The Weill Revival

By the end of 1990, virtually every one of Kurt Weill’s compositions will have been performed, broadcast, and/or recorded somewhere in the world, marking what would have been his 90th birthday on March 2, 1990.

There will be major festivals devoted to his music in Cleveland, Dusseldorf, London, and Wales. Crossing the Atlantic in many cases for the first time, even Weill’s seldom-seen American musicals will again take stage. “Street Scene,” for example, which opened to rave reviews at its May premiere by the Scottish Opera, returns to New York City Opera’s repertory next month, and later in the season bows at English National Opera and the Municipal Opera in Bielefeld, West Germany.

This week, rock star Sting makes his theatrical debut in Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” as Macheath during previews of Michael Feingold’s new translation at the National Theatre in Washington. John Dexter directs and Julius Rudel conducts a cast which includes Georgia Brown, Alvin Epstein and Maureen McGovern. Los Angeles-based producer Jerome Hellman hopes to open on Broadway in early November.

About the same time, Menahem Golan plans to release his film adaptation of the Weill/Bertolt Brecht classic. Starring Raul Julia, Julia Migenes, Richard Harris and Roger Daltrey (as the street singer), “Mack the Knife,” as it’s been tentatively retitled, won’t have many similarities to its Broadway counterpart, as it plays freely with both script and score. There will also be symbolic, rival stage productions running on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall at Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble in the East and the revitalized Theater des Westens in the West. As the repertory piece most popular with German audiences, there will be dozens of “Die Dreigroschenoper” productions in other cities too.

Sting’s original cast album of “The Threepenny Opera” and the recording of the film will compete with two other complete renditions of the show on CD by the time of Weill’s birthday. The one due out on London/Decca is a high-budget affair conducted by John Mauceri, with a cast assembled with an eye for markets as variegated as the piece itself: Italian chanteuse Milva as Jenny, opera stalwarts Rene Kollo (Macheath) and Helga Dernesch (Mrs. Peachum), and as Polly the young German dancer/singer Ute Lemper, whom Decca is promoting internationally as yet another Weill specialist. (Her Weill songs album topped the U.S. crossover charts for several months earlier this year.) Also underway in Decca’s series is a complete recording to Weill’s American opera “Street Scene” with Josephine Barstow, Jerry Hadley and Angelina Reaux, as well as a “Seven Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny Songspiel” for Lemper. If the first releases sell as well as its Janacek cycle, Decca plans to record the bulk of Weill’s stage works.

Decca will be competing, however, with the lower-budget Capriccio/Delta label, which is releasing the products of the West German Radio’s 10-year Weill project. The only untransposed, full-length “Mahagonny” has already appeared; soon to follow are the one-act comic opera “Der Zar Lasst Sich Photographieren” (“The Czar Has His Photograph Taken”) (1927), the radio cantatas “Der Lindberghflug” (1929) and “Ballad of Magna Carta” (1940), “Happy End” (1929) and “Der Silbersee” (1933).

Several other companies are jumping on the bandwagon with reissues of recordings long unavailable. Polygram has restored Weill’s 1936 anti-war musical “Johnny Johnson” to the active list and will soon follow with the didactic opera “Der Jasager,” the Violin Concerto, and Gisela May’s award-winning “Seven Deadly Sins.” Meanwhile, Nonesuch’s seven records surveying early Weill, including Teresa Stratas’s two landmark song albums, are still available. And CBS has re-released virtually all of its Weill items, including the legendary performances from the ‘50s by Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya.

Lenya, who ignited the first postwar revival of interest in Weill’s German works with those recordings, figures prominently in the current plans, even though she died in 1981. Little, Brown recently published Donald Spoto’s “Lenya: A Life,” and Bette Midler has signed to star in the Tri-Star film based on Lenya’s life. Scheduled to shoot next year, it will be produced by L.A.-based Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (“Footloose,” “Sing”) in association with Midler’s own All Girl Productions.

Of greatest interest, though, are the productions of genuine rarities, Weill’s virtually unknown stage works. The Dusseldorf Festival opens with the world premiere of the original German version of Weill’s satirical operetta on the international arms trade, “Der Kuhhandel.” When events in Central Europe prevented its production in German-speaking territories in 1935, it was adapted for the British music hall, retitled “A Kingdom for a Cow” and quickly withdrawn. (Its Hungarian-born librettist, Robert Vambery, 81, now lives in Los Angeles.) Also in March, Scottish Opera will mount the first revival and the first-ever performance of the complete score of the Weill/Franz Werfel/Max Reinhardt opera/oratorio “The Eternal Road.”

On a smaller scale, Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., plans to mount Terrence McNally’s rewrite of Jacque Deval’s “Marie Galante” (1934), for which Weill composed incidental music and six songs (including “I Wait for a Ship”). And the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia will stage the first professional revival of Weill’s adventurous “Love Life” (1948), reputed to be the first “concept” musical, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. (It ran on Broadway for seven months and then disappeared without a trace. The ASCAP strike prevented a cast album from being made, and the show was never made available to stock and amateur companies. Apparently Lerner, himself seven times married, found its theme of marital strife uncomfortably autobiographical.)

There will also be concert performances of the Weill/Ira Gershwin collaborations “Lady in the Dark” and “Firebrand of Florence,” as well as the anti-apartheid “Lost in the Stars,” Weill’s last completed score. Other events--a Broadway revival of “One Touch of Venus” and several TV presentations, among them--are still too tentative to announce.

An international musicological conference in Duisburg, West Germany, next March and several exhibitions running parallel to the North Rhine/Westphalian Weill Festival reflect the increased scholarly attention Weill is finally receiving.