Kurt Weill - Life and Work, List of selected works
Composer, born in Dessau, EC Germany. He studied and worked at Berlin, became a composer of instrumental works, then collaborated with Brecht, achieving fame with Die Dreigroschenoper (1928, The Threepenny Opera), its best-known song, Mack the Knife, becoming an international classic. A refugee from the Nazis, he settled with his actress wife Lotte Lenya in the USA in 1935. His Broadway works included Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lady in the Dark (1941), and he also wrote the folk opera Down in the Valley (1948), which used traditional Kentucky tunes. His later operas and musical comedies, all of which contain an element of social criticism, did not repeat the success of the first.
Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950), born in Dessau, Germany and died in New York City, was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s until his death. In Weill's lifetime, his work was most associated with the voice of his wife, Lotte Lenya, but shortly after his death "Mack the Knife" was established by Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin as a jazz standard;
Life and Work
After growing up in a religious Jewish family, and composing a series of works before he was 20 (a song cycle Ofrahs Lieder with a text by Yehuda Halevi translated into German, a string quartet, and a suite for orchestra), he studied music composition with Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin and wrote his first symphony. Although he had some success with his first mature non-stage works (such as the String Quartet op.8 or the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, op.12), which were influenced by Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Weill tended more and more to vocal music and musical theatre. Lenya took great care to support Weill's work, and after his death she took it upon herself to increase awareness of his music, forming the Kurt Weill Foundation.
His best-known work is The Threepenny Opera (1928), a reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. The Threepenny Opera contains Weill's most famous song, "Mack the Knife" ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer"). Weill's working association with Brecht, although successful, came to an end over differing politics in 1930. As a prominent and popular Jewish composer, he was a target of the Nazi authorities, who criticized and even interfered with performances of his later stage works, such as Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930), Die Bürgschaft (1932), and Der Silbersee (1933). With no option but to leave Germany, he went first to Paris, where he worked once more with Brecht (after a project with Jean Cocteau failed) - the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. Weill believed that most of his work had been destroyed, and he seldom and reluctantly spoke and wrote German again, with the exception of, for example, letters to his parents who had escaped to Israel.
Rather than continue to write in the same style that had characterized his European compositions, Weill made a study of American popular and stage music, and his American output, though held by some to be inferior, nonetheless contains individual songs and entire shows that not only became highly respected and admired, but have been seen as seminal works in the development of the American musical. For his work on Street Scene Weill was awarded the very first Tony Award for Best Original Score.
In the 1940s Weill lived in a home in New City in Downstate New York near the New Jersey border and made frequent trips both to New York City and to Hollywood for his work for theatre and film. Weill was active in political movements encouraging American entry into World War II, and after America joined the war in 1941, Weill enthusiastically collaborated in numerous artistic projects supporting the war effort both abroad and on the home front. He and Maxwell Anderson also joined the volunteer civil service by working as air raid wardens on High Tor Mountain between their home in New City and Haverstraw, New York in Rockland County.
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