From Berlin to Broadway

Long before his death in 1950, Kurt Weill had to contend with critics in both his native and adopted countries who dismissed his success in America as an unworthy commercial compromise of the great music he had created in Germany before he fled Nazi persecution in 1933. To them, the syncopated rhythms and mordant melodies of “Die Dreigroschenoper” (The Threepenny Opera) and “Mahagonny” were the “real” Kurt Weill, and the smoother, sometimes more sentimental sounds of Broadway hits such as “One Touch of Venus” or even the ambitious “Lost in the Stars” were, to quote Harold Clurman, “synthetic ... increasingly facile ... artistically nondescript.”

Nonsense, declares Foster Hirsch, who has no use for “the persistent legend of two monolithic Kurt Weills confronting each other across vast cultural and geographic distances.” His appreciative study of Weill’s theatrical work makes an ardent brief for the “essential continuity” in the career of “the century’s first major crossover composer,” and “crossover” is not a put-down in this author’s lexicon.

A professor of film at Brooklyn College who has published books on topics ranging from film noir to the Actors Studio, Hirsch clearly has considerable sympathy for the composer who wrote in 1946, “In a deeply democratic country like ours, art should belong to the people [and] should be ‘popular’ in the highest sense of the word.” Indeed, “Kurt Weill on Stage” is a welcome addition to the never-full-enough shelf of serious nonfiction for the general reader: written in unpretentious, accessible prose; effectively but not excessively researched; substantive without being overly long. Hirsch shares Weill’s belief that people can be entertained and enlightened at the same time.

The text focuses almost entirely on Weill’s work; discussion of his unorthodox but enduring marriage to Lotte Lenya, for example, is brief though insightful. This makes sense: Comments throughout the book reveal Weill as a man almost no one knew intimately, and the central drama of his life was artistic. Whether you see it as a decline into facile commercialism or, as Hirsch does, a consistent and courageous struggle to create a new form of music theater, Weill’s career raises questions still pertinent today about the relationship between high culture and popular art. These are not uniquely American questions, but they are especially relevant in a nation where modern mass media were created. And it seems very American that they’re exemplified here by the son of a Jewish cantor who saw no conflict in translating the ideals of radical German artists to the Broadway stage.

Hirsch wastes no time on Weill’s birth in 1900 or childhood in provincial Dessau but jumps right to his immersion in the heady cultural stew of Weimar Berlin. While studying with composer Ferruccio Busoni, a champion of “pure” abstract music, 21-year-old Weill joined the Novembergruppe, an organization of painters, sculptors, playwrights and musicians who disdained elitist art and “consciously addressed a broad popular audience.” This commitment led Weill from the concert hall to the theater, and though his early short operas were primarily dissonant, atonal works, they began to bear traces of jazz, that “emblem of openness and modernity” that thrilled Weill and his friends on their visits to Berlin nightclubs.

His first collaboration with Bertolt Brecht was a one-act opera based on five Brecht poems about a mythical American city. “Mahagonny-Songspiel” caused a sensation at the German Chamber Music Festival in 1927: not, as Hirsch astutely notes, because it was a jazz opera (it wasn’t) or because its songs were deliberately cast in melodic, pop form. “It was the fact that the songs had been embedded in a sophisticated musical texture with distinct high-cultural overtones that was to cause either delight or outrage.” (There are many passages of sustained musical analysis in “Kurt Weill on Stage,” and in keeping with Hirsch’s overall approach, they are lucidly written for a general audience.)

“Die Dreigroschenoper” continued the partners’ assault on operatic tradition, as they pushed the performers to talk-sing Weill’s seductive music in a manner that emphasized the words and framed (over the director’s vehement objections) a presentational production style that stressed the actors’ distance from the characters. It was a smash and a scandal. “Serious musicians thought [Weill] was a traitor,” remarked conductor Maurice Abravanel, “and he was given up by the avant-garde because he wrote successful things.” The Nazis, who hated genre mixing almost as much as race mixing, mounted demonstrations at the 1930 opening night of “Mahagonny,” which was even more politically and artistically provocative in its full-length version. When they came to power in 1933, they shut down three productions of Weill’s opera “Silbersee,” and the composer hastily left town. After an uneasy 30 months based in Paris, where he found no solid cultural or commercial base, he arrived in New York.

At this point, though only one-third through his text, Hirsch has established the themes he elaborates in his coverage of Weill’s American career. Weill was already a convinced populist who sought a wide audience. He did not believe working on Broadway compromised his art: One of the first shows he saw there was “Porgy and Bess,” which according to Hirsch “remained for Weill at once a model of the kind of American opera he wanted to create and a reminder of the Broadway musical’s flexible boundaries.” He had always sought out prominent and influential collaborators in Germany; stateside he teamed with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Paul Green (for “Johnny Johnson”), Maxwell Anderson (“Knickerbocker Holiday,” “Lost in the Stars”), Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin (“Lady in the Dark”) and Elmer Rice (“Street Scene”).

Detailed accounts of these shows’ creations demonstrate the same Kurt Weill who played good cop to Brecht’s “combative rogue cop” during the stormy rehearsals for “Die Dreigroschenoper.” He was, writes Hirsch, “a cunning strategist who knew how to get what he wanted”; he kept his cool until tantrum-throwing collaborators ran out of steam and found that their quiet colleague had won the allegiance of cast and crew. Only his letters to Lenya, filled with nasty comments on difficult co-workers, reveal the anger and frustration he concealed beneath a professionally unflappable exterior. Hirsch’s shrewd use of their correspondence suggests a central element in Weill’s bond with his wife; he needed someone he could be honest with, and “at heart [Weill and Lenya] remained two refugees huddling together against a world in which they often felt misunderstood and unappreciated.”

Yet unlike many of his fellow refugees, Weill was happy in America and intensely patriotic (he became a citizen in 1943). He tagged along during a tour of “Knickerbocker Holiday”--though the producers told him he wasn’t needed--because, he declared, “I want to see this glorious country.” He strove to capture the nation’s sounds in his work. His first New York show, “Johnny Johnson,” was a virtual pastiche of American music from military marches to cowboy songs, with some surreal numbers and symphonic underscoring to assert his high-art credentials. He created a rueful romantic ballad (“Speak Low”) for Mary Martin in “One Touch of Venus” and gave Gertrude Lawrence “The Saga of Jenny” to bump and grind to in “Lady in the Dark,” but he also wrote a 61/2-minute aria for a character in “Street Scene” and never abandoned his goal of writing an American opera. In “Lost in the Stars,” he explained, his aim was “to do a ‘musical tragedy’ for the American theatre so that the typical American audience (not a specialized audience) can accept it.”

Were these ambitious, unconventional Broadway musicals as good as “Die Dreigroschenoper” or “Mahagonny”? “[They] never reach the level of his collaborations with Brecht,” Hirsch acknowledges, adding parenthetically, “what else in the musical theatre of the twentieth century has?” He is content to praise Weill’s American shows for the diversity of their beautiful music and the seriousness of their intentions, which points the way toward such boundary-smashing productions as “West Side Story,” “Chicago” and virtually every Hal Prince-Stephen Sondheim show from “Company” to “Sweeney Todd.” Yet these works share with Weill’s German catalog a social and political bite that, it must be admitted, is absent from his American musicals, a point Hirsch ducks altogether.

I don’t think it would have been caving in to the high-art purists to acknowledge that aspiring to get a typical American audience to accept musical tragedy is not quite the same as confronting the Weimar public with acrid theatrical commentary on their society’s bitter contradictions. Hirsch’s engaging book is strong on description and appreciation, a little light on truly probing cultural criticism. I doubt such criticism was ever his goal, so it makes more sense to admire “Kurt Weill on Stage” for what it does achieve: a persuasive argument against “rigid judgmental divisions--between serious and light, between opera and musicals, between Europe and America, Berlin and Broadway--which Weill spent his life trying to abolish.”