A cantor’s son in Dessau
Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900, in Dessau, a town in Saxony-Anhalt in central Germany. He was the third of four children of Albert Weill, a synagogue cantor, and Emma Weill, born Ackermann. His brothers were Nathan and Hans, and his sister was Ruth. The family was religious, and the Kurt Weill Foundation notes that both the Weill and the Ackermann lines included distinguished rabbis and musicians. In 1907 the family moved into quarters next to Dessau’s new synagogue, which was consecrated in February 1908.
Music filled the house from the start. Around 1906 Kurt began piano lessons with his father, and by his early teens he was composing. His earliest surviving piece, written in 1913 when he was thirteen, is “Mi addir,” a Jewish wedding song. He entered the local Oberrealschule in 1909, doing well in literature and mathematics but spending most of his free time on music. From 1915 he studied piano, theory, composition and conducting with Albert Bing, an assistant conductor at the Dessau court theater, who introduced him to the opera repertoire and let him work as a volunteer rehearsal pianist.
Berlin and Busoni
After finishing school in 1918, Weill enrolled at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik to study composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of Hansel and Gretel. Money was short in the aftermath of World War I, and he left his studies in 1919 to work as a rehearsal pianist in Dessau. In December of that year he became a conductor at a small theater in Lüdenscheid. The work was demanding, but it taught him how a theater actually runs, a lesson that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
In December 1920 the celebrated pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni accepted him as a master student in Berlin, and Weill studied with him from 1921 to 1923. Busoni pushed him toward lean, clear, ironic music, in which the score comments on the stage action rather than simply swelling with it. Weill also joined the leftist November Group of Berlin artists, and in 1922 his children’s pantomime Die Zaubernacht was performed. In 1924 the conductor Fritz Busch introduced him to the playwright Georg Kaiser, beginning a long collaboration, and that summer he met the singer and actress Lotte Lenya. They married in 1926.
The Threepenny Opera
The breakthrough came in 1928 with The Threepenny Opera, written with the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. It reworked John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera as a savage, funny portrait of beggars, thieves and the respectable people who profit from them. Its songs, built from the sounds of cabaret, jazz and dance halls, were instantly popular, and the best known of them, “Mack the Knife,” would become one of the most recorded songs of the twentieth century. Lenya played Jenny in the original production. The piece made Weill famous and, for the first time, financially secure.
He and Brecht followed it with Happy End in 1929, the school opera Der Jasager in 1930, and the large satirical opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930. Their partnership ended that year over political differences. When a film version of The Threepenny Opera was made without respecting the authors’ wishes in 1931, Weill and Brecht went to court, and Weill won his case. By his early thirties he was one of the most talked-about composers in Germany.
Forced out
As the Nazis rose, Weill, a Jewish composer who wrote biting, modern, socially aware music, became a target. His name was placed on lists of artists the Nazis despised, and performances of Mahagonny were disrupted by organized protests. In March 1933, after Hitler took power, he learned that the Gestapo was about to arrest him and fled to France. Lenya, from whom he separated and divorced that year, followed separately, and they would remarry in 1937.
The Paris years were hard. He had lost his money and his home, and he felt betrayed by the country he had loved. He still worked: with Brecht he made the ballet-with-song The Seven Deadly Sins, which was staged in Paris in 1933, and The Threepenny Opera reached Broadway in April 1933, though it closed after only 13 performances. In September 1935 Weill sailed for the United States. He later refused to speak German again.
Remaking Broadway
In New York Weill did something unusual for a refugee: he set out to learn how Americans made popular music and to write for them as an American. His first major project, The Eternal Road, was a vast biblical pageant by Franz Werfel about the Jewish people’s long journey, and it opened in 1937 with packed houses but huge costs. Johnny Johnson, an antiwar satire, followed in 1936, and then Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938, his first Broadway success, which gave the world the song “September Song.”
Lady in the Dark, written with the playwright Moss Hart and the lyricist Ira Gershwin, opened in 1941 and ran for two years. It used songs and dream sequences to explore psychoanalysis, an idea few musicals had touched. One Touch of Venus in 1943, his biggest commercial hit, included “Speak Low.” Weill became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943, and during the war he wrote anti-Nazi and patriotic songs.
Street Scene and Lost in the Stars
After a flop in 1945 called The Firebrand of Florence, Weill turned toward simpler, more American sounds and more serious subjects. Street Scene, premiered in 1947, with a libretto by Elmer Rice based on Rice’s own play and lyrics by the Black poet Langston Hughes, set the lives of the residents of a New York tenement block to a score that moved between jazz, blues, ballads and operatic arias. He called it a Broadway opera. It won the first Tony Award for Best Original Score, awarded that year.
His last work, Lost in the Stars, opened at the Music Box Theater on October 30, 1949. With a book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, it was a “musical tragedy” based on Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country, about racial division and a father’s grief in South Africa. It was an unusually serious subject for a Broadway stage. Weill died of a heart attack in New York on April 3, 1950, a month after turning fifty.
How we still hear him
Weill’s influence runs through modern musical theater. The Kurt Weill Foundation argues that after World War II he drove a series of Broadway shows that reshaped the social role and artistic standing of the musical, and that his work influenced later generations. Composers who treat the stage musical as a vehicle for serious ideas, from social satire to tragedy, owe a debt to him. Encyclopedias often call him one of the few twentieth-century composers whose work counts as both serious and popular.
His songs live outside the theater, too. After his death “Mack the Knife” became a jazz standard in the hands of Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin, and singers from opera stars to rock musicians have recorded his music. Opera houses stage Street Scene and Mahagonny, theaters worldwide revive The Threepenny Opera, and concert halls play his symphonies. His two Berlin-era operas with Brecht remain textbook examples of political theater that is also thrilling entertainment.
Jewish background
Weill grew up in an observant, musical Jewish home; his father was the cantor of the Dessau synagogue, and one reference work says he was raised Orthodox. By the mid-1920s he had drifted from religious practice, and his Berlin work was secular. Persecution brought him back toward his heritage: after the Nazis drove him out, he drew on the liturgical melodies of his youth for The Eternal Road, which told the story of the Jewish people.
In the United States he joined with other refugee artists to raise support against Nazi Germany, and his wartime songs were part of that effort. Lenya, who was not Jewish by birth, stood by him, and after his death she devoted herself to his legacy. His father Albert escaped Germany as well and lived until 1950, though sources differ slightly on the details.
Legacy
Lenya founded the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in 1962. It runs the Lotte Lenya Competition for young singers, the Kurt Weill Prize for scholarship, and a research center, and publishes the scholarly Kurt Weill Edition so that his works can be performed from reliable scores. In Dessau, the Kurt Weill Centre opened in 1993 in a house designed by Walter Gropius, with a museum, library and archive, and the city hosts an annual Kurt Weill Fest.
Weill’s life shows how art can survive exile. Pushed out of Germany at thirty-three, he did not simply carry old forms across the ocean but built a new American theater language that millions have enjoyed since. His songs still turn up in movies, bars and concert halls, and his best shows still ask audiences to look hard at how society treats its poor, its outcasts and its minorities.
Sources & further reading
Kurt Weill, Wikipedia · Musical formation (timeline), Kurt Weill Foundation for Music · Biography, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music · Kurt Weill, EBSCO Research Starters · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.