Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill was a German composer, music teacher, and conductor, best known for his collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht. He was born in Dessau on March 2, 1900, the son of Albert Weill, the chief cantor of the city’s synagogue and a composer of liturgical music.

From 1918 to 1924, Weill studied in Berlin with Engelbert Humperdinck in composition, Friedrich Koch in counterpoint, and Rudolf Krasselt in conducting, before continuing his studies with Ferruccio Busoni and Philipp Jarnach. His early work reflected the influence of his teachers and Igor Stravinsky. In the mid-1920s, he simplified his musical language and incorporated popular idioms, including elements of jazz.

With playwright Georg Kaiser, Weill wrote the cantata The New Orpheus (1925) and the operas The Protagonist (1926) and The Tsar Has His Photograph Taken (1928). He met Brecht in 1927, beginning a long collaboration. Their first joint work was the short song opera Mahagonny, which they later developed into The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Weill also set Brecht’s words in Berlin Requiem (1928) and the sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. Their Threepenny Opera, staged in Berlin in 1928, brought wide attention, and its songs quickly became popular.

Weill moved to Paris in 1933 and to the United States in 1935, where he continued to work in musical theater and musicals. His New York debut was The Way of the Promise, a biblical drama with a libretto by Franz Werfel, written in 1935 and staged by Max Reinhardt in 1937. During his American years, he wrote ten musicals, including Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Street Scene (1947), based on Elmer Rice’s play, and Lost in the Stars (1949). He became a United States citizen in 1943.

Weill’s music occupies a distinctive place in 20th-century musical culture. The “Mack the Knife” ballad from The Threepenny Opera became a jazz standard. His work connected classical and popular music and influenced composers including Carl Orff and Benjamin Britten, as well as European and American songwriting. He was also a precursor to the musical polystylism developed by Alfred Schnittke in the 1970s through the 1990s. Weill married Austrian actress Lotte Lenya in 1926; they divorced in 1933 and remarried in 1937. Their second marriage lasted until his death in New York on April 3, 1950. Weill received a Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1947, and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music was awarded in 1970.