to the foundation.

Far more decisive, however, is the enormous range and variety of the music itself. Most of it was conceived for the stage, with librettos and lyrics in German, French, and English by some of the century’s most distinguished poets and playwrights. While not all of Weill’s music appeals to everyone, very little appeals to no one. Most of it is distinctive and original; much is genuinely inspired. Rejecting formulas for form, function and subject matter, Weill’s boldest experiments for the musical stage again seem fresh and relevant, as the social and political upheavals of the first half of the century seem to inform his compositions more than that of any of his colleagues. Whether breathing the rarefied atmosphere of Ferruccio’s Busoni’s masterclass in Berlin, the pungent odor of smoke-filled cabarets, or the summertime stench of New York tenements, Weill somehow infused his music with an unwavering commitment to a more humane and just society.

That many of the works now seem at once exotic and commonplace, accessible and abstruse, European and American, visceral and intellectual, should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the ambiguities at the heart of Weill’s musical style and the dualities of his career. As much at ease in Hollywood film studios as the Baden-Baden festivals of New Music, he ultimately rejected the elitist premises of art-for-art’s-sake that Modernism had inherited from the previous century and then left largely unaltered. During an interview in 1940, Weill contrasted himself with Arnold Schoenberg, who, it was said, wrote for an audience 50 years after his death. “I don’t give a damn about posterity,” said Weill. “I write for today.” In that sense he was anything but prophetic, for his music from both sides of the tracks continues to entertain and instruct on both sides of the Atlantic.