In Perfect Tune With His Century

The poly-stylistic, media-mingling, genre-busting musician is not a recent invention. The first half of the 20th century--when music seemed so deeply split into competing philosophies--also was the playground of Kurt Weill.

Like so many composers today, Weill was influenced by popular music, and especially attracted to theater productions that blended music, drama, dance and film in new ways. Centennial celebrations of his birthday (March 2, 1900) here and abroad remind us of just how protean, and enduring, his work really was.

Marking the anniversary is a small flood of new recordings, anthologies, books and performances. The complete German version of Weill’s massive biblical drama “The Eternal Road,” for instance, got a much-belated premiere last June in Germany. That production comes this month to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a citywide Weill festival in New York.

“Weill remains a difficult composer to nail down, in part because his artistic development is not easily charted on a straight line,” says David Farneth, director of the research center at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. “Most staggering of all is the range of expression he mastered in a relatively short career, so that it is difficult to wrap one’s arms around the ‘complete’ Weill.”

After Weill’s death on April 3, 1950, from a heart attack, the late composer-critic Virgil Thomson extolled him in an obituary as “the most original single workman in the whole musical theater, internationally considered, during the last quarter century.”

“Every work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution to dramatic problems,” Thomson wrote.

Weill wrote early and wrote often. His first staged work was the children’s ballet “Magic Night,” first performed in Berlin when he was 22, and produced in New York two years later.

It was “The Threepenny Opera,” however, that made Weill and his collaborator Bertolt Brecht famous in 1928. In the five years following, “Threepenny Opera”--an adaptation of the 18th century English ballad opera “The Beggar’s Opera”--racked up more than 10,000 performances in 18 languages. Its U.S. premiere in 1933 was comparatively disappointing. Yet when Marc Blitzstein revived it in his own English version in 1954, it ran for six years in New York, supported two national touring companies, and spawned 48 different recordings of the Moritat “Mack the Knife,” including the million-seller that made a star of Bobby Darin in 1959.

But Weill was always a bit ahead of his time.

Think that the use of film projections in staged works is a product of the latest technology? Weill’s surrealist ballet-opera “Royal Palace,” staged at the Staatsoper in Berlin in 1927, included film elements, as well as Weill’s first incorporation of jazz into his evolving musical style.

Think multiculturalism, wide-ranging adaptation or the theatrical treatment of real contemporary subjects is new to the age of “Miss Saigon,” “Nixon in China” and “Rent”? Weill worked with jazz, waltzes, fox trots, American spirituals and folk songs, a German adaptation of a Japanese Noh play and an American adaptation of a German antiwar novel.

In films and radio, Weill collaborated with Ben Hecht, Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir. On the Broadway stage he worked with Paul Green, Langston Hughes, Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perlman and Ogden Nash. He wrote music for schools, for industrial and patriotic pageants, cantatas and songs, symphonies and string quartets.

Partnership With Brecht Had Stormy Moments

Weill came by his talent naturally and it was manifested early. His father was chief cantor of the synagogue in Dessau, Germany, and a composer of sacred music. Weill himself began composing at age 12, although almost all of his work prior to his 1920 entrance into Busoni’s master class in Berlin have been lost. While studying, he played organ in a synagogue and piano in a beer cellar. The premiere of “Magic Night” in 1922 was followed up with a handful of orchestral works presented in the same season by the Berlin Philharmonic.

Weill soon took students himself, including famed pianist Claudio Arrau, composer Nikos Skalkottas and conductor Maurice Abravanel. He also wrote weekly columns for a German cultural magazine until the astonishing success of “Threepenny Opera” allowed him to abandon everything else in favor of simply composing.

Weill and Brecht also tried to capitalize on that success with pieces such as the 1929 “Happy End,” expanding on the musical and theatrical possibilities that “Threepenny” had opened. The collaboration was not always happy, however. Their quarrels over the primacy of words or music reached the point of scandal during the staging of their “Mahagonny” in 1931, with the volatile Brecht at one point threatening to “throw that phony Richard Strauss right down the stairs.”

It is “Happy End”--a darkly comedic tale of love between a gangster and a Salvation Army missionary--that is a highlight of local centennial celebrations. The Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting 12 performances of an imaginative theater-as-installation production directed by Randee Trabitz and featuring singer Weba Garretson and the Eastside Sinfonietta starting Wednesday.

“Musicians are ecstatic about the chance to do such great music,” Garretson says. “There is so much to challenge you in terms of rhythm and harmony. It is sophisticated and swift, but not cynical--sort of sweet and sour at the same time, a dynamic thing that’s happening. Many of his songs are standards for jazz and cabaret singers, and there is kind of a school of rockers who are very attracted to his music. If he were alive, Weill would be doing raves now.”

Early Efforts to Reach Wide Audience Fell Short

Reaching a wide audience was something that very much concerned Weill. How he went about it--particularly in his later devotion to Broadway and related projects in film and radio--caused a real split in Weill’s following and critical estimation.

Part of it was geographical and cultural. Shortly after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Weill left Germany for Paris. There he completed one of his best scores--and the final collaboration with Brecht--”The 7 Deadly Sins.” But success in France proved elusive, and he moved on to England. The reception he got there was openly hostile--a combination of anti-Semitism and distaste for his interpretation of “The Beggar’s Opera.”

With Franz Werfel and Max Reinhardt, Weill began work in 1934 on “The Eternal Road,” a sprawling and timely biblical epic told by a rabbi to his congregation on the eve of a pogrom. It proved impossible to stage in Europe given the anti-Semitic political climate. Weill came to New York in 1935 to oversee its 1937 Broadway premiere in a much truncated form. While there, he worked with Paul Green and the Group Theatre on the antiwar musical “Johnny Johnson,” and his career became decisively attached to musical theater in New York.

He did have failures on Broadway. Indeed, given the innovative dramaturgy and sophisticated music, it is perhaps more surprising that works such as “Lady in the Dark,” “One Touch of Venus” and “Lost in the Stars” were staged at all, let alone became resounding triumphs.

After 1950, Weill became a posthumous star of another medium: television. Curators Ron Simon and Allen Glover have developed a comprehensive series of screenings now showing at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills.

“We started looking at some of this material in 1998 for the Brecht centennial, and this whole world of Weill opened up,” Simon reports. “We found that Weill has been vital over many decades, on American television in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and on contemporary European television.”

“Weill sort of anticipated many trends,” Glover adds, “fusing high culture--opera--with folk and jazz. He appealed to many opposing sensibilities--so many musicians rediscover him all the time.”

The screening series includes a 1979 Swiss production of “Mahagonny Songspiel,” an adaptation of songs from the opera that was not available when the series was first presented in New York in 1998. It also features NBC Opera Theater’s “Down in the Valley”(the only work televised while Weill was still alive), most of his best-known theater works and biographical shows, as well as musical interpretations of Weill’s songs, with artists ranging from Louis Armstrong and Boris Karloff (!) to Lou Reed and PJ Harvey.

“His music remains relevant to modern times because it still challenges our ears, and the social and political themes addressed in his stage works have a timeless quality,” said Farneth of the Weill Foundation. “But underneath the intellectual element there is a human voice that makes people sit up, listen and feel energized.”

That’s the aspect of Weill that always appealed to audiences and artists, but some critics have had a harder time reconciling the radical innovator of the European left in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, with the popular Broadway tunesmith of the late ‘30s and the ‘40s. After his death, conventional appreciations held that there were “two Weills.” This apparent dichotomy, however, ignores how committed Weill was to reaching audiences with his early works and how pioneering and idiosyncratic his Broadway pieces were. Today a multiplicity of styles, forms and genres are almost expected of an artist. The screening series indicates something of the creative grappling with Weill’s legacy, and the production of “Happy End” demonstrates his lasting relevance into a new century.

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Kurt Weill Programs

“Happy End” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Los Angeles. Feb. 23-27 and March 1-5, Wednesdays-Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m. $13-$15. (213) 626-6828.

“The World of Kurt Weill” at the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Screening series, through March 19. Free. ($3-$6 donation suggested.) It is broken into two parts:

“Berlin to Broadway,” programs run Fridays and Sundays at 2 p.m.: “Happy End,” Friday and Sunday; “The 7 Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny Songspiel,” Feb. 25 and 27; “Down in the Valley” and “The Lindbergh Flight--Oceanflight,” March 3 and 5; “Lady in the Dark,” March 10 and 12; “One Touch of Venus,” March 17 and 19.

“Weill + Lenya + Brecht,” programs run Thursdays at 6 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 p.m.: “September Songs,” today and Saturday; “Lenya--A Girl Named Jenny,” Feb. 24 and 26; “May to December Songs: Interpreting Weill,” March 2 and 4; “Omnibus: Lotte Lenya” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Kurt Weill in America,” March 9 and 11; “The World of Kurt Weill,” March 16 and 18.

Information: (310) 786-1000.