Weill’s Road Less Traveled : It’s taken 62 years for the emigre’s opera about the Holocaust’s arrival to get a second staging.

On a recent Sunday night in this struggling eastern German city, the European premiere of Kurt Weill’s “The Eternal Road” was more than an ambitious staging of an all but forgotten opera. It was a chance to celebrate and revive an epic work whose collaborators--Weill, author Franz Werfel and director Max Reinhardt--were forced to flee Germany and the Nazis; a moment in which the industrial city of 270,000, once known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, whose own Jewish population was virtually wiped out in 1938, could make amends for the sins of the Holocaust.

Gathered on the Theaterplatz--in a darker era known as Adolf-Hitler-Platz--Chemnitz’s citizens hoped to show the world their good intentions.

“We noticed that one of the most important operas of a German composer [of] Jewish nationality wasn’t produced in our language,” says Hans Moeller, the dramaturge at the Chemnitz Opera. “It was a symbol of cutting off the best of the German cultural tradition. At the end of the century, it is necessary to remember that once in that century, brutality caused not only the cutting off of the cultural life in Germany but also the life of the Jews. We saw a chance to have wonderful music combined with a wonderful libretto, and to do our job in bringing it back to [its] country of origin.”

The German run of “The Eternal Road” has been co-produced by the Chemnitz Opera, the Krakow Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the New Israeli Opera, and the production will travel to New York and Tel Aviv to mark the centenary of Weill’s birth in 2000. Written between 1934 and 1936, in the years after he left Germany, it’s an extravaganza of biblical proportions.

With more than 200 actors and singers, and an 80-piece orchestra, “The Eternal Road” (Der Weg der Verheissung) juxtaposes the coming of the Holocaust with the scriptural history of the Jews, telling the story of a synagogue congregation huddling together to fight off impending destruction, while the elders read from the Torah, bringing to life visions of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the prophets.

Until now, “The Eternal Road” has never been heard in Europe, and has never been sung in German, the language in which it was written. In fact, the opera was staged just once, in New York, in 1937.

Weill, the son of a synagogue cantor, fled Germany for Paris in 1933. He came to the U.S. two years later, already famous for “The Threepenny Opera” and other innovative and successful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. But Weill was a Broadway newcomer when he and fellow emigre Reinhardt got a shortened, translated version of “Eternal Road” produced in New York. The fourth and final act, it is now assumed, was simply dropped to make the four-plus-hour piece more manageable in length and, as one story goes, to avoid the costs of paying union overtime to an enormous cast and crew.

The opera opened in New York only after several postponements, says Ed Harsh, managing editor of the Kurt Weill edition, a recording project that over the next several decades will release all of the composer’s works. “Eternal Road” was more straightforward and less edgy than Weill’s Brecht collaborations, but it was generally well-received by critics. Still, it played to half-full houses. Reinhardt had insisted, among other things, on ripping out the most expensive seats in the theater to make room for his extravagant stagings.

“For some of the more serious Jewish people, the piece simply was not serious enough,” says Harsh, “and didn’t attract the kind of wide general audience [the presenters] expected.” In the end, it went bankrupt, losing half a million dollars.

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For the next 62 years, “The Eternal Road” was in eternal limbo: a giant production that had been a stupendous financial failure. Weill, who died in 1950, went on to become a well-known Broadway composer, but one who never quite recaptured his prewar reputation for the avant-garde. Many Europeans branded him a sellout and largely disowned the “American Weill,” and his works from his post-German years are seldom performed in Europe.

But recently, Weill fans scattered around the world started trying to bring those works--and “The Eternal Road” in particular--back to life. Among them was John Mauceri, principal conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, who is conducting the Chemnitz revival and reconstruction. Mauceri had conducted another late Weill piece, “Street Scene” (1947), for a “Live at Lincoln Center” broadcast in 1979. He says his first encounter with the 1,200-page score of “Eternal Road”--in the mid-’80s--was a personal revelation.

“I tell this story, and it’s completely true,” says Mauceri, 53, after dress rehearsal the night before the opening in Chemnitz. “I felt fear. Because I felt like I had accidentally opened a door and found King Tut’s tomb. I was completely unprepared for the level of the very first musical gesture in the piece. Because it was Weill, and yet it wasn’t Weill; it was a melody that presented itself and opened like a flower, it just kept becoming more and more beautiful.”

In the 15 years that followed, the conductor tried in vain to convince opera houses around the world--including the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Michigan Opera Theater and the Scottish Opera, where he was music director for seven years--to produce the piece, which Mauceri describes in unabashedly gushing tones. “[Weill] makes reference to the entire history of German ecclesiastical music,” he begins. “He makes references in the big chorales from Bach cantatas, Brahms, the songs of Schubert. You don’t expect Weill to be writing fugues, and at the same time it’s still Weill with its rhythms, its melodies that get in your ear and won’t go out. We see and hear the naked Kurt Weill, his soul, the part of him that he sometimes hid. This unbelievably positive, generous, humanitarian spirit is absolutely on the table when you hear ‘The Eternal Road.’ ”

Mauceri wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm. He had had a long-standing relationship with Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York. Kowalke and other foundation members were searching for all the missing pieces of Weill’s repertory in preparation for his centenary, and took a special interest in the long-forgotten piece. Harsh says among those who considered mounting productions were conductor Daniel Barenboim and John Rockwell, the former director of the Lincoln Center Festival. But no one could quite make it happen.

“It’s a humongous investment,” explains Harsh of the production, which cost about $800,000 to produce in Chemnitz. “It’s not that people haven’t been interested, but usually they get into the concept, then they look at the size of the piece and the money that’s involved and the personnel and the time, and they get scared.”

But in the end, it was the eastern German city of Chemnitz that had no fear. Moeller and his colleagues had come to the idea on their own. Representing Chemnitz Opera, Moeller went to New York to ask the Weill Foundation for the rights. When the Weill people told Moeller that he’d have to come up with the funding to make it an international co-production that would travel to the U.S. and to Israel, he convinced them that they had the resources and expertise to make it happen.

“A lot of people ask the question, ‘Why Chemnitz?’ ” says Harsh, “but it’s really as simple as [this]: Chemnitz simply did not give up.”

When Mauceri was asked to sit in on the meeting with Moeller, he admits that he had never heard of the Chemnitz Opera, which in its heyday was one of the most important in East Germany. He was skeptical: “As an American you have a pretty fixed idea about what this small town in East Germany would be like; you kind of imagine smokestacks and a pretty depressing area. And what could the theater be like? And what could the quality be like?”

But Mauceri says he has had no complaints. “We worked here in peace for two months, [without] the pressure of being in Paris or Vienna or New York City. We’re all living perfectly beautifully in a very wooded part of Germany with a perfect theater that has got wonderful facilities, an excellent orchestra and chorus, and devoted management to doing this piece. What more could we ask for?”

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For the city of Chemnitz, staging “The Eternal Road” is just one step in a larger effort to compensate for the past and move into the future.

The city has plans to rebuild the synagogue destroyed in the war, to create a place of worship for its new Jewish population of 300, mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia.

“We want to help them really to find a new identity as Jewish people living in Germany,” Moeller says. And he sees the revival of “The Eternal Road” as a vital part of that rebuilding.

“In a way it’s a compensation,” agrees David Sharir, the production’s Israeli set designer. “In a way, of course, it is also pangs of conscience, but I don’t think it’s just that. We’re speaking about the second generation after the war, people [who] feel there is a necessity to bring back the culture that has been destroyed by their fathers and grandfathers, and I think this is a very right humanistic gesture--not [only] to my people but to humanity in general.”

Mauceri, too, hopes that “The Eternal Road” marks a rekindling of European interest in Germany’s interrupted culture, especially when it comes to its emigre musicians, many of whom, like Weill, had second careers in the U.S.: “I hope it acts as a kind of beacon: Hello, wake up, this is just one of them,” he says. “Part of the reparation is not just giving money, it’s not just giving the house back, it’s not just finding the gold in Switzerland, it’s also giving back the music.”

Mauceri conducted a benefit concert in Chemnitz to raise funds for the rebuilding of the synagogue, and chose to perform music written in Los Angeles by emigre composers. “Classical music has been the last part of the artistic world to accept what happened in World War II,” he says. “No one questions what Einstein said in Princeton as opposed to what Einstein said in Berlin. But music that Schoenberg wrote in Vienna is good, but what Schoenberg wrote in Los Angeles isn’t. Most of the major orchestras do not feature in any proper percentage this 50 years of music. I believe fundamentally that the crisis in classical music is based on the negation of this repertory.”

The night before the opening performance, Mauceri maintains that he still can’t believe it’s taken the world so long to revive “The Eternal Road.”

“Why isn’t this the 50th production of it?” he laments. “Why hasn’t it been done at the Met and La Scala, and why haven’t we all grown up with our parents singing this music to us when we were kids? [If we say] this isn’t any good, that’s why we haven’t heard it in 62 years. But if we say this is really great, then we must have the dialogue: Why? And that’s what I really hope happens after tomorrow.”

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The Chemnitz “Eternal Road” is being touted as the world’s first complete look at Weill’s work, but that’s not exactly the case. The fourth act has been reinstalled, but portions of music and spoken dialogue were shaved from the first, to make the production close to 3 1/2 hours. Performers involved in the production included members of the Chemnitz orchestra and opera, guest soloists, the Krakow Opera Choir and the Leipzig Synagogal Chorus, a group of non-Jews who have taken it upon themselves to restore the liturgical music of their city’s annihilated Jewish population.

Perhaps the most challenging conundrum for the presenters was how to end the piece. As the opera’s biblical story focuses on the ominous revelations of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, the contemporary congregation is ordered out of its synagogue toward an uncertain future. In 1937, that uncertainty may have been justified, but not in 1999.

“The ending needs to be treated very sensitively,” says Harsh, “because as Werfel and Weill wrote it, this congregation that we’ve been watching all night is banished to wander this eternal road, told to leave the city on the pain of death.” For today’s audiences, says Harsh, the Holocaust has to be acknowledged more directly. “A lot of people have not known how to deal with that,” Harsh says.

German director Michael Heinicke chose to add Nazi storm troopers and a shooting to the final scene for the Chemnitz production. He also separated one boy in the synagogue from the rest of the most likely doomed congregation. While the curtain goes down, the boy stands alone, looking into the audience.

“His fate is different at the end,” says Harsh. “The congregation may end up wandering the road, they may be killed. He’s the one who is going to carry the hope of the Jewish people. It’s a ticklish thing, though.”

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At Chemnitz on opening night, a packed house settles into its seats and a heavy anticipatory silence. At the end, there is enthusiastic applause, and after several curtain calls, most of the audience has found its feet. After the show, those close to the production called it a triumph.

David Drew, who created a concert version of the fourth act last year in New York and London, said: “It’s not a museum production; it’s not a bit of bringing up from the grave some old thing that’s been lying [around] for 60 years.”

But not everyone agreed with him. While the local press was mostly euphoric, critics from Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich had problems with the direction and found the set design old-fashioned.

And, as Mauceri worried, some of the German critics seemed most interested in parsing the mix of Weill’s musical influences--this is European, that American--with a preference for the former. The Munich-based daily Suddeutsche Zeitung praised Weill’s compositional ability, especially where the music “is not just accompaniment, but rather develops a life of its own”; but it added that the violins “sometimes sob in an all too American fashion.”

Mauceri says that his next challenge is making a video and CD recording of “The Eternal Road.” He claims nothing the critics say can take away from the real success of the venture. “After so many years of ignoring and denigrating this music, [it] is alive and well,” he says. “There is an opportunity for people to hear it. That’s all we care about. Because people cannot know what a piece of music is unless it’s performed. I’m not saying that everyone has to love it. All I’m saying is we should give it a chance.”*