Kurt Weill - KWFWeill’s Reply to Theodor W. Adorno in April 1942 Feature I’m a Stranger Here Myself 6 Free Associations from an Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl Weill as Emigré …

Kur t WeillN e w s l e t t e r

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In this issue

Note from the Editor 3

A Letter Surfaces 4Weill’s Reply to Theodor W. Adorno in April 1942

Feature

I’m a Stranger Here Myself 6Free Associations from an Ethnomusicologist

Bruno Nettl

Weill as Emigré 11One American’s View by Claire R. Reis

Letter from Berlin 13Jürgen Schebera attends Mahagonny.com

Recordings

The Eternal Road (excerpts) on Naxos 14Edward Harsh

The Firebrand of Florence on Capriccio 16Stephen Banfield

Books

Music & German National Identity 17ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter

Jürgen Thym

Amerikanismus—Americanism—Weill 19ed. Hermann Danuser and Hermann Gottschewski

Guido Heldt

Performances

Die sieben Todsünden in Cincinnati 21Janelle Gelfand

Happy End at the Shaw Festival 22Maarten van Dijk

Die Dreigroschenoper in Williamstown 23John Lucas

Topical Weill 1a–8a

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Cover photos: Images of Weill’s IDs provided by YaleUniversity Music Library. Clockwise from left: France(April 1935), Germany (February 1936), U.S.A.(August 1937).

ISSN 0899-6407

© 2003 Kurt Weill Foundation for Music

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Published twice a year, the Kurt Weill Newsletter features articlesand reviews (books, performances, recordings) that center on KurtWeill but take a broader look at issues of twentieth-century musicand theater. With a print run of 5,000 copies, the Newsletter is dis-tributed worldwide. Subscriptions are free. The editor welcomesthe submission of articles, reviews, and news items for inclusion infuture issues.

A variety of opinions are expressed in the Newsletter; they do notnecessarily represent the publisher’s official viewpoint. Letters tothe editor are welcome.

Staff

Elmar Juchem, Editor Carolyn Weber, Associate Editor

Dave Stein, Associate Editor Teva Kukan, Production

Kurt Weill Foundation Trustees

Kim Kowalke, President Paul Epstein

Lys Symonette, Vice-President Walter Hinderer

Philip Getter, Vice-President Welz Kauffman

Guy Stern, Secretary Harold Prince

Milton Coleman, Treasurer Julius Rudel

Maury Yeston

Internet Resources

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Kur t Weill Newsletter Volume 21, Number 2 3

Note from the Editor

Early in his compositional career, Weill already experienced an“issue of identity.” In 1926, just after the success of DerProtagonist in Dresden, he didn’t know whether he was a citi-zen of Baden, Anhalt, or Prussia. The police had even paidhim a visit and questioned him. What made the matter reallyurgent, though, was the fact that his passport was about toexpire, and any delay in the renewing process threatened topostpone further an already late honeymoon with Lenya inItaly.

No scholarly debate has unfolded about Weill’s identity ina Weimar Gemany still bearing the traces of small statism (heturned out to be a citizen of Anhalt). Ten years later, however,Weill was in a completely different situation when he renewedhis passport. Walking into the German General Consulate inNew York in February 1936, five months after the promulga-tion of the Nuremberg Laws, must have stirred up an eeriefeeling. The new passport that was issued to him looks oddly“normal”: no swastika on the stamp, no addition to his pass-port that would brand him as Jewish (that law was to come in1938), his citizenship this time stated simply as German, hiscurrent place of residence listed as Berlin-Charlottenburg.Weill’s life in the spring of that year was far from normal, bothon a professional and a personal level. The Eternal Road pro-ject had just been postponed indefinitely, and with no immi-nent job opportunities he faced the grim prospect of return-ing to France, where his publisher was in the process of can-celing his contract. Although Lenya had accompanied him tothe United States, the two were still estranged, and Weill wasdevastated by Erika Neher’s decision to end their long-dis-tance affair.

As is well known, an extensive scholarly debate has ensuedover the consequences of Weill’s decision to stay in the U.S.and to embrace it as his new homeland. This Newsletter issuesupplies new views, insights, and documents for that discus-sion. The feature article takes a look at Weill from an ethno-musicologist’s viewpoint, a perspective that is not only helpfulin regaining a larger picture of Weill and the various nationaland cultural contexts in which he lived, but also shows howour views have changed during the past fifty years. A fascinat-ing document that shows dramatic differences in opinion andattitude between two émigrés has come to light: a reply byWeill to Theodor W. Adorno on the issues of American theaterand the Threepenny Opera. Claire R. Reis’s recollection ofconcerts organized by the League of Composers, on the otherhand, offers an American view of how Weill adapted to hisnew homeland and the cultural debates therein. Finally, wereview two books that look at issues of national identity, onefocusing on Weill and Americanism, the other on the role ofmusic in Germany’s identity—both of which present anexemplary mixture of German and American scholars tacklingquestions raised by these issues.

Elmar Juchem

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Weill’s passport, issued in April 1931, was stamped by the French authoritieswhen he entered the country on 22 March 1933. The exact circumstances ofWeill’s flight remain obscure. Caspar and Erika Neher drove him to the bor-der but it is still unknown where he crossed, leaving his native Germany forgood. Weill never told the story to Lenya.

The bottom of the stamp reads LONG . . . LLE, perhaps “Longueville,” but thetwo cities of that name are not close to the German border. The questionremains: Where did he cross?

4 Volume 21, Number 2 Kur t Weill Newsletter

Theodor W. Adorno in Los Angeles to Kurt Weill31 March 1942:

Dear Weill,It must be a surprise after such a long time and a failed ren-

dezvous in New York to suddenly hear from me again. However,independent of the wish to keep alive a relationship which hasmeant a lot to me and perhaps something to you too, I am writingto you for a particular reason. It is the problem of an American per-formance of the Dreigroschenoper.

As you know, Brecht lives here and we are together a lot. He toldme that there is an opportunity to organize a performance ofDreigroschenoper by a Negro ensemble, and he also mentioned yourown hesitancy to endorse this project. Please do not consider it pre-sumptuous of me if I express my unsolicited opinion concerningthis matter—a matter which, as nobody knows better than you, ismost dear to me and whose possibilities in America, musical andsociological, I feel qualified to evaluate.

The Broadway production ten years ago apparently was whatKarl Kraus called a verbroigten Leubusch. My strong feeling is thatin an intellectual environment where artistic productions arejudged in terms of tests, contests or, at best, raffles, a repeat of theexperiment on Broadway would not be guaranteed success, unlessthe Dreigroschenoper was established earlier in some other venue, soas to conquer New York by storm from the outside. Furthermore,the ideological situation in America cannot be compared to theGerman one of 1929; it is in no way a “critical situation” and there-fore as yet not ready to accept the authentic Dreigroschenoper, whichis so inseparably tied to a climate of crisis.

On the other hand, there is Brecht’s situation, which, as far as Ican judge, is such that he can hardly afford to wait indefinitely fora Dreigroschenoper revival. Of course, a personal point of view can-not and should not be the decisive factor in a question of artisticresponsibility; however, it is this same artistic responsibility whichgives impetus to try anything to allow the creative powers of Brechtto reproduce themselves in a dignified way so that he is relieved ofthe most trivial daily worries.

Now as far as the performance itself is concerned: we are talkinghere about the founding of a Negro theater on a national level,backed by Paul Robeson and the so-called Negro Lodges, thereforeconsiderable moral backing, with financial consequences, if suc-cessful, which offer you and Brecht good prospects. TheDreigroschenoper should be the first work to be showcased on this

stage by this group. However, the thought which actually motivatedme to intervene, is the following: from the very beginning the per-formance style of the Dreigroschenoper has been based on the jazzarrangement. In my opinion, there exist only two possibilities for anadequate performance, namely the strict, tone for tone rendition ofthe original full score—a process which would work against yourown intention and your and Brecht’s vision of montage. Or one hasto present the work in an actual jazz adaptation. This, however, canbe successful over here only if the principle of jazz variation wouldbe applied in a far more radical way than would have been necessaryin Europe. You surely will agree with me that the method of some-one like Mackeben would not be successful here, because it lags farbehind American rhythmic refinements. If one handed over the jazzadaptation to one of the commonly employed white jazz arrangers,even the very best, there would be the danger that something tameand bland would be made out of Dreigroschenoper, that it would loseits sting and its foreignness. I cannot counter Brecht in his assertionthat the only chance—a paradox—to achieve success and at thesame time retain its extraterritoriality, at least for the moment, liesin a really far-reaching “re-functioning” using a Negro ensembleworking on both text and music. One should strive for a somewhateconomically self-sufficient performance, one in which theNegroes, whose general reactions could never be completelygrasped by us anyway, would largely be left to themselves and whowould improvise the work in their own way. I would go so far as tosay that Dreigroschenoper depends either on the utmost faithfulnessand literality, or on the crassest and most infringing improvisation-al liberties, and the work itself is laid out from the beginning for thelatter, such that it would find solace in it, until such a day when itcan celebrate its negative-theological resurrection once more, likeon the first day of creation in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

To show you that I have not become musico-sociologically half-witted in my period of silence, I am sending you under separatecover my last two publications in that field.

Please be so kind as to reply.Best wishes to you and Lenja.

Your old friend,Theodor W. Adorno

Translated from the German. Original letter held by Yale University MusicLibrary, Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya (MSS 30), box 47, folder 18.

A Letter SurfacesWeill’s Reply to Theodor W. Adorno in April 1942

Ever since the Weill-Lenya correspondence became availableafter Lenya’s death in 1981, we have known that Weill respondedto a letter he received from Theodor W. Adorno in the spring of1942. The sociologist, whose centenary is celebrated this year,had written to Weill in support of a planned production of DieDreigroschenoper in California, initiated by Brecht. Weill had notbeen informed about these plans until the last minute and wastherefore strongly displeased. In a letter to Lenya, he complainedabout the “good old swinish Brecht method” and mentioned thathe had written “Wiesengrund a letter which he won’t forget for

some time” (8 April 1942, published in: Speak Low (When YouSpeak Love) : The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, ed. by LysSymonette and Kim Kowalke, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,1996, letter no. 263, p. 320). An inquiry by archivist Dave Stein tothe Theodor W. Adorno Archiv in Frankfurt has resulted in theunearthing of this letter. Since the exchange of letters touches onmany issues central to Weill scholarship in general, and perfor-mance practice of Die Dreigroschenoper in particular, we repro-duce both letters below with the kind permission of the TheodorW. Adorno Archiv.


Kurt Weill in New City, N.Y. to Theodor W. Adorno7 April 1942

Dear T.W.,please allow me to write in English. It is easier for me and I like

it better.It was very nice to hear from you after a long time. I have been

working a lot these last years and most of the time I have been liv-ing in the country and did not see many people. Lenya has beenplaying since last fall in the Helen Hayes play Candle in the Wind (byMaxwell Anderson). She is touring the whole country with this playnow and will not be back before the end of May. When you comeback to the East, I hope you will come out and see Brook House.

As far as Dreigroschenoper is concerned, I must say that I don’tagree at all with your point-of-view, neither in general nor in detail.Your letter contains a number of mistakes and wrong statementswhich I would like to correct because I think it is a shame that a manof your intelligence and integrity should be so misinformed aboutcertain things.

What you say about the “Broadway Theatre” is, in my opinion,absolutely wrong. I have other people from over there seen makingthe same mistake. They see a few shows on Broadway, they comparethem with the best things they have seen in Germany and they passa judgement on the entire American Theatre. You forget complete-ly that more than 10 years have passed since we worked in theGerman theatre and that we would do an entirely different form oftheatre if we were still in Germany. I have made a thorough studyof the American theatre and I have seen all important shows in thiscountry, on Broadway and outside of Broadway, in the last sevenyears, and I can assure you that they have done just as much “exper-imental” theatre of every type here as we have done in Germany.They had the expressionistic theatre, the epic theatre and the sur-realist theatre. They had projections, narrators, Greek choruses.The modern Russian theatre had the same influence here as in theGerman theatre, and I have seen a great number of plays with socialcriticism, political satyres [sic], “Zeitstücke” etc. The only differ-ence is that all this is concentrated on New York, that Broadway isat the moment the center and the heart of the American Theatre.(The National Theatre Conference of which I am an active memberis trying very hard to change this situation). But, next to Russia,Broadway is today the most interesting theatre center in the world.You are entirely wrong when you say that any theatre experimenthas to be done somewhere else and then forced on Broadway. Thathas been tried a few times and always ended in complete desaster[sic], for the simple reason that those shows that were brought infrom other towns were completely provincial and second-rate. Youcan do anything on Broadway and find an audience for it—if it isgood. I have myself done three experimental shows here, and thelast of them has been sold out for fourteen months now in spite ofthe fact that it represents an entirely new form of musical theatre. Iknow that I would have done some day a revival of Dreigroschenoperon Broadway which would have preserved all the values of the orig-inal work, transformed into the terms of the American life and notinto the terms of the Negro theatre which is something special andrather far-fetched for a German adaptation of an old English bal-lad-opera.

What you say about the musical problem of Dreigroschenopersounds rather odd, coming from a man who was always a defenderof musical integrity. Where did you get the notion that the “perfor-mance of Dreigroschenoper was always based on the jazz-arrange-ment?” Have you never seen my orchester [sic] score for

Dreigroschenoper? Don’t you know that this score has always beenplayed exactly as I have written it? There were no “rythmischeKünste” in Mackeben’s interpretation that he didn’t find in myscore. Or how would you explain the success of this music in hun-dreds of places where Mackeben didn’t play? Also: I am not sure atall if this score shouldn’t be played here in its original form. Italways makes a great success with Americans and the old Germanrecords are still selling by the hundreds here. But if it has to bechanged or adapted, don’t you think that I would do a better jobthan a second rate negro musician in Los Angeles? “Der Stachelund die Fremdheit” of which you talk, is in my music, in mymelodies, my harmonies and my orchestration and everybody whowill touch it will destroy it.—As far as the “jazzvariation” is con-cerned, you don’t seem to know that this form has been mastered tomuch greater perfection by white musicians and arrangers than bynegroes. I have myself made a study of it and used it quite a bit late-ly. It is no secret.

I have to say another thing, as long as you want to know mypoint-of-view in this matter. Paul Robeson as well as ClarenceMuse told me that Brecht has known about this project since lastsummer. If he would have informed me about it I would have hadthe opportunity to get in touch with those people, to talk to them,to collaborate, to help and to protect my artistic interests. But thefirst time I heard about the whole project was on March 5th 1942,when his agent suddenly asked me to sign a contract, out of the bluesky. And since then the only thing which I demanded was to see thebook and the lyrics which he constantly refused. I don’t know whatyou or anybody else would do if he would be treated this way. But Ido know that a thing like this could never happen with anyone of myAmerican collaborators. Maybe the main difference between theGerman and the American theatre is the fact that there exist certainrules of “fair play” in the American theatre. Three cheers for theAmerican theatre!

This poor fellow Clarence Muse wrote me a desperate letter. Heis really in an awful position. I have therefore decided to put asideall my doubts and all my objections and have worked out a proposi-tion which would allow them to go ahead with their production, butto show it in California only. If they want to show it outside ofCalifornia I have to see it first and decide if I want my music to beused or not. My friends here say I am crazy that I do this. But I doit first out of the above mentioned feeling of fair play towardsClarence Muse, second because I don’t want anybody to say that wepeople from over there are quarreling among ourselves, thirdbecause Brecht and his friends seem to think that this is the greatopportunity for him here in America and I don’t want to be the onewho is in the way—and fourth because the whole thing is really notso important for me. I have a lot of other things to do, things thatare more important, and much more fun.

I hope you don’t mind that I gave you my frank opinion in thismatter. But I felt that I had to be absolutely honest to you and I amsure you will understand it.

With my best regards for you and your wife,Yours cordially,Kurt Weill

Original letter held by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main.Weill’s spelling and capitalization have been retained, except that titles havebeen italicized.


II’’mm aa SSttrraannggeerr HHeerree MMyysseellff

FFrreeee AAssssoocciiaattiioonnss ffrroomm aann EEtthhnnoommuussiiccoollooggiisstt

By Bruno Nettl

Several Kinds of Strangeness. “You?” exclaimed mywife. “He [the editor of this Newsletter] asked you to write some-thing about Kurt Weill?” She was no more incredulous than I hadbeen, when asked—an ethnomusicologist with principal experienceamong Native Americans of Montana and musicians in Tehran,who loves but knows only little of the music of Weill, and who isthoroughly ignorant of scholarly issues surrounding this major butidiosyncratic figure in twentieth-century music history. In thesepages, “stranger” is surely the right designation for me. But I amstruck by this interesting coincidence: the gradual recognition ofWeill’s significance by musicologists, after his death, involved theerasing of boundaries, and the history of ethnomusicology since1950 too is marked by the deleting of unnecessary conceptual bor-ders. Kurt Weill certainly has to be sort of a stranger in this articleand the world of ethnomusicology in which it is based, but actual-ly, certain recently developing interests of that field, and the bur-geoning of Weill scholarship, have eradicated some of the distance.

My own memories of Weill go back to my teenage years in thefamily home in Princeton, ca. 1942, where my father, the historianof 18th-century music Paul Nettl, once played a catchy-soundingtune about somebody called Messer, but the most important thingabout it at that moment seemed to be its relationship to the Beggar’sOpera. Later, as a young student in the School of Music at IndianaUniversity, I had begun to learn something about what was later tobe called ethnomusicology, a field that at the time rather rigidlydivided the musical world into categories such as “classical,” “pop-ular,” and “folk,” wherein the primary concern with folk music wasabout “authenticity.” My teacher, George Herzog (1901–82),almost an exact contemporary of Weill’s, an immigrant fromHungary who had lived in New York in the 1930s and most of the’40s and had met Weill, considered these categories real and theirmaintenance important. Herzog’s message, as I perceived it, wasthis: Seek out and study authentic folk music as had his idol BélaBartók; avoid cultural mixes like popular music (e.g., the kind thatcombines African-American and European styles, or which drawson both folk and classical sources); maintain respect for, but in yourscholarship eschew, Western classical music, remembering that ithas its own scholarly discipline. Well, Dr. Herzog wasn’t really thatrigid, but in mid-century this was the early ethnomusicologicalview of the musical world. In such a world, Kurt Weill’s oeuvrewould surely be a stranger.

Actually, ethnomusicologists in America and Europe themselvesare generally seen as strangers in the world of music, concernedwith the “other” in various respects. But they didn’t until recentlywant to hear about strangeness within the cultures they were study-ing. Originally, they wanted to know what was typical in the musicof India, or in an aboriginal tribe, or Appalachia—what was “nor-

mal” and acceptable (in this field that most people see as the homeof abnormal musical taste). Not about the Indian who had learnedto play ragas on the cello, or the folksinger who was insertingMozart songs into his repertory, or the Cheyenne peyote religionistwho was accompanying his songs on the guitar, or for that matter,the kind of composer who would write both “September Song” andthe 1921 Berliner Symphonie. And the musical public and its criticswere also narrow-minded, feeling obliged to choose between the“German” Weill of the Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny, or the“serious” Weill of chamber music, or the “American” Weill of StreetScene and One Touch of Venus. And were uncomfortable when theyfound that Weill swimmingly straddled musical worlds as did mycello-playing Hindu.

A Foray Into the History of Ethnomusicology.Because of the way people—and peoples—have been forced tomove from place to place, and also (on account of technologicaladvances) able to move around the world easily—physically andnow also virtually—strangeness has been a kind of leitmotif of lifesince 1950, the era of modern diasporas. Ethnomusicologists begantheir studies by trying to find music as it existed, or as it might haveonce existed, in cultures that were self-contained, to contemplatemusic uncontaminated by intercultural influences. This was theirperception of the cultural norm of the past eras, but I think theyknew that this quest would ultimately be frustrated, and still theysought the unspoiled, emphasizing the concept of authenticity.They avoided the impact of colonialist cultures on the world’smusics, of hybridization, of mass mediation, the multi-culturalnation-state, and the processes that led to what is now widely calledglobalization. The music of indigenous peoples and village folk anduncorrupted classical systems were their favorite subject matter.1

This kind of focus hasn’t quite disappeared, but after World WarII, there came the realization that the kind of unspoiled authentici-ty the early ethnomusicologists sought just wasn’t around anymore—maybe had never been, as the “pure” of today was usuallythe “hybrid” of yesterday. While scholars from everywhere partici-pated in this sea change in attitude, I think it was concentrated inthe USA and Canada, and incidentally also Israel, nations whichhave in common the significance of diasporas—I’m using the termbroadly to refer to large-scale movement and dispersal of popula-tions and cultures.

Following this virtual turn-around, ethnomusicologists became(and now are) very much concerned with concepts that help us tounderstand the role of music in enabling individuals to negotiateand maintain various kinds of identity—ethnicity (the group ofwhich you’re most essentially a part), nationalism (membership ina larger, imagined community), hybridity (recognition of simulta-


neously holding several identities), gender, class, age-group. Thenotion of ethnicity (I’m following Martin Stokes’ analysis)2 is con-cerned with establishing boundaries within which a social groupmay use music and other cultural domains to erect boundariesbetween “us” and “them,” using concepts such as authenticity tojustify these boundaries.3

Of these various concepts, ethnicity is the one that is least relat-ed to specific, predictable criteria such as physical borders, lan-guage, culture. Its contents are fluid and debatable. But all of theseconcepts could be helpful in interpreting the relationship of KurtWeill to the cultural contexts in which he lived and worked. I saythis, realizing that the question of Weill’s personal and musicalidentities, seen by himself and by his audiences and critics, has beena major issue in the burgeoning literature, both critical and docu-mentary.4

I first heard the term “ethnic groups” in early 1950s Detroit.The cultural diversity of American cities had begun to be recog-nized, and an organization, the International Institute, had beenestablished to encourage ethnic groups to practice their traditionsbut also to share and mix them; traditions such as music, dance,holiday customs, foods. When I joined the faculty at Wayne StateUniversity to teach about folk music, I found that music was indeedan important ethnicity marker. People who had becomethoroughly “anglo” nevertheless knew some songsfrom the old country, could sing them but didn’tunderstand the words, for example. But also,I realized that when vernacular musiciansplayed at, say, Polish and Serbian wed-dings, they exhibited what Stokes calls a“magpie attitude toward genres” fromdifferent national sources, picked upand digested and reinterpreted in var-ious ways.5

After about 1960, ethnomusicolo-gists in the United States began to takeseriously the task of analyzing themusic of ethnic groups, and this meanttaking significantly into account the waysin which these societies related, musically,to other groups—those who were likethemselves, their relatives elsewhere, per-haps in their place of origin, and theirimmediate neighbors.

To make this more concrete, ethnomu-sicologists would have done fieldworkamong Hungarian-Americans in Detroit,some of whom had arrived in the 1890s,finding individuals who remembered andsang traditional Hungarian folk songs, and comparing these songsto the repertory collected in Hungary, thus studying how the tradi-tional repertory had been preserved in America, how it had beenchanged, and perhaps also how—while the home tradition hadundergone change—it had preserved older forms. But they wouldalso examine the socio-cultural context to see how, for example, thefunctions and uses of traditional songs changed in the shift from arural agricultural to an urban industrial society. How songs came tobe performed by professional musicians with instruments takenfrom the jazz world. Or how their function of accompanying tradi-tional rituals changed to one of maintaining cultural identity in aculturally hybridized world. From the occasional collecting of suchmusic—even as critics worried about its authenticity—this

approach to understanding the musical culture of America becamealmost the norm for ethnomusicological studies after about 1980.Interestingly, because of the confluence of Jewish populations frommany parts of the world in Israel, their musical interaction reflect-ed the developments in North America. In all of these studies,though, one was concerned with groups who agreed, not with idio-syncratic individuals.6

This kind of research came into existence because of the way thecultures of the United States and Canada grew, through immigra-tion from everywhere, to form in some respects a melting pot, inothers a kind of cultural mosaic, and other configurations as well.It’s the result of hundreds of separate waves of immigration, and ofhundreds of ways in which immigrant groups settled and negotiat-ed their relationships to their places of origin and their new envi-ronment. Using the term now very loosely, it’s the result of hun-dreds of separate diasporas that provided food for study andthought for a substantial population of music scholars. Consideringthe life and work of Kurt Weill motivates us to see if the ethnicgroup of which Weill was a member, Germans and CentralEuropeans of Jewish background fleeing the Nazi threats, was dif-ferent from the others and to ask whether those who came toAmerica were like those who went to Palestine/Israel.

Ethnicity, Diasporas, and Music.The heterogeneity of the Jewish population and

their variety of musical traditions was notedearly on by Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, and

also by Robert Lachmann in the 1930s.The increase in immigration as a resultof the Holocaust and then of thefounding of the state of Israel gavefurther impetus to seeing Israel’smusical culture as a microcosm ofJewish traditions from everywhere,and also of the Christian and Islamic

musical traditions in which Jews hadparticipated. A large number of schol-

ars, significantly beginning with EdithGerson-Kiwi and continuing with manyothers including Ruth Katz, DahliaCohen, and Amnon Shiloah, made stud-ies that in some ways paralleled thosebeing carried out in North America. Butof course the situation was more com-plex, for while the American sceneinvolved people who left their traditionaland permanent home for somethinghopefully better, Israel gathered in peo-

ple who were also looking for something better, but doing it bycoming home, bringing music traditions from abroad while tryingto integrate themselves into the traditions they found. Among theGerman-speaking (and Czech and Hungarian) immigrants, theredeveloped a musical culture which, according to Philip Bohlman,7

duplicated and even surpassed the experience of the original home,a musical life based on the nurturing of Mozart, Beethoven,Schubert. Composers coming from Europe began to use MiddleEastern and Eastern European folk styles as resources, but workedhard at remaining composers of “art music.” While Kurt Weillblended into the vernacular musical culture of the USA, Israelicomposers, and for that matter many others who came to America(e.g., Schoenberg or Hindemith) did not effect this kind of blend.

When working on Lost in the Stars, Weill asked ethnomusi-

cologist Hugh Tracey to provide him with examples of South

African music.


In the literature on Kurt Weill, one doesn’t read much aboutexperiences he might have had with music his generation ofGerman musicians would have labeled as “exotic”—e.g., Arabicmusic on his visit to Palestine—but he drew on a great variety ofmusical traditions. In today’s world, in which the norm of music isto have multicultural roots and to be polysemic, he might have feltquite at home, more than in 1920s Berlin. On the other hand, someof his correspondence around 1948 suggests that while he consid-ered issues of authenticity and appropriation of music from varioussources, he did not seem to be too comfortable or sympathetic. Inworking on Lost in the Stars, he became acquainted with examplesof South African music, but in the end decided that it wouldn’t real-ly be appropriate as source material.

The primacy of music as an index of ethnic identity was madeclear to me in numerous of my field experiences, and particularlywhen I was trying to learn something about the classical music cul-ture of South India, in Chennai, formerly called Madras. Somehowthe emblem of ethnicity of the whole culture seems to have been theclassical music, Carnatic music. It is a complex system, and fewpeople, I think, knew it well, and very few went to live concerts—although there were plenty of those. It was principally the music ofthe intelligentsia and the associated caste groups. Even so, pride inthis great music, and its great composers such as Tyagaraja andMuttuswami Dikshitar, and its great performers, was a kind of hall-mark of Madras society as a whole. It’s a bit as if the emblem ofAmerican ethnicity were Aaron Copland—which is probably notimaginable; or of Austrian ethnicity, Mozart and Schubert, whichdefinitely is. Here the purpose of presentation to the outside worldwas a matter of showing parity; one was told that there are two greatmusical systems, and two great cultures, European and Indian.Indian music was melodic, and European, harmonic; Indian vocal,European instrumental. But each had its trinity of great composers.Music symbolized the superiority, in a world context, of Hindusociety and culture.8

As ethnomusicologists ceased paying much attention to theboundaries delineated by the George Herzog generation, some ofthem began to look at the Viennese trinity, and at the whole groupof Great Masters, not as historical figures but as a kind of pantheonruling our world of classical music today, and I undertook to exam-ine them in the context of a study of university schools of music. Apantheon indeed—who the principals are is clear; they are the com-posers whose names are on our music buildings and whose musicyou must unquestionably respect. Some at the borders (Berlioz,Bruckner, Liszt) might have a kind of associate status, like certainsemi-divines in ancient Greece. Can one imagine Kurt Weill join-ing such a pantheon? It’s not that among them there aren’t com-posers who reached out. Take Mozart: one thinks of the incrediblevariety of genres, his multinational sources of inspiration, his abili-ty to appeal to audiences not particularly learned musically. He’snot the only one. But the uniqueness of Kurt Weill and his exis-tence on several sides of too many borders may keep him a stranger.

What Are You, Anyway? In the modern world, decidingon one’s ethnic identity and one’s cultural allegiance has not alwaysbeen an easy matter. According to the anthropologist Anya Royce,people manipulate their identities in order to attain satisfaction indifferent contexts; identity is less a matter of external ascription orbiological or cultural pedigree than of the conscious decisions ofindividuals presenting themselves to others in a variety of situa-tions.9

When I first came to the USA, in 1939, my father frequentlywent to a pastry shop on 72nd Street called Eclair, where recentémigrés from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia gathered;sometimes I got to go along. Much of the vigorous but also desper-ate-sounding conversation revolved about the speakers’ relation-ship to Europe and America. All were happy to have escaped withskin largely intact, but only a few seemed to love America while oth-ers were critical and disappointed—no gold in the streets, no jobs,

Ernst Hoffman rehearses the orchestra for the premiere of Down in the Valley at Indiana University in July 1948. The author of this

essay, playing third violin, is seated in the back (from the conductor’s viewpoint) next to the bassoon player. Photo: Indiana

University Archives


no proper “culture,” the fewwords of British English theyhad learned unintelligible toNew York doormen, and so on. Afew were determined never toreturn, and even in their homes,conversed in heavily accentedEnglish. Some were clearly dis-oriented, thinking they had bet-ter leave the refugee-beehive ofNYC for the hinterlands butafraid it would be just toostrange. A good many thoughtthey would hold on and, when itwas again safe, return to Europe.

My parents arrived fromCzechoslovakia (they had livedin Bohemia, first an Austro-Hungarian and then aCzechoslovak province, all theirlives), but speakers mainly ofGerman, with Czech a secondlanguage, and of Jewish back-ground but without religiousparticipation. With no knowl-edge of America and no plan ofaction, they were typicalrefugees; they turned eventuallyinto exiles, who hoped eventual-ly to return, and, near the end ofthe war, they turned into immi-grants, becoming citizens.10

Even so, around 1946, I wit-nessed a curious conversationbetween my father and aGerman who asked him, “Wasist eigentlich Ihre nationaleEinstellung?” best translated, “What do you consider yourself tobe?” (Maybe he just said, “was sind Sie eigentlich?”—“who areyou, anyway?”—I don’t remember for sure.) Mentally weighing thealternatives—was he Jewish, German, Czech, Sudeten-German,Deutschboehme, American?—my father answered, “well, when allis said and done, I think I am an Austrian,” going back to what hewould have had to say in his youth before World War I, and at thesame time confessing to his identification with Germanophone cul-ture without uttering the then-negative word “German.” But ourhousehold language continued to be German, with English wordsthrown in to bridge the culture gap, and with Czech largely neglect-ed. The whole business of identity made him uncomfortable,though. Although he traveled a great deal in Europe in his old age,he never returned to Czechoslovakia, where he was born, and henever visited Israel, which would tie him to his roots in a significantway. I mention all this to illustrate the problems that others in KurtWeill’s shoes might have had.11

I have no survey of statements of identity of the intellectual émi-grés of the late 1930s available, but I suspect that my father’s atti-tude was not atypical. Many of them opted to stay as strangers, see-ing that this nation consisted of people who could easily survive byremaining strangers, a country of diverse ethnic groups with noethnic majority. This was an aspect of the cultural context in whichKurt Weill lived in the period of World War II, but when it came to

decide how to present himself,he may have been a bit of anexception, a man who came toAmerica and decided with littledifficulty that it was the rightplace for him. Reading the bio-graphical literature, one seesWeill coping with his multipleidentities in a pretty straightfor-ward way; so also with his musi-cal identities, not worrying aboutwhether he’s doing the rightthing by composing light orheavy, classical or popular, E orU music, taking refuge in thesomewhat simplistic cliché—there’s only good and bad music.It’s my impression that Weilladjusted personally better thanmost émigrés; maybe it had to dowith his ability to adapt musical-ly, especially to the Americanmusical culture.

EthnomusicologistMeets “Folk Opera.”During this period of my life,when I was absorbing the musi-cal worldview espoused by myteachers of mid-century, I alsohad the good fortune of beingasked to play, in 1948, in theorchestra that was rehearsing forthe stage premiere of Down in theValley, in the incunabular stageof the eventually famed IndianaUniversity opera program.12

A type of work sometimes labeled Gebrauchsmusik (a term thatPaul Nettl is sometimes credited with originating)13 that could bestaged rather quickly, it was produced on a couple of months’notice. The score—written to be accessible to high school orches-tras with players who were of an age at which many studied violinbut few had yet shifted down the perfect fifth to embrace the viola,which was more respectable than second violin—called for threeviolin parts. I was assigned to Third Violin and played under thewatchful eye of Ernst Hoffman, the conductor who built the IUorchestra from a scraggly bunch of amateurs into a pretty disci-plined crew before being killed in an early-morning car crash in1953, and about whom I remember particularly his strategic use ofrubato both for dramatic effect and to help us get through difficultpassages. I remember from the pit hearing the high-pitched,intense voice of the distinguished Hans Busch, son of Fritz, direct-ing the singers, trying to get them to act and not just to sing. And itwas the first time I played in the pit of a real opera house, theIndiana University Auditorium with its 3800 seats, in which I hadseen Metropolitan Opera productions.

A few days before the performance, Kurt Weill appeared, withLenya (not yet so famous in the Midwest), along with Marion Bell,who sang the lead, and her husband Alan Jay Lerner. I wish I couldsay I actually met Weill—it was less than two years before hisdeath—but I only saw him from a distance as he observed the dress

1 0 Volume 21, Number 2 Kur t Weill Newsletter

rehearsal. He made some encouraging remarks to Hoffmann andBusch and waved to us in the pit in a friendly fashion, but I suspectthat he was otherwise monopolized by the University’s administra-tors. I have the feeling, though, that some of those people in Indianadidn’t quite know what to make of a German composer who wroteBroadway musicals and film music. After all, “popular music” wassomething of a no-no to the orchestra, whose members had beenordered by the dean to avoid dance band gigs and such.

Mostly I remember the heartbreaking story of Down in theValley, of the falsely accused hero escaping from death row to visithis girl. But I also found it pretty curious that someone was tryingto combine opera and folk music, and was bemused at this way ofinjuring the authenticity of folk music by the intrusion of the oper-atic genre, wondering if this was a proper “opera,” and whether thesong that gave it its title was still a proper “folk song.”

What should ethnomusicologists do with Down in the Valley?They might look at it as an outcropping of the Anglo-Americanfolk-song tradition, see it as part of a minority movement in the tur-bulent history of twentieth-century opera, or an aberration in thecanon of the Broadway musical. They could view it as a contribu-tion to a genre that never got off the ground in America, serious butaccessible music for young musicians, a kind of Gebrauchsmusik. Or,looking at it within the theoretical frameworks used by ethnomusi-cology, an example of syncretism, or hybridization, in contempo-rary terms, globalization.14 Might it be best related to the history ofmusicians in Europe, America, the Middle East, regarded with sus-picion and to some extent outsiders, who—like the Jewish musi-cians in Middle Eastern villages, or the Bohemian musiciansthroughout 18th-century Europe, or the 1990s Peruvian musiciansin the world’s cities—make music for their audiences, music maybestrange to their own ethnicity or perhaps exaggerating the traits oftheir ethnicity?

The creation of Down in the Valley at about the same time as thebeginning of the great reverse of ethnomusicological interest maybe just an interesting coincidence. But it’s probably more signifi-cant that it also came at the time at which the so-called “secondfolk-song revival,” came into its own, spearheaded in Weill’s timeby Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who broke down the barriersbetween popular and folk with their particular ideas of the authen-ticity and modern role of folk music.15

Although ethnomusicologists have tried to avoid being labeledas the musicologists whose job it is to study and evaluate the use offolk and indigenous music by composers of art music, I can imag-ine examining Down in the Valley as a part of a movement in whichAmerican folk music moves into several mainstreams of Americanmusical culture. Certainly the sources of the songs that Weill usedwere a step or two away from their form as recorded by folkloristsand sung by untutored miners or farmers’ wives.

Contemplating Down in the Valley and Kurt Weill’s work at largeenriches my sense of the wealth of our twentieth-century musicalculture, and reinforces my sense of the uselessness of the bound-aries among the various kinds of music available to us. While othersmay argue about the proper conceptual category for his music andlook critically at the variety of his interests, Kurt Weill himself, whomight hold the record among composers for participation in themost genres, classes, and types, seems to me, in his life, to havemade his peace with being a stranger everywhere, and might per-haps have been willing to be culturally at home anywhere.

Notes

1. For views of the history of ethnomusicology, see Bruno Nettl and Philip V.Bohlman, eds., Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1991.2. Martin Stokes, “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music” in his editedvolume, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place.Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994, pp. 1–28.3. Ibid., p. 6.4. As in Ronald Taylor, Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World (Boston:Northeastern University Press, 1991); and the collections of letters, KurtWeill: Briefe an die Familie (1914–1950), edited by Lys Symonette and ElmarJuchem (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000) and Speak Low: The Letters of Kurt Weilland Lotte Lenya, edited and translated by Lys Symonette and Kim H.Kowalke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).5. For further details and bibliography, see B. Nettl, Encounters inEthnomusicology: A Memoir. Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2002, pp.177–181.6. For background and illustration, see Stephen Erdely, “Ethnic Music inAmerica, an Overview,” Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 11:114–137, 1979.7. Philip V. Bohlman, The Land Where Two Streams Flow. Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1989.8. B. Nettl, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Asian Music 15, no. 2: 1–10, 1984;“Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture,” Yearbookfor Traditional Music 21: 1–16, 1989.9. Anya Royce, Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1982, p. 19.10. For a more detailed account and interpretation, see B. Nettl, “DisplacedMusic and Immigrant Musicologists,” in R. Brinkmann and C. Wolff, eds.,Driven into Paradise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp.54–65.11. B. Nettl, Encounters . . . , pp. 12–18, 33–39.12. Beyond the accounts of this in the standard literature on Kurt Weill, seealso George Logan, The Indiana University School of Music: A History.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 152–53 and passim.13. Paul Nettl, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Tanzmusik im 17. Jahrhundert,”Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4: 258, 1921–22.14. For comments on these concepts and terms, see B. Nettl, The WesternImpact on World Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1985; Thomas Turino,Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2000.15. See Neil V. Rosenberg, ed. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music RevivalsExamined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Bruno Nettl is Professor Emeritus of Music and Anthropology at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kur t Weill Newsletter Volume 21, Number 2 1 1

Not long after that the union took notice of another experiment,this time in a theater orchestra. The late Kurt Weill had introducedthe Hammond Organ into a Broadway show entitled JohnnyJohnson. The strong tonal volume of this instrument replaced fivelive-players; the Musicians’ Union ordered the management toengage the five theater orchestra men, even if they had to sit in thecellar throughout the performance and play pinochle. (p. 122)

•Upon one of Milhaud’s arrivals in New York, I asked the CustomsDepartment to have him met at the dock by a special inspector. Iimpressed upon the port authorities that here was an importantmusician who needed help; at the time he was in a wheel chair.

The special inspector met us and together we waited until theMilhaud baggage was assembled, sixteen pieces of it—but wherewas the seventeenth?

While Madeleine searched for it, Darius sat calmly in his wheelchair. It was a mercilessly hot day in July but a nice breeze blew onthe French Line’s open pier.

Suddenly someone remembered that Kurt Weill and LotteLenja would be coming to greet the Milhauds but, as they had nopass, they would have to wait outside the barrier.

Nearby the inspector was waiting for the missing piece of lug-gage to be found so he could begin his work. “You mean Kurt Weillof Street Scene?” he exclaimed, overhearing us; “I’ll go and getthem through the gate right away.” In a moment he was back withthe Weills who were overjoyed to join their great friends. All of uslaunched into a lively conversation about new operas and films inEurope and the States. (p. 185–186)

•

At the end of 1935 Kurt Weill had arrived from Europe. He wasanother composer who had left Germany to find a new home in thiscountry, one more European intellectual escaping from Hitler’styranny. Before leaving Europe he had spent two years in France,and arrived in New York with the great stage producer MaxReinhardt.

Although the League of Composers had not found it possible toproduce Weill’s operas, we were well aware of their important placein the opera houses of Germany. He had appealed to a new German

Weill as Emigré

One American’s View by Claire R. Reis

Program from the 1935 League of Composers concert in honor of

Weill.

Claire R. Reis (1888–1978) was one of the leading Americanorganizers and promoters of contemporary classical music. Reisstudied in France, Germany, and the U.S. and trained as a pianist,but she made her greatest contributions to American music asthe director of the League of Composers, which she helped tofound in 1922. The League (now merged with ISCM) has playedan important role in encouraging and promoting American com-posers ever since. Led by Reis, the League organized concerts,championed innumerable composers (most notably AaronCopland), commissioned new works, sponsored radio programs,and published a journal, Modern Music, devoted to contempo-rary music. The League also arranged concerts of the music ofmany refugees, including the one for Weill described below. Reisremained an active and beloved figure on the musical scene longafter her retirement in 1948.

The texts below are drawn from Reis’s memoir, Composers,Conductors, and Critics (New York: Oxford University Press,1955).


public with music that was sim-ple enough—even jazzed-upenough—to be intelligible tothe masses. In 1927 at thefamous Baden-Baden MusicFestival his opera Mahagonnyhad created a new interest formusicians and music lovers whogathered there. This opera—hisfirst attempt to blend jazz andblues rhythms—gave the publica certain shock; at the sametime there was a simplicity tothe work that gave it a trulypopular appeal.

Of course, it was in order forthe League to plan an eveningin Weill’s honor shortly after hisarrival here. He chose for theoccasion a program of greatvariety. There were excerptsfrom an opera, excerpts alsofrom what he called an“operetta.” His wife, LotteLenja, with her marvelous tal-ent and charm, had interpretedmany of his works in Europe;she offered us her co-operation.Though her singing voice isslight, her personality is soremarkable that her presence onthe stage makes itself felt imme-diately.

The program included achorus from Die Bürgschaft,solos and chorus from Mahagonny, and Three Penny Opera (DreiGroschen Oper), and closed with excerpts from the operetta AKingdom for a Cow.

As far back as 1932, the late Jerzy Fitelberg had written in theLeague’s magazine, that it did not seem possible to carry the styleand development of Weill’s opera Die Bürgschaft and Drei GroschenOper farther; “but Weill is a genuine creator, and will find a newpath along which to guide opera. Today he is probably the only realopera composer in Germany, a fact that is generally accepted andwhich explains the great interest that awaits all his further develop-ment.” As it turned out Weill found his “new path” in this country,though perhaps it was a path that did not always add to his staturein the best phase of his musical talent.

That evening in honor of Kurt Weill proved a great successmusically; an enthusiastic audience at the Cosmopolitan Clubbrought him and Lotte Lenja forward to take innumerable bows.For me, only one thing marred the evening in retrospect; it was atelephone call the next morning from Olga Samaroff, with whom Ihad enjoyed a long close friendship. We had been colleagues in var-ious musical activities—the Town Hall Music Committee, theSchubert Memorial, and the League of Composers—and, since shewas always open minded and far seeing, I had often sought heradvice, and she had been helpful in many ways. This was the firsttime she had ever taken me to task.

She explained that she had brought several people to thisevening for Kurt Weill, with the hope that they were potential

patrons for the League.“Claire,” she cried on the tele-phone, “how could you have aLeague program presenting amixture of classical opera andpopular operetta? I have neverbefore known you to lower theLeague’s musical standards!”

“But Olga,” I tried toexplain, “not only has theLeague always quite franklyaimed at representing all thecontemporary composers ofnote at these evenings, we havetried to present them in theirvarious styles. Weill—famousnot only for light music—chosethis program himself because itrepresented the wide range ofhis work.”

I was not absolved. Olgaassured me that we had lost thepotential patrons; being purists,they could not accept the musi-cal “mixture” they had heard.Those were still days when, tomany people, there was simplyno meeting ground betweenserious and so-called lightmusic. I think we should alwaysbless the name of GeorgeGershwin for breaking downmany of the barriers.

A few years later I recalledOlga’s scolding, when Kurt

Weill wrote the music for the New York World’s Fair exhibit called“Railroads on Parade.” Many critics dwelt on what a fine exampleof music it was, written for a specific purpose; some went so far asto claim it was as important as a symphony written for performancein Carnegie Hall.

Kurt Weill, as a man of the theater, came very quickly in contactwith theater groups in the United States. Perhaps his easy ability toblend into the American scene may have lost to him certain of hisearlier traits. Seemingly his music for Street Scene, Lady in theDark, and Knickerbocker Holiday might well have been written by anative American composer.

However, the original Weill is in evidence in his folk opera,Down in the Valley. At a program given as a memorial to him in 1951I sat with Nicholas Nabokov, who had been a personal friend andgreat admirer of Weill’s music when he knew him in Europe.

“How very different, how far apart, are the two styles of themusic we have heard tonight,” Nicholas reflected. (The programhad included excerpts from some of Weill’s earlier works as well asrecent compositions.) “How completely integrated is Weill’s music,written in Europe before he came here, and what a pity that he lostsome of that quality when he took on the coloration of the Americanscene—or, should I say, of Broadway?” I felt compelled to agreewith him, that the great success Weill had achieved in this coun-try—doubtless because of his ability to blend with it—seemed atthe same time to have weakened the reservoir of a profound creativetalent. (p. 186–189)

Program from memorial concert presented 3 February 1951 at New York’s Town Hall.

The concert was also noteworthy because it saw Lotte Lenya’s first public perfor-

mance after Weill’s death.


Letter from Berlin: Jürgen Schebera attends“Mahagonny.com” (26–29 June 2003)

When an interviewer from the Berliner Zeitung asked about the con-ference’s subheading, “75 Years of Rise and Fall of the City ofMahagonny,” considering that 2003 marks neither the anniversary ofthe premiere of the songspiel (1927) or the opera (1930), one of theconference’s organizers, Marc Silberman (Madison, Wis.), repliedwith disarming nonchalance: “You mustn’t be too particular.”

Precisely this kind of laissez-faire attitude marked the entireconference: Pick a hip title that caters to the current zeitgeist(“mahagonny.com”—wow!), assemble as many papers as possible (atotal of 84—again: wow!) regardless of whether they fit under thetopic or just wear Mahagonny drag, gather a diverse internationalcrowd of participants (132 from 17 countries), the core being fromGermany and the U.S. with the required exotic additions fromRussia and Norway to South Africa and Singapore, and, yes, youwill get publicity—which seems to have been the main goal.

With such a concept—or rather the lack thereof—the chancesfor scholarly success are slim, and the course of the event proved acase in point: no proper discussion of the work’s complicated gen-esis based on new source studies; no detailed examination of thecontributions of poet and composer to either the work or the theo-ry of epic theater; in particular, no discussion of the new genre ofepic opera and its impact on twentieth-century opera history. Toomuch to ask of a symposium of the International Brecht Society?Certainly not, if one had focused on this exceptional work of musictheater, supposedly the raison d’être of the conference.

Right away, the opening night’s keynote address at the Akademieder Künste signaled that the organizers had nothing of the sort inmind. Borrowing some convenient snippets from Mahagonny,media studies scholar Norbert Bolz (Berlin) talked about“Consumerist Urbanism in Our Time.” And indeed, in the ensuingdays one had the distinct feeling of attending a symposium on“Contemporary Urbanism.” Papers were given—to name a fewexamples—on “Uncivil Society in Johannesburg,” “Moscow, theCity of Utopia,” “Actual Bologna,” or—listen to this one—“Honolulu as a Historic Counter-Model to Brecht’s Imaginary‘Paradise City.’ ” Berlin-based listeners struggled to suppress bellylaughs when the new Federal Republic of Germany and its moderncapital were explained to them by blissfully naïve presenters fromthousands of miles away who, needless to say, had brought along afew appropriate Mahagonny quotes. For example: “MahagonnyResurrected? Metaphors for Understanding 21st Century Berlin”(Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Springfield, Mo.), “The BerlinRepublic As Redemption of Brecht’s Mahagonny” (AlexandraLudewig, Perth), or “Berlin-Mahagonny and the Re-Shaping ofPost-Wall-Borders” (Janet Ward, Las Vegas).

Of course, traditional exegesis of Brecht’s texts received its due,often with well-worn peripheral references to Walter Benjaminand—yes—his “Flaneur” (1929) but also in rather contrived newcomparisons, for example to Karl Kraus and Anna Seghers. Andthere was ample opportunity to present one’s field of specialty,whether related to Mahagonny or not: People talked about OswaldSpengler and Rudolf Schlichter, about Margarete Steffin and theBauhaus master Marcel Breuer. As for the zeitgeist, a special ses-sion on “Mahagonny: Gender & Race” simply had to make anappearance, featuring three papers from—you’ve guessed it—U.S.scholars.

Facing such massive numbers of urbanists and Brechtians, the

musicologists and Weill specialists (those from overseas with astipend from the Kurt Weill Foundation) had a hard time finding anaudience during the parallel sessions, always held five at a time.Still, the organizers had dedicated four sessions of a total of twen-ty-eight to musical aspects: “Mahagonny: Music History” (chair:Joachim Lucchesi, Karlsruhe), “Mahagonny: Music Aesthetics”(chair: Manfred Durzak, Paderborn), “Mahagonny: The Music I”(chair: Vera Stegmann, Bethlehem, Pa.), and “Mahagonny: TheMusic II” (chair: Rolf Goebel, Huntsville, Ala.). But here, too,there had been no coordination of concepts that would have allowedfor a common thread, and the sessions remained a series of inter-esting yet unrelated papers. Among others, Gerd Rienäcker (Berlin)talked about the opera’s chorales, Stephen Hinton (Palo Alto) aboutmusical symbolism in Weill’s score, and Erica Scheinberg (LosAngeles) about traces of American popular song in the 1927“Alabama Song.”

Completely inexplicable was the shortage of practitioners, i.e.,opera directors, conductors, and dramaturgs. Only two directorshad been invited, but since they were both first-rate, their presen-tations marked a high point of the conference. Joachim Herzreported many interesting details from his various stagings of theopera in East Berlin (Komische Oper, premiere 1977, with 117 per-formances in repertory until 1986), Munich, Dresden, and Leipzig.And Peter Konwitschny, probably Germany’s most importantopera director today, in tandem with the dramaturg Werner Hintze,answered questions from Rienäcker about his Hamburg staging in2000 (conducted by Ingo Metzmacher). According to Konwitschny,Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny requires no contrived, mod-ernized staging: “In the context of late capitalism’s globalized vic-tory parade, ever since the collapse of so-called ‘actually existingsocialism’ some ten years ago, the opera is even more timely andprovocative than at the time of its composition. For what Weill andBrecht may have considered a gross exaggeration became today’sreality long ago.” Konwitschny continued: “We must not forgetthat this is an opera. The librettist notwithstanding, today one sim-ply cannot stage the work with the usual set of clichés, in ‘Brechtianstyle,’ where the plot is acted with ironic distance, as if the singersmust apologize constantly for the fact that they are presenting suchpseudo-art in the first place. That fits very well into postmodernistarbitrariness and into a general trend toward the dumbest kind ofirony, today’s signature of fashionable intellectuality. But Weill’smusic is completely alien to this cool, know-it-all, and thereforeinhumane distance toward the characters. He did in fact write anopera—and this has to be staged, even if it goes against the grainwith the followers of an ‘orthodox’ Brecht style.”

In order to see the internationally acclaimed production byKonwitschny and Metzmacher, one would have had to travel toHamburg in 2000 or 2001. At Berlin’s three opera houses, the workis currently missing in action (after the flop of Günter Krämer’sproduction at the Deutsche Oper in 1999)—and no other Weillwork is to be found. Hence, the symposium’s organizers initiated,in a laudable effort, a student performance by the Hochschule fürMusik “Hanns Eisler” (directed by Alexander Busche, conductedby Jörg Iwer). But the staging turned out to be so stuffy and old-fashioned, and the musical aspects were so weak (the hiredFilmorchester Babelsberg was crushed by the work), that it’s best tospread the cloak of silence over the whole affair.

“Mahagonny.com” in a nutshell: Typical of academia today, itwas an “event” with high pretensions, bold statements, staged withmuch brouhaha, but in the end, despite some interesting presenta-tions, the overall result was disappointing.


Recordings

The Eternal Road(excerpts)

Rundfunk-SinfonieorchesterBerlinGerard Schwarz, conductor

Naxos 8.559402

How Jewish a composer was Kurt Weill?That is possibly the most beguiling ques-tion about a man whose personal and musi-cal identities seem to offer few if any clearanswers. On a simplistic level, of course,the answer is easy: Weill’s father was a can-tor in a family with a proud, centuries-longheritage of rabbis and other Jewish intellec-tuals. In terms of his background, to assertthat Weill was not a Jewish composer wouldbe perverse. But how did the seeds of hisheritage grow in the course of a remarkablyeventful fifty-year life and thirty-yearcareer? If he indisputably began from asolidly Jewish base, where did he go fromthere?

None of Weill’s works promises a moredirect and complete answer to this particu-lar biographical riddle than does Der Wegder Verheißung / The Eternal Road. But it isan appropriate measure of the depth of theriddle that the promise of its solution isfrustrated by the convoluted complex ofuncertainties that this work and its historypresent. It is those very qualities, and thetantalizing suggestions they offer, thatmake The Eternal Road an ideal object ofattention for the Milken Archive ofAmerican Jewish Music.1

Supported by the Milken FamilyFoundation, the Milken Archive wasfounded “to record, preserve and distributea vast cross-section . . . of outstandingpieces of American Jewish music from thepast 350 years.” In an effort of awe-inspir-ing ambition, the Archive seeks to cover atruly vast field, extending far beyond thewell-known (and vast enough in itself) bodyof secular works of major figures such asBerlin, Gershwin, Weill, Bernstein, et al.,to the full range of music “related to theAmerican Jewish experience, both sacredand secular.”

The most public aspect of the Archive’swork will be its plan (truly astonishing,

given the current state ofthe recording industry) torelease on the Naxos labelfifty compact discs com-prising more than 600newly recorded works.These releases will takeplace over a number ofyears, led by an initialgroup of five in September2003. Prominent amongthose in the initial group isa “world premiere record-ing of scenes” from TheEternal Road, featuringGerard Schwarz conduct-ing the Rundfunk-Sin-fonieorchester Berlin.

The lack of a recordingof The Eternal Road hasbeen one of the most gap-ing holes in the Weill discography. No suchrecording emerged from the revival of thework in an international co-production onthe occasion of the Weill centenary. TheMilken recording thus is a most welcomedevelopment, and the label “world pre-miere recording” is deserved so long as it isfollowed by the words, “of scenes.” This is,overall, a fine representation of some of themost compelling musical moments of TheEternal Road. It is not—and does not pur-port to be—a recording of The EternalRoad as a work of musical theater.

Given the eighty-minute limitations ofa single compact disc, the Milken selectionof excerpts is largely praiseworthy.2 Evenon points of possible debate, the choices aredefensible. The nature of the work againpresents a challenge. Since the relationshipbetween music and dramatic structurechanges frequently in the course of thework, many of the musical movements donot lend themselves to easy excerpting. Onthe one hand, Weill generally maintainedhis customary style with closed musicalstructures. On the other hand, those struc-tures are often interrupted (sometimesrepeatedly) by large patches of dialogue, orinterspersed with stage music.

The first act contains more such inter-ruptions and interspersions than the otherthree, which may explain why the impres-sion left by the excerpts from that act is theleast satisfactory. The movement thatshould be the musical highlight of the act,the duet between Jacob and Rachel, is a dis-appointment. On the positive side, therecording presents the later—and in myopinion, far stronger—of the two versions,which renders the scene in much more dra-

matic tones. But Constance Hauman(Rachel) is merely acceptable and IanDeNolfo (Jacob) is weak, exerting a greatdeal of effort to achieve pitch and tempos.The tempos are both a shade too slow—atthe opening—and a shade too fast—in themiddle, Vivace section. The recitativeintroduction to the duet features the firstappearance on the recording of the Rabbi(Karl Dent), which is the key vocal-dra-matic role in the entire work. Dent’s voiceis appealingly clear and unforced, with easycommand of the extensive range demandedby the part. His interpretation can best bedescribed as straightforward. He singsaccurately and with some attention todetail. As I listened to each of his successiveleading moments, however, the lack of dra-matic characterization and especially ofstyle was increasingly frustrating. There isan audible sense that Dent—and many ofthe other vocalists—studied a series of iso-lated musical movements rather than learn-ing a dramatic role. I wondered whether thevast base of cantorial experience embodiedin the Milken Archive might have beenbrought to bear here more effectively.

The other two movements from thefirst act, the denouement of the Abraham-Isaac scene and the reuniting of Jacob andJoseph in the finale, are unremarkable butfor one fact. The final bars of the finale fea-ture a reminiscence of the Jacob-Rachelduet. Since Weill composed two versions ofthe duet, he also composed two versions ofthese final bars. Inexplicably, the Milkenrecording presents the earlier version of theclosing even though, as noted above, wehave just heard the later version of the fullduet. This is a major inconsistency: a rem-


iniscence of something that never was. Itleaves a most curious impression.

The impression improves with excerptsfrom the second act, which represent alarge portion of the whole. Schwarz han-dles the opening scene, which includes theso-called “Miriam’s Song,” with sensitivi-ty. This movement is the first of the trulyairtight structures in the work, and it showsWeill’s familiar, exquisite skill in combin-ing musical phrase with dramatic action.Meanwhile, the Ernst Senff Chor begins toemerge as a true star of the recording, mov-ing flexibly from resonant background tovivid characterization as the musicrequires.

From the beginning of the cleverly ren-dered “dual action” movement that juxta-poses Moses’s receipt of the tablets con-taining the Ten Commandments with thedance around the golden calf, the musiccompletely takes over the dramatic action.Weill sets the remainder of the second actas if it were an operatic libretto. Indeed, bythe start of Moses’s death scene the genreof the work has undergone a radical changefrom pageant-with-music to music-dramaof Wagnerian pedigree.

James Maddalena cuts a formidable fig-ure as Moses, fulfilling the daunting vocaldemands (involving range and enduranceespecially) with relative ease. Again, theapproach is more oriented to singing thanacting. Better that, though, than the con-verse, since in this case the whole act failswithout decisive command of the sungrole.

The sole musical representative of thethird act is the Ruth-Boaz scene. Its melo-dious, surprisingly tango-laced phrases areattractively sung by Barbara Rearick andVale Rideout. On the basis of lyric beautyalone, it is difficult to argue with the choiceof this scene over the many bits and piecesof effective melodrama that make up themiddle of the act. The exclusion of thespectacular choral scene (corresponding tothe building of Solomon’s temple) thatcloses the act is a different matter. In that itcommunes very closely with the spirits ofdirector Max Reinhardt and scene designerNorman Bel Geddes, the finale is a keypiece of the Eternal Road puzzle. Itsabsence here leaves a tangible emptiness.

The fourth act is very well represented.It unfolds in full from the opening move-ment contrasting the spirits of Jeremiahand Isaiah through Jeremiah’s confronta-tions with the false prophet Chananiah andthe crowd. The politically charged (andmusically relatively weak) scenes in which

King Zedekiah considers the consequencesof capitulating to Babylon are skipped overto reach the deeply ambiguous final scene.Aside from Moses, Jeremiah is the onlyother role that can make or break an entireact. Thankfully, Ted Christopher’sJeremiah is the strongest performance onthe recording, combining vocal excellencewith strong dramatic personification.

The orchestral performance through-out most of the recording is solid. The fewmoments of imperfection in ensemble play-ing are more than balanced by the manyinstances of excellent solo and sectionalfeatures. Likewise admirable is Schwarz’sscrupulous attention to the letter of Weill’snotations regarding expression and articu-lation. When he takes liberties, it is clearlyintentional and often to good effect. Forexample, the shortened bowstrokes in thestring accompaniment figure to Scene 24.4(Track 11) give an evocative breathlessnessto Boaz and Ruth’s love duet. It is unfortu-nate that often throughout the disc theorchestra is set substantially behind thesingers in the mix, sometimes reducing itseffect to an echoey blur. Tempos for themost part lie within reasonable ranges.Occasionally, Moderato passages are per-formed a bit too slowly, as in the semi-sta-sis of the meno mosso just prior to the closeof the first act.

Milken Archive Artistic Director NeilLevin’s liner notes helpfully raise some ofthe key points related to the work, its cre-ation, and its creators. He is especiallystrong on summarizing the theological andphilosophical tensions implicit in FranzWerfel’s expressionistically tinged text. Inthe post-Holocaust, post-founding-of-the-state-of-Israel reality of the present day, thefourth and final act of The Eternal Roadposes stark challenges to interpretation.Levin makes it clear that some of thesechallenges were already very much in evi-dence in the environment of the 1930s,mirroring a tension between Werfel’s uni-versalist conception of Messianic redemp-tion and the more earthly focus of produc-er Meyer Weisgal’s Zionism.

Levin also addresses the question ofWeill’s Jewish identity; his biographicalsketch raises many of the salient points.Given the breadth and depth of the issuesinvolved, they cannot possibly be givenproper consideration in such limited space.Tantalizingly, a note in very small print atthe end of the notes in the CD bookletstates that “a comprehensive history andanalysis of The Eternal Road and its Judaicperspectives” by Levin will be published as

a separate monograph. Those interested inthe work will eagerly look forward to thisvolume’s appearance.

The Eternal Road is indeed quite prob-lematic. But it is problematic in the mostpositive of senses. The “problems” it pre-sents—and they are many—to would-beperformers and interpreters are really bet-ter understood as engaging challenges. Theprocess of discovering one’s own responsesto those challenges, on whatever level, is agrowth process, just as it should be with allmeaningful works of art.

At the same time, the work can instructon a final truth: that too much frettingabout the problems of The Eternal Road—or, again, any meaningful work of art—canlead one to overlook the work’s direct com-municative power. Schwarz takes this les-son to heart in his approach to theinscrutable little march that closes thework. He determines not to over-interpretwhat is possibly uninterpretable. He setshis course and plays it fast and straight andstrong to the end, without undue drama orsentiment.

Sometimes the right thing to do is sim-ply to let something be what it is.

Edward Harsh

New York City

Notes

1. Throughout this review, I use the title TheEternal Road, because the stated focus of theMilken recording is on the work as it was present-ed in the 1937 New York premiere. The use of theAmerican title is, however, meant to suggest nei-ther that The Eternal Road and Der Weg derVerheißung are different pieces nor that they arethe same piece. The reality is more complex thanthat.2. The CD booklet includes only a brief note onthe process of selecting excerpts. Mention ismade therein of reliance on my “restored or neworchestrations.” It is important to note that thegreat majority of music on this disc is in Weill’sown original orchestrations, with only a fewmovements using mine or those of Noam Sheriff,who unfortunately is not mentioned anywhere inthe recording materials.


Recordings

The Firebrand of Florence

BBC Symphony OrchestraSir Andrew Davis, conductor

Capriccio 60 091

The recent publication of The Firebrand ofFlorence as both score and recording is sucha major event for students of popular musi-cal theater that it is difficult to separate outone’s responses. The critical edition of thefull score by Joel Galand is epoch-makingsimply because it is the first ever artifact ofits kind. The recording is therefore alsounique in that one can for the first time fol-low a Broadway show, plot and all, with theorchestral score to hand (“to hand” is notquite the expression, the score being by farthe largest and heaviest item in my person-al library).

We have been working up to thismoment over the past couple of decades, ofcourse—with In Dahomey in the MUSAcatalogue, Bernstein’s Candide and WestSide Story in full score from Boosey &Hawkes, some Gershwin piano/vocalscores and various critical editions ofOffenbach, Gilbert and Sullivan, andJohann Strauss on the paper front, record-ings of “restored” shows by Gershwin,Porter, Kern, and others on the digital. Butcoordinated materials come together onlywith The Firebrand of Florence, and a greatmoment it therefore remains. Listening to(more or less) a whole show of the 1930s or40s in one’s home, professionallyplayed and sung and captured atthe highest studio standards, mayno longer be the luxury it once was,but doing so in the company of1004 pages of full score still takessome getting used to.

What, however, constitutes theproper aural complement to a crit-ical edition of a musical? No soon-er is it asked than this becomes avexed question. Should we have allthe spoken dialogue, even thoughthis would not necessarily be suffi-cient to clarify the action in a piecewhose first-act finale is bedroomfarce? Are supplementary tracks(cut numbers, alternatives) a goodidea? And what about authenticity

of sound? The original Broadway orchestrawould have sounded thin and surely havebeen augmented for an original cast record-ing, had there been one in 1945. The origi-nal voices were in several cases far fromideal, even if Lotte Lenya was Weill’schoice (indeed his command) for theDuchess. Besides, performance practicehas changed radically. All the more reason,one might argue, for period recordings tosupplement the new one within the samepackage as a kind of critical apparatus, theaural equivalent of textual variants in theperennial quest for Werktreue and the com-poser’s intentions. The only period trackshitherto issued for The Firebrand ofFlorence are Ira Gershwin’s own renditionsof the main numbers with Weill at thepiano, but I should dearly love to hearMaurice Abravanel’s five numbers on 78rpm discs, if they survive (they were neverissued). A complementary, perhaps morepressing concern is how the roles should besung, acted, and enunciated today, if theyare to convince a modern audience.

Short of a DVD of a responsible mod-ern stage production—in other words, ifone cannot have the visuals as well—mymost rewarding experiences of soundrecordings of musicals have hitherto been,first, a live radio relay from the originaltheater captured on tape (Ellis’s Bless theBride of 1947—this must be an example—gets you very close to the real thing), andsecond, a radio broadcast of a completemusical, dialogue and all, in a modern radiorecording such as the BBC and NorthAmerican public stations have occasionallybroadcast.

Here we have, again from the BBC,something rather different. It is the liverecording of a concert performance of the

operetta given at the Barbican, London, aspart of a Weill weekend in January 2000 andbroadcast live at the time on Radio 3. SirAndrew Davis conducts the BBCSymphony Orchestra and the BBCSingers, and it must be said that the stan-dard of performance is astonishingly, con-sistently high for such a complex, multi-movement, one-off operation completewith audience response (for laughter canaffect timings and mood). The orchestralplaying is alert and unanimous, the tempiunproblematic (I do not have the confi-dence to say perfect in the company of somany Weill experts), the pacing fluent, andthe microphone mix—or however onedescribes what had to be got right in theconcert hall and (presumably) adapted forthe recording—triumphant, for the wordsare clear and constantly focused, and thekind of projection problem that can provetricky in the theater (or out of it) rarelyraises its head: only with the male-voiceharmonies accompanying the second stanzaof the Duchess’s “Sing Me Not a Ballad”does an idea sound ineffectual. Mistakesare extraordinarily rare, an unfortunate(horn?) A-flat on the fermata climax to theopening scene perhaps the only glaringone.

Issues for debate might be many butboil down to two: cuts and vocal perfor-mance practice. Back in 1999 Galand andthe production team had to shorten aBroadway evening to a radio or concertone—two hours plus intermission, trans-lating here to one CD for each act. The twoconsequences of this were, despite somerestored material that had been cut in NewYork, a number of musical omissions andthe substitution of a specially commis-sioned, witty verse narration by Sam

Brookes for most, though by nomeans all, of the spoken dia-logue. One misses various dancebreaks, the sizeable entr’acte, agigue near the end of Act II, andthe Act II soldiers’ march,though the number of times atune will bear repetition needs tobe carefully weighed on a contin-uous narrative recording such asthis, where the book scenes aresummarized and visual distrac-tion is missing, so it was probablywise to have erred on the side ofcontraction.

The singing is excellent, theperformers and Weill’s score suf-ficiently operatic that showbizelements could arguably have


Booksbeen completely avoided. Certainly FelicityPalmer’s voice in the role of the Duchess isa blessed alternative to the stereotypicalfemale belter of similar tessitura. GeorgeDvorsky conveys the buffo Duke with com-mendable restraint when singing, whichmakes his spoken falsetto excesses all theless appetizing on repeated listenings.Rodney Gilfry and Lori Ann Fuller as thebaritone and soprano leads sing strong andstraight. Far from straight, however, is thecamp effect of Simon Russell Beale’s narra-tion, its excruciating rhymes and arch com-mentary an equivalent to the Broadwayhumor of the book, yes, but so 1990s in fla-vor as to have added a sometimes smother-ing layer of postmodernism to the wholeenterprise, a dubious achievement. Mostirritating is the fact that this is declaimed inBritish English while the singers, includingthe British chorus, attempt American (“theman awaiding hanging” in the second sungline is quite a jolt after Beale’s spokenopening), though in a piece whose overallthrust is operatic one feels that a false dis-tinction has been created that it shouldhave been possible to submerge. Again, onewould like to hear how the original castsounded.

And what about Weill’s music? I hate tosay it, but utterly professional and likeablethough it is, Ira Gershwin’s lyrics providethe element of sustained genius in theshow. Weill does pull out all the Broadwaystops in “A Rhyme for Angela,” but this isnot quite enough, though the openingscene has some very fine music and buildsin an utterly satisfying way. We will proba-bly love Weill most in this show, as our per-spective on it lengthens and deepens, forhaving retained something from hisBrechtian years in the trial scene, for “YouHave to Do What You Do Do” fusesGershwin’s verbal dexterity, critical acuityand amusement at psychoanalysis with thediscomfort of our being pulled up short byan ethical challenge in a Broadway show. IfWeill and Gershwin could not afford toalienate Cellini from their Broadway audi-ence on the sexual front in 1945—he andAngela are presumably supposed to livehappily ever after—they did manage tohint at the enormity of creative amoralityand the nature of responsibility in thisnumber. Good for them: after all, theNuremberg Trial was soon to begin, withits all too similar defenses.

Stephen Banfield

University of Bristol

Music & GermanNational Identity

Edited by Celia Applegate andPamela Potter

Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002. 319 pp.

ISBN: 0-226-02130-0

I remember a powerful scene from a Fellinifilm, Casanova, that I saw many years ago.Although my memory of the film is some-what vague, one scene left me with a vividimage of Germans and Germany. Afterlong travels through fog, inhospitable land-scape, and inclement weather, Casanovafinally arrives in Fellini’s “Germany”: atremendously spacious hall, half church,half factory, with organ consoles placed onthe walls, sometimes so high above groundthat the players have to be catapulted intotheir seats by a machine. Once seated, theorganists immediately begin hammeringaway on their instruments with heavy clus-ter chords. At a certain moment the playingstops while a male chorus sings a sentimen-tal song; each organist rising from his seatto join the chorus with hand on heart. Afterthe Lied is finished, the cluster chordsresume and reach even greater intensity asseveral more organists are catapulted intotheir seats. Germans, Fellini seems to tellus, take their music very seriously; they goto great lengths to bring it off; their musicis hard work and always profound (a semi-religious expression best performed inquasi-religious venues).

Fellini’s parable about music and theGermans, expressed in bizarrely hilariousvisual images, is the subject of an ambitiousand important book. Its editors, CeliaApplegate, a historian at the University ofRochester, and Pamela Potter, a musicolo-gist at the University of Wisconsin, havegathered fifteen experts from a wide varietyof fields (musicology, ethnomusicology,history, and German literature) to shedlight on the role of music in contributing tothe national identity of Germans in theirquest for nationhood in the nineteenth cen-tury, in their aggressive pursuit of nationalambitions leading to the political catastro-phes of the twentieth century, and in theera of separation and re-orientation after

the war, up to the leveraged buy-out of theEastern part of the country by WestGermany. The span of “coverage” is thusenormous—200 turbulent years—and sev-eral authors do not shy away from makingconnections with the most recent develop-ments. The strength of the book, whoseessays are organized in roughly chronolog-ical order, is indeed that it does not endGerman history with the Nazi period, butavoids the black hole of 1945 (the “hourzero” as wishful thinking would have it) bydiscovering common denominators oneither side of this historic watershed.

The first essay, Bernd Sponheuer’s“Reconstructing Ideal Types of the‘German’ in Music,” sets the tone by jux-taposing Forkel’s 1779 critique of Burney’sA General History of Music and Adorno’s1958 radio lecture on Toscanini and teasingout of this juxtaposition a remarkable con-sistency in defining the German in music:“depth, hard work, and thoroughness” (notunlike Fellini’s imagery) and the espousalof a “mixture of styles” (as Quantz had putit in the eighteenth century). The exclusiveand the universal definition seem, at firstglance, to be mutually exclusive, butthrough much of the 1800s and 1900s theywere interconnected. The first helpedGermans to separate their music from themusical styles of other countries (whichthey considered lightweight, superficial—in short, fluff); the second led to claims ofsupra-nationality and universality ofGerman music (espousing the “purelyhuman”) as well as the notion of superiori-ty. Both definitions reflect the idea of aGerman special path (Sonderweg) in musichistory. Albrecht Riethmüller’s essay,strategically placed at the end of the vol-ume, is related to Sponheuer’s in that itpursues illusions of German musical supe-riority in a series of vignettes citing Hegel,Droysen, Franz Brendel, Busoni,Goebbels, and an anonymous reviewer inthe Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. (As acosmopolitan and multi-culturalist, Busoniis the only one in this illustrious group ofauthors with a healthy skepticism towardclaims of musical superiority, suggestingthat they might best be relegated toSimplicissimus, a satirical magazine of histime.) Riethmüller concludes his essay witha few enlightening remarks on the Germanmusic industry and how it commodifies thenation’s alleged musical superiority, andseveral personal observations supportinghis thesis that illusions of musical grandeurcontinue in Germany and Austria to thisday.

1 8 Volume 14, Number 1 Kur t Weill Newsletter1 8 Volume 21, Number 2 Kur t Weill Newsletter

Philip V. Bohlman’s “Landscape-Region-Nation-Reich” focuseson the Landschaftliche Volkslieder project (a series of publicationsof folk songs from various German regions) begun in 1924 duringthe Weimar Republic, continued during the Nazi period, and final-ly completed in 1972. In a fascinating essay, the author maps thevarious stages of the edition onto the turbulent history of Germany,interpreting the project, despite its emphasis on regionalism, as anexpression of German national identity during times of dramatichistorical changes.

Two of the essays explore, with entirely different and surprisingconclusions, the reception history of two artifacts that figuredprominently in the national consciousness of the Germans, theDeutschlandlied (text by Hoffmann von Fallersleben sung toHaydn’s “Emperor Hymn”) and Wagner’s Meistersinger. JostHermand pursues the meandering path of the song that laterbecame the German national anthem, from its beginnings as anexpression of Vormärz republican hopes for unity, justice, and free-dom via its dormancy after the failed revolution of 1848 to itsaccrual of chauvinist and imperialist meanings (“Deutschland überalles”) during World War I. The Weimar Republic, eager to acquirepatriotic credentials, made the song the official national anthem,while the Nazis did not see anything wrong with the chauvinistrhetoric that, by then, had been foregrounded in the song, andforces of traditionalism prevailed in the early years of theBundesrepublik in keeping the anthem. Hermand comes to a some-what rueful verdict: “Much as one might wish it to be so, the his-tory of the ‘Lied der Deutschen’ consists of more than its democ-ratic past. The reception of the song reminds us of the darkestmoments of Germany’s past.” Appropriation by right-wing groupsdid similar harm to Meistersinger, but Thomas S. Grey argues thatthe opera is no more representative of a national consciousnessleading to fascism than, say, Brahms’s Triumphlied. He tries to sal-vage the opera from its Teutonic-minded enthusiasts as well as itsfascist-bashing critics by proposing that we should respond toMeistersinger both as an artwork and a historical artifact whosereception history has added a layer that “far exceeds the author’soriginal intentions.” But Grey is not quite sure, because he adds,“At least, we can only hope so.”

Hans Rudolf Vaget and Michael H. Kater explore the positionsof two artists, Thomas Mann and Hans Pfitzner, respectively—both of whom believed in the centrality of music for theGermans—during the first half of the twentieth century. While thetwo were quite close in their assertion of German cultural suprema-cy during World War I (the composer’s opera Palestrina figuredprominently in an essay of Mann of the same time, espousing a con-trast between German culture and Western civilization), the twobroke ranks over Mann’s critical Wagner essay of 1933 and set off indifferent directions. The composer tried (unsuccessfully) to ingra-tiate himself with the Nazis; the writer (by now a Nobel laureate)became the leading figure of Germans in exile, giving vent to hisdoubts and despair over the Germans and their close relation tomusic in the novel Doktor Faustus.

The most personal and, at the same time, broadest of the essaysis by Bruno Nettl: “Ethnicity and Music in the Czech Lands.” In aseries of vignettes he describes how the German-speaking people ofBohemia and Moravia (the regions that, by now, have become theCzech Republic) interacted for centuries with a rich mix of otherethnic groups (Czechs, Jews, and Gypsies), all of them with musicas an important ingredient in their cultural make-up (Burney’s ver-dict that Bohemia was the conservatory of Europe is appropriatehere). The German-Bohemian culture declined and finally disap-peared as racist and imperialist policies tried to stamp out its attrac-

tive hybrid nature by force through occupation and concentrationcamps, and an inverted version of “ethnic cleansing” after WorldWar II resulted in the expulsion of Germans from the Czech lands.It is a culture now irretrievably lost.

Most of the essays in the volume cover time spans smaller thanthe aforementioned contributions. Schumann’s late choral works ascompositional reverberations of the political events around 1848 arethe subject of John Daverio’s “Einheit-Freiheit-Vaterland.” BruceCampbell’s “Kein schöner Land” and Doris L. Bergen’s “Hosannaor ‘Hilf, O Herr Uns’” show the importance of music in furtheringpolitical and ideological causes, even in amateur groups and inchurch-affiliated organizations, during the Weimar Republic andNazi period, respectively. Another pair of essays by Joy HaslamCalico and Gesa Cordes focuses on attempts at cultural reorienta-tion by the two German states after World War II. While EastGerman officials, taking their cues from the Soviet Union, saw (atleast initially) in opera the seeds for a new musical culture (only tostymie performances or discourage the composition of the firstDDR operas by Dessau and Eisler early in the 1950s), the WestGermans tried to create a new musical identity far removed fromreminiscences of the past and, at the same time, different from thesocial realism prescribed by the East. The emergence of total seri-alism, espoused as the only way to salvation by the DarmstadtSchool of the 1950s and supported by state subsidies, has thus anundeniable political subtext. The Cold War also figures prominent-ly as a backdrop in the essays of Uta Poiger and Edward Larkey, asthe West German elites tried to cope with the onslaught of jazz aswell as Western pop music on their populations after World War II.

Last but not least, Applegate’s and Potter’s introductory essay“Germans and the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity” isa welcome staple, connecting the various contributions and provid-ing a context for them. In addition, it fills in (or at least touches on)some of the “blanks” that almost inevitably show up in any bookconsisting of articles wide and narrow by more than a dozen some-times rather diverse contributors: the role of state institutions earlyin the nineteenth century in supporting musical life, the signifi-cance of the Bach and Handel revivals (and Mendelssohn’s hand inthem), the issue of canon formation, and how the field of musicol-ogy contributed to the interaction between national and musicalmovements. Applegate and Potter avoid taking a stand on whether“the parallel emergence of the German nation and the universallyacknowledged masterworks was nothing more than a coincidence inchronology,” but insist that “the interaction developed into aninterdependence over the last two centuries.”

The interdependence, of course, is vividly apparent in the careerof Kurt Weill, who received his training under Busoni thanks to thegenerous cultural sponsorship of the Weimar Republic, under thedirection of its thoughtful and determined minister of music, LeoKestenberg. Likewise, the vitriolic comments of Schoenberg,Adorno, and others when Weill turned away from what was consid-ered the proper Germanic path of composition and instead culti-vated a greater level of accessibility (in his works after 1926 and,most decidedly, in his Broadway musicals) give ample testimony ofthe almost desperate sense of cultural uniqueness and mission thatGerman musicians had inherited from their forebears. The essaysin this volume provide evidence of the wide-ranging, sometimesdamaging manifestations of this (not entirely unfounded, of course)belief in Germans’ unique musical achievements.

Jürgen Thym

Eastman School of Music


Amerikanismus—Americanism—Weill:Die Suche nach kultureller Identität inder Moderne

Edited by Hermann Danuser und HermannGottschewski

Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2003. 330 pp.

ISBN: 3-931264-23-8

Amerikanismus—Americanism—Weill: The title is awkward in itsmixing of languages, its double reference to America and its refusalto clarify the relationship between its three main terms. But it is afitting title for a book that flips freely between English and Germanpapers and explores a wide range of topics and perspectives,inspired by Kurt Weill, but moving in wide arcs around and onpaths far beyond him.

The volume presents the proceedings of a conference held dur-ing the Weill centenary in March 2000 in Berlin, organized byHermann Danuser and Herrmann Gottschewski from theDepartment of Musicology at the Humboldt University, Berlin, incollaboration with Kim H. Kowalke from the Kurt WeillFoundation.

Nine articles are written in English, eleven in German; the listof participants includes music, media, and literary as well as politi-cal historians. And the pairing of Amerika and America is the book’smain organizing principle: the double view, multiplied by the mir-ror images both perspectives entail: Amerikanismus means Germanimages of the USA in the early twentieth century; Americanismmeans American constructions of its own cultural identity. Bothare, as Danuser stresses in his introduction, by no means clearlydistinguishable, but densely intertwined, especially in the case ofthe USA, built by people with links to numerous countries of ori-gin—links that permitted cultural exchanges back and forth overthe oceans, steadily modifying self- and external images. It is a per-spective—imagology—that has been common in comparative liter-ary history since the 1960s, but it has rarely been applied to musichistoriography.

The relevance of such a double perspective for Weill—a com-poser who long before his emigration had been involved inEurope’s imaginings of the land beyond the “great pond”—is obvi-ous. But beside this relevance, the double perspective also summa-rizes recent trends of dealing with that most vexing problem ofWeill scholarship: The problem of the double Weill, theGerman/American composer, and the problem of what to stress indescribing his musical output and its historical contexts—the obvi-ous biographical break brought about by his emigration, or theartistic continuities linking his production in Berlin, Paris and NewYork?

The double-track construction of the book becomes immediate-ly apparent in its two radically different introductions: Kowalke’srelaxed digest of Weill’s relationship to America, before his immi-gration and after, as compared to Danuser’s painstaking unfoldingof the book’s methodological foundations. Both, though, discussEurope and the USA, indicating the book’s refusal to follow the tra-ditional bisection of Weill’s career.

Kowalke—as befits the president of the Kurt WeillFoundation—starts with Weill, yet shows how many different dis-cussions can be hung upon the skeleton of his career and his devel-oping relationship with America, in how many ways Weill’s workrefracts the political and cultural discourses of its time. Danusersets out from the “cultural turn” (p. 20) in the humanities, thedevelopment of umbrella disciplines such as cultural history or cul-tural studies, partially overriding old disciplinary boundaries andforcing everyone to reconsider the contexts in which cultural phe-nomena can be profitably placed. The task of a conference reflect-ing this “cultural turn” was, for Danuser, to explain Weill no longerwithin the confines of a traditional history of modern music (usual-ly meaning “modern art music,” a concept that already collideswith the realities of Weill’s aesthetics and reception), but to connectthe specific insights of such a history to the wider context of cul-tural and social modernity.

•The first set of papers is headed Perspectives in Economics,

Society and Culture. Here, political, literary and media historianshave their say, and Weill is visible only from afar, if at all. Interlacingthe history of ideas with the history of their academic (de)con-struction, Michael Hoenisch investigates E pluribus unum, the for-mula describing the United States not only as united states, but alsoas united ethnicities and cultures, combining the “enlightenmentconstruct of a universal culture to be realized in an Americannation” (p. 38) and the Protestant Christian vision of a NewJerusalem (p. 37) that led to the concept of the melting pot. YetHoenisch also touches upon those—indigenous peoples, Africanslaves or Mexicans in the south—whom the motto has often hiddenfrom view, those who did not come as willing immigrants, butfound themselves willy-nilly added to the stew.

The other papers in this section are all in German and analyzedifferent European images of America. Alexander Schmidt-Gernigexplores the change of German images of the USA focusing onpolitical aspects—the land of the free, the beacon of democracy—to a discussion that between 1900 and 1930 switches to using theUSA as the positive or negative example of unbridled capitalism. Itwas a discussion highly relevant to Weimar Germany, a nation thathad to reinvent itself at a moment in history that invited the com-parison with or distancing from the USA. Schmidt-Gernig’s claimof a preponderance of socioeconomic aspects in Germanic con-structions of the USA is somewhat undermined by RichardHerzinger’s analysis of the role of America in German cultural phi-losophy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially inits relation to different (and sometimes not so different) concep-tions of modernity on both the ideological left and right—a classicexample of projecting local problems onto an external screen, wherethey may be less painfully discussed at one remove.

Complementing Schmidt-Gernig and Herzinger, EgbertKlautke analyzes the French discussions pro and contra Americabetween 1918 and 1933 and shows that comparisons with the USAwere by no means a German specialty, but a common Europeanphenomenon. Apart from touching another country where Weillworked, his paper also dampens the minor German exceptionalismof claiming a special 1920s relationship between the WeimarRepublic and the USA.

Friedemann Apel’s Adorno, Amerika and Amorbach leads backinto a Germanocentric discussion, not least because the object ofApel’s case study, Theodor W. Adorno, was so deeply rooted inGerman culture and so much less willing than Weill to embrace theUSA as a new (cultural) home, but also because Apel’s account

Books


keeps so close to Adorno’s ways of thinking that he never gains crit-ical distance. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler provides a less per-sonalized case study in his analysis of scientific and technologicalexchanges between the USA and (especially Weimar) Germany andthe central role of military demands on technology in its interna-tional development.

•Edging closer towards Weill is the second section,

Popularization and Technicalization of the Arts. Still Weill-less isJohn Czaplicka’s study of the voyage the German architect ErichMendelsohn undertook, in 1924, to New York, a city that to himconjured up the image of Babylon—stimulatingly grand anduncanny in equal measure. It is surprising, though, that Czaplickafails to mention Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the most influential exam-ple of the German reception of American architecture, a film whosemega-city is clearly modeled on New York, yet also uses the imageryof Babel (then there’s the fact that Lang had come to New York onthe same ship as Mendelsohn in October 1924).

Bryan Gilliam explores the influence of American film on mod-ern German music theater in the 1920s, an influence built on theimmense popularity of movies which not only offered an inexpen-sive glimpse into the exhilarating “land of cowboys, gold miners,gangsters, tramps, and millionaires” (p. 147), but which also trans-mitted the cinematic techniques of D.W. Griffith to GeorgeAntheil’s Transatlantic or those of Charlie Chaplin, the mostfamous artist of his time, into the work especially of left-wing play-wrights such as Weill’s collaborators Iwan Goll or Bertolt Brecht.

Hardly less influential during the 1920s was American popularmusic. Michael von der Linn traces the knowledge European com-posers such as Weill, Ernst Krenek or Karol Rathaus had ofAmerican popular music—and of which American popularmusic—and discusses how this knowledge influenced their ownmusic. His and Gilliam’s studies might have been truer to thebook’s professed methodological perspective if they had focusednot only on which bits of American culture European artists werefascinated by, but also on what was transformed in their ‘transla-tion’ into European contexts—on how America became Amerika (orAmérique). Similarly, Gisela Schubert’s study of the melting pot asa metaphor in and for American musicals of the 1920s looks more atthe aims and claims of their makers than at compositional process-es and results—more at the menu than at what exactly went intoand what came out of the melting pot. Jack Sullivan, too, in hisshort paper on Walt Whitman as source for European composers asdiverse as Delius, Britten, Hindemith and Weill looks more at influ-ence than at transformation, more at what the composers saw orwanted to see in Whitman than at what they made out of his textsand ideas. Andreas Eichhorn shows greater methodological care inhis study of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, whose quite differentreception in Germany on the one hand and in Paris and New Yorkon the other demonstrates the limited international applicability ofnational images of other nations—of the differences betweenAmerica, Amerika and Amérique.

•The final group of six papers deal with Weill himself and with

the ways his works exemplify the paired termsAmerikanismus/Americanism. The perennial problem of the “twoWeills” reappears in the papers of Stephen Hinton and TamaraLevitz. Hinton focuses on the methodology of writing biography ingeneral and of the “biographical method” in particular, meaning toread “musical works with reference to or in terms of a life (or vice

versa)” (p. 211). He follows the ways Weill’s biographers have(re)constructed his personal and his artistic biography and asks foran approach that steers clear of the “two Weills” as well as fromteleological models stressing a planned continuity of the works.Levitz questions the conventional wisdom of the “two Weills” fromthe perspective of Weill’s Jewish roots in Germany, pointing outthat there was not so much “a Jewish identity” in pre-NaziGermany but an array of identities, a “fragmented universe.” Shecalls for a biographical approach that would do justice to the com-plex structure of Weill’s Jewish-German roots and its relationshipto the American and Jewish-American contexts that added toWeill’s “multiple identity” (p. 245). But though Hinton’s andLevitz’s calls for caution make sense as such, they are more easilyrealized in accounts of Weill the man than in accounts of Weill thecomposer or of Weill’s music, which, not least due to its enormous(though highly selective) popularity, to some extent transcends thebonds of biographical contextualization and enters the realm of thecultural icon, where different laws apply from those of the histori-ographer.

After Hinton’s and Levitz’s broad perspectives, three otherpapers deal with specific examples of Weill’s Amerikanismus: J.Bradford Robinson describes a source for the Mahagonny-Songspiel(a vocal score held at the Weill-Lenya Archives at Yale) that allows areconstruction of a particular staging of the Songspiel. Hindemithspecialist Giselher Schubert looks into the complex genesis of theLindberghflug and its different versions—a modern American myththat was as eagerly invented and amplified by the European publicas it proved difficult for librettist Bertolt Brecht and composersHindemith and Weill to shape it into a final form. Nils Grosch usesDie sieben Todsünden and its textual and musical “picture postcardsof a stylized America, intentionally drawn for an audience that wasfar away” (p. 271), for a discussion of Weill’s (and partially Brecht’s)Amerikanismus, for his changing ideas about and uses of theAmerica where he was soon to find a new home.

This new home and its musical landscape, as encountered andinfluenced by Weill, is the topic of Kim Kowalke’s concludingpaper. He—and unfortunately he alone in the Weill section of thebook—looks not at Weill’s Amerikanismus, but at his adoption ofAmericanism: at the way he developed into a composer of Americanmusical theater. Kowalke focuses on Street Scene and Down in theValley, but embeds them in a broad panorama of Weill’s Americanmusical contemporaries. And with a final look at Weill’s unfinishedprojects we get an idea of the even richer contribution to Americanmusic he might have made had he lived a little longer.

•Were one to name the main defect of the book, it would be the

same as its main strength: the enormously wide political, culturaland musical landscape(s) it endeavors to traverse and in which thereader may occasionally feel somewhat lost; it certainly loses sightof Kurt Weill for long stretches. But at the same time the reader—or at least this reader—is grateful that the conference did not setout to replace bad old Weill orthodoxies with bad new ones and thatit dared to go into the open (though more the German andEuropean than the American open). If the applicability of all thatcan be found in these papers to Weill research is not immediatelyapparent, this may be a blessing more than a curse: It is at least aninvitation to think, and think anew—certainly a quality Kurt Weillhimself possessed in abundance.

Guido Heldt

Wilfrid Laurier University

Die sieben Todsünden

Cincinnati Opera

26–28 June 2003

Cincinnati Opera’s production of Weill andBrecht’s Die sieben Todsünden (The SevenDeadly Sins) was one of the more uniqueand imaginative productions mounted onMusic Hall’s stage this season. In anunusual grouping, Nicholas Muni,Cincinnati Opera artistic director since1996, made Sins the centerpiece of a triplebill, framed by Poulenc’s La voix humaineand William Bolcom’s and ArnoldWeinstein’s Medusa, a monodrama createdfor American soprano CatherineMalfitano.

Capping the one-womanevening, Malfitano performedboth the singing Anna and thedancing Anna—a fusion rarely, ifever, attempted (in October 2000in Vienna, Helen Schneider por-trayed Anna I and Anna II; how-ever, she was accompanied onlyby piano, and the performancewas semi-staged).

As a vehicle for Malfitano, thetriple bill worked surprisinglywell, especially given the ex-tremes of performance styles, aswell as the fact that she was per-forming role debuts of Poulenc’swoman and the Annas, and creat-ing Medusa for the opera stage for the firsttime. Her tour de force performance rose ina steady crescendo to the taxing Medusa,where Bolcom had her shriek, growl, cack-le, and half-speak her lines.

The curtain rose on a stark, raised road-way curving across Cincinnati Music Hall’sstage, a visual motif carried through allthree works. (Muni’s creative team includ-ed Dany Lyne, design, and Thomas C.Hase, lighting.) The ramp, which was thesite of a car crash for Muni’s film-noir con-cept of La voix humaine, was also the back-drop for Anna’s seven-year odyssey acrossthe United States in pursuit of theAmerican dream. In a surreal touch, theaudience viewed the scene through thecurve of a windshield, with video projec-

tions on a large, hanging “rear-view mir-ror.”

Where Brecht’s text was a commentaryon American capitalism, Muni’s interpreta-tion commented on American cultures. Heset his Sins vaguely in the present, with ref-erences to current events and even televi-sion commercials, although the costumesgave it a 1950s aura. The sky rained money,and each sin (cleverly announced inEnglish in the “mirror”) was saturated incartoon color: “Wrath” was red; for“Lust,” Anna was bathed in hot pink; and“Envy,” of course, was green.

Malfitano’s fusion of chanteuse anddancer was seamless. Sporting a crisp whitedress and long brown tresses, she projecteda youthful joie de vivre, as she tookPolaroids to record her journey and twirledher white suitcase. Although Malfitanodidn’t attempt the smoky delivery of LotteLenya, she drew upon a wide palette ofexpression, delivering the German text formaximum impact, with clarity and dramat-

ic timing. (Malfitano sang the original key,not Lenya’s transposed down version fromthe 1950s.)

Muni surrounded Anna with a dizzyingarray of activities, which, while entertain-ing and clever, strayed from Brecht’s 1933-style satire. He depicted the Family asiconographic symbols of American culture.The Family (Dean Peterson, AndreasConrad, Mark Panuccio, and Craig Verm)was introduced in “Sloth” as MountRushmore. Their mock-serious quartetswere quite funny, whether appearing asUnited States presidents (Reagan, Clinton,and both Bushes), pop icons (MarilynMonroe, Michael Jackson, Madonna, andMae West), Boston priests praying forAnna’s soul in “Lust,” or a family watching

the famous Anna on TV. (I doubt that tenorPanuccio ever dreamed he would be crawl-ing around the opera stage in a diaper andpacifier.)

Muni’s staging was both spirited andprovocative. In “Wrath,” set in LosAngeles, Anna stopped the Rodney Kingincident, with four cops beating a card-board “body.” In “Greed,” she was pro-jected on the big screen—in the tabloids, inthe news, and in commercials. (Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer ad got abig laugh.)

She concluded her journey in SanFrancisco (“Envy”), where she was an ana-lyst in a black pantsuit, seeing patients on acouch. The little house in Louisiana rolledin, complete with picket fence, golf course,pool, and pink convertible.

Lucinda Childs’ choreography wasarresting, and Malfitano displayed greatmoves, whether bumping and grinding in asleazy Memphis nightclub (“Pride”), per-forming a steamy pas de deux (“Lust”), or

twirling a little tap dance withher suitcase. Rene Micheo andGregory Schoenwolf madeexcellent dance partners. In thepit, Brian Salesky conducted theCincinnati Symphony Orchestracrisply, irresistibly navigatingWeill’s sophisticated cabaretmusic.

Taking on both the practicalAnna and the impulsive, idealistAnna raised some intriguingquestions. Did it, for instance,obscure the very essence of thepiece that Weill and Brechtintended—that of Anna as splitpersonality? Malfitano, whocould be alternately innocent orsizzling, nevertheless had to

work to make it clear to the audience whichAnna she was portraying at any givenmoment. (Muni represented Anna II withphotographs; Anna I stashed the picturesin her suitcase, and took them all out at theend—a lot of business that was hard tocomprehend.) Secondly, the absence of adancing alter ego seemed to place the workless in the realm of ballet chanté (originallychoreographed, after all, by Balanchine)and more in that of musical theater.Nevertheless, it was a memorable companypremiere of one of Weill’s greatest works,and it enchanted the Cincinnati audience.

Janelle Gelfand

Cincinnati

The family, grouped behind Anna I (Catherine Malfitano), impersonates the last

four presidents. Photo: Philip Groshong

Performances



Happy End

Shaw FestivalNiagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario

5 August – 31 October 2003(43 performances)

The 328-seat Royal George Theater at theShaw Festival is a bijou former vaudevillehouse with Edwardian gilt moldings andred wallpaper. Here the Shaw has present-ed fairly insipid small-scale musicals in thepast. But the intimate venue provides aperfect setting for their production of theWeill/Hauptmann/Brecht/FeingoldHappy End, which is not in the leastinsipid.

As if to underline the unusual nature ofmounting such a “daring” work, the direc-tor Tadeusz Bradecki has an actorannounce during the prologue, “HappyEnd—at the Shaw Festival!?” with ironicraised eyebrows. Bradecki frames the pro-duction with reference to its own staging,having the cast come on in rehearsal cloth-ing, with bits of scenery visibly raised at thestart or falling down at the end, and inter-polating another announcement into thefinale: “Ladies and gentlemen! BertoltBrecht—1929!” I’m not sure if thesesophomoric gestures towards foreground-

ing the signifier could make the grade asalienation effects, and the final line is veryfunny in a way not intended, given whatBrecht was actually up to in 1929. All thesame, Bradecki, a Polish director who hasconsistently mounted some of the Shaw’smost interesting productions, has puttogether a very satisfying and intelligentversion of this problematic work. Herespects its fun, gives proper weight to itssocial criticism, and most of all, aided bythe theatre itself, avoids the horrors ofreprocessing it as a musical.

Unlike last year’s deafeningly amplifiedThreepenny Opera at Stratford, this HappyEnd is blissfully unplugged. The showbegins with a bang-up delivery of theFoxtrot “Hosannah Rockefeller” denounc-ing the robber barons of AmericanIndustry, but the bang is the intimate oneof cabaret, most suitable for “DorothyLane’s” modest attempt to provide aframework for the wonderful songs.

In his notes Paul Sportelli, the musicdirector, speaks of the miraculous soundWeill achieves with a small jazz band andthe thrill of being able to perform a piece atthe Shaw for the first time as it was origi-nally orchestrated. Hence his loving atten-tion to rhythm, dynamics, and detail, sothat even subtle touches, like the delicious-ly slushy Hawaiian guitar in “SurabayaJohnny,” often unheard, make their propereffect.

Blythe Wilson as Lieutenant LilianHoliday plays her conflicted character withan amusingly knowing innocence. She singsher two major songs with great musicality,even managing in the higher register to

echo the sub-Fritzi Massary warbling ofCarola Neher. Unfortunately, she cannotresist belting out the climaxes, especiallythe “shitting” and “pissing” in “TheSailor’s Tango” that so offended AlfredKerr in 1929 (one imagines Neher deliver-ing this with a more amusing, arch pudeur).And Wilson’s rage in “Surabaya Johnny” isnearly as hysterical as Teresa Stratas’shrieks in the same song. This emotionalengagement reveals that she is singing inthe first person. But like many of Brecht’ssongs, they are in fact about people otherthan the character performing them. Theyare also cautionary tales that require thesubtle menace Lenya always conveyed.This cautionary quality is much more like-ly to make itself known when the songs areapproached in the third person. The lack ofmenace in Wilson’s delivery weakens theterrifying vision of the drowning sailors in“The Sailor’s Tango,” for example.

The tough, menacing tone is well cap-tured by Glynis Ranney as the Lady inGrey in her “Ballad of the Lily of Hell,”and by Jay Turvey doing a clever PeterLorre imitation, complete with Japaneseaccent, as the sinister Dr. Nakamura in the“Song of the Big Shot.” BenedictCampbell as Bill Cracker in a reprise of thesame number also strikes the correct tone.The “Mandalay Song” takes off like a rock-et under Sportelli’s direction, and NeilBarclay as Sammy, in drag as MotherGoddam, resists camping it up, so that thehard-driving song has a grotesquely brutalpower.

Mike Nadajewski as Captain HannibalJackson treats the Temperance parody,“The Liquor Seller’s Dream,” with thesame deadpan, goofy seriousness as the restof his performance, and is therefore gen-uinely funny—as is the rest of the SalvationArmy team, with particularly effectivecomic business from Trish Lindstrom andJenny L. Wright in the comparativelyminor roles of Sister Mary and Sister Jane.

Bradecki strikes the right tone through-out—his production has coherence andwit. This modest Happy End is exhilaratingand delightful. What is missing is a darker,tougher edge. But to hear the score in anideal environment, delivered for once withrefinement, energy, and real musicality isquite enough to be grateful for.

Maarten van Dijk

University of Waterloo

Bill Cracker (Benedict Campbell) lights a cigarette for the Lady in Grey (Glynis Ranney) in the third act; Baby

Face (Jeff Lillico) looks on. Photo: David Cooper

Performances


Performances

Die Dreigroschenoper

Williamstown Theatre Festival

25 June – 6 July 2003

Watching Melissa Errico standing in frontof a large, purloined landscape painting,wearing a filmy white dress, sporting ablack fedora and cane, and superbly singing“Surabaya Johnny” as Polly Peachum in theWilliamstown production of The Three-penny Opera made even the long trip to thenorthwest corner of Massachusetts worthevery mile. Director Peter Hunt hadobtained permission to add the Happy Endsong to this production, replacing “PirateJenny” in the wedding scene as a number toentertain Macheath and his boys. The newlyrics, although credited to MichaelFeingold in the program, were of a rathermysterious origin, as were a number of oth-ers in the usually familiar Marc Blitzsteinadaptation. Hunt, a former artistic directorof the festival who has done this work therebefore, brought a knowing hand to the stag-ing. Producer Michael Ritchie had provid-ed him with a star-studded cast including,besides Errico, David Schramm asPeachum, Randy Graff as Mrs. Peachum,Jesse L. Martin (of TV’s Law and Order) asMacheath, Karen Ziemba as Lucy, JackWillis as Tiger Brown and Betty Buckley asJenny. As a wonderful reminder of the her-itage of performances of this work, theroles of Filch and Victoria’s messengerwere performed by William Duell, whoperformed the same roles in the 1954Theater de Lys production. Musical direc-tor and conductor James Samplinerbrought a taut, stylistically smart sense ofpace and bite to Kurt Weill’s score.

Set on John Conklin’s industrial three-story steel pile of platforms and stairs,christened “Bert’s Garage 1928” for thewedding scene and with the orchestratucked away up center on the second level,this production was given a gritty, rustylook. Into this environment, LaurieChurba’s magnificently seedy costumes fitperfectly. With the stage level used foractual settings; second story for entrances,exits and crosses; and third for hangings,the space was abuzz with movement. Therewas no act curtain, only a large poster of

Queen Victoria morphed intoAdolf Hitler against whichone heard the “Moritat” sungin German before it flew outand the accomplished, stylishLaurent Giroux as the StreetSinger delivered an exciting,nasal “Mack the Knife.” TheGerman version would returnat the end as a coda to theevening.

In general, the productionwas an olio of styles rangingfrom the histrionic throughthe naturalistic to the vaude-villian. Overplayed, but effec-tively so, was the avuncularSchramm’s Peachum; hisburly appearance effectivelycontrasted with the slighter,harder-edged and more sar-donic Mrs. Peachum of Graff,who rendered with phantomlyrics and eerie bravado anunbelievably raunchy “Balladof Dependency.” Over-wrought as Tiger Brown,Willis proved a willing accom-plice and then a sorrowful foilto Macheath, whom Martinadamantly underplayed. Hispassivity was remarkable inthat it diminished the verybasis of the plot which makes Macheath’sarrest and execution the important eventover which so much passion is vented. Onthe positive side, Martin was able to bring acredible sound to his singing of the part.

As Jenny, Betty Buckley, the longtimeBroadway performer, was perhaps too oldto be a credible lover of this boyishMacheath, but, that aside, she delivered ashow-stopping version of “Solomon’sSong” using a hat and cane that mirroredErrico’s in “Surabaya Johnny” in the firstact. Singing the usurped “Pirate Jenny” inthe brothel scene, Buckley displayed theunique voice on which she has made hercareer, but could perhaps have used morehatred to provide a more chilling effect.

The remarkable Polly Peachum ofErrico and the Ziemba’s exciting portrayalof Lucy Brown provided performances onecould only wish were preserved as exam-ples of complete characterization, musi-cianship, and stage presence in these roles.Errico gave the audience not only a magnif-icently nuanced performance—being fauxnaïve when called for and hard and sardon-ic when needed—but also an absolutelyexquisitely sung Polly as well. The contrast

between the emotional drain of her fresh-faced vision of “Surabaya Johnny” and themask of death and flint-like sound of theAct One Finale was stunning. No less riv-eting was Ziemba, seated and almostmotionless, riveting the audience with“The Barbara Song.” When the two cametogether in the “The Jealousy Duet,” mur-derous sparks dipped in acid intonationflew from the stage, igniting the audiencein an electric moment.

This solid production of TheThreepenny Opera at the WilliamstownFestival was a long way from the consistentuse of most of the conventions and effectsof epic theater. The performers relied heav-ily on real emotion and realistic actingstyles to make their characters appeal to theaudience. But appeal they did. On a warmnight in the mountains in a two-week sum-mer stock run, an effective representationof the work was given, appreciated andenthusiastically applauded.

John Lucas

Brown University

Image of Queen Victoria mutating into Adolf Hitler.

Photo: Richard Feldman

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__________ Weill. Briefwechsel mit der Universal Edition. Metzler, 2002. $50.00 ____________________________ Weill. Gesammelte Schriften. Schott, 2000. $48.00 __________________ Farneth/Juchem/Stein. KW: A Life in Pictures. Overlook, 2000. $75.00 __________________ Farneth/Juchem/Stein. KW: Ein Leben in Bildern. Ullstein, 2000. $65.00 __________________ Speak Low: The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. California, 1996. $50.00 __________________ Weill/Lenya. Sprich leise, wenn du Liebe sagst. Kiepenheuer, 1998. $37.50 __________________ Juchem. KW und Maxwell Anderson, Metzler, 2000. $37.50 __________________ Weill. Briefe an die Familie, Metzler, 2001. $37.50 __________________ Drew. Kurt Weill: A Handbook. Faber, 1987. $50.00 __________________ Farneth, ed. Lenya the Legend. Overlook, 1998. $45.00 __________________ Kowalke, ed. A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill. Yale, 1986. $28.50/18.00 (pbk) __________________ Kowalke and Edler. A Stranger Here Myself [essays] Olms Verlag, 1993. $40.00 __________________ Schebera. Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life. Yale, 1995. $45.00 __________________ Schebera. Kurt Weill. Rowohlt, 2000. [in German] $10.00 __________________ Taylor. Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World. Northeastern, 1991. $18.00 (pbk) __________________ Kortländer, ed. Vom Kurfürstendamm zum Broadway. Dröste, 1990. $18.00 __________________ A Guide to the Weill-Lenya Research Center. $5.00 ________

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Detach and mail with payment to: Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, 7 East 20th Street, New York, NY 10003-1106.

Documents

Kurt Weill - KWFWeill’s Reply to Theodor W. Adorno in April 1942 Feature I’m a Stranger Here Myself 6 Free Associations from an Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl Weill as Emigré …