Kurt Weill
Schebera, Jurgen
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Kurt Weill" How German Is Kurt Weill? Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life by Jurgen Schebera Yale University Press 38x pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Mark Steyn Frank Sinatra, who gives fulsome credit to his...
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...Even with an American lyric by Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill isn't quite one of the boys, like Sammy Cahn or Johhny Mercer...
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...Shows like The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny (193o) are really the first postmodern musicals, ironic parodies that don't quite believe in the form they're using...
...Brecht objected to political control in Nazi Berlin...
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...In a totalitarian society, it's what's acceptable to the prevailing political orthodoxy...
...In the end, that's a greater achievement than whatever political message that old fraud Brecht intended...
...and that Maxwell Anderson begins his lyric to Weill's first U.S...
...Sheesh...
...Weill stayed in New York, and thereby declared: Ich bin ein Irving Berliner...
...that his lyricists and fellow Broadway composers all refer to him as Curt While...
...Whenever I've discussed Weill on the BBC in London, their dread Pronunciation Unit has insisted that he be called Koort Vile...
...For most of the great American songbook—Berlin, the Gershwins— we have to thank the overzealous Cossacks of Czar Nicholas II who a century ago made emigration seem such an attractive proposition...
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...When Life described him, in 1947, as a German composer, Weill wrote to protest: "I do not consider myself a 'German composer.' The Nazis obviously did not consider me as such either, and I left their country (an arrangement which suited both me and my rulers admirably) in 1933...
...Schebera has unearthed an interesting review from Der Volkische Beobachter of Weill's 1932 opera Die Burgschaft: "This Jew has seen how his last opera led to trouble in Leipzig," roars the critic...
...Weill's librettist from the Threepenny Opera days, Bertolt Brecht, got it right: he loathed America, and after the war returned not just to Germany but to East Germany, the Stalinist GDR, where he founded the relentlessly political Berliner Ensemble...
...But, for artistic integrity, I'll take Weill toughing it out on Broadway any day...
...Instead it's all gloomy, neo-Brechtian recitals by self-consciously cerebral Teuton chantoosies...
...Born in Dessau in 1900, Kurt Weill belonged to that more recent tide of refugees, those who arrived mid-century from Mitteleuropa...
...Weill's German shows are weighted down not just by Brecht's anti-capitalist bunk, but even more by his structural laziness...
...no Lena Home singing "My Ship," or Tony Bennett's "Lost in the Stars...
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...As for "Mack the Knife," while Schebera may prefer the spiky orchestration in the original Berlin production, it's American arrangers who'vekept the song current...
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...Even without the Nazis, though, Weill would probably have been headed for Broadway...
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...The Broadway stuff is regarded as, at best, an aberration or, worse, a commercial sell-out...
...In a stunning act of cultural appropriation, he has effectively been posthumously extradited to Germany and allotted a very specific place in history—as the in-house composer who provided the seductive, decadent soundtrack to the Weimar Republic...
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...Like Billy Wilder, he spoke with a German accent...
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...As it happens, I agree with him that there aren't "two Weills," because it seems to me that it's America that vindicates the German side of him: After his death, the long-running off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera presented the piece in its new guise —not as an assault on capitalist London but as the embodiment of Weimar Berlin...
...Mac tonight...
...Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life by Jurgen Schebera Yale University Press 38x pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Mark Steyn Frank Sinatra, who gives fulsome credit to his composers and lyricists, likes to introduce "Mack the Knife" thus: "Here's a song by Weill and Blitzstein...
...Even after all that's happened to their wretched country, guys like Klemperer never learn...
...He's also full of careless, unargued value judgments: "Having to work on pieces below operetta must have been especially depressing," etc...
...He was very interested in money," sneered Otto Klemperer...
...As to money and the terrible people in American show business, it's all relative...
...A few years later, Weill scored another smash with a show he didn't even write: Kander and Ebb's Cabaret, which starred Weill's widow and, in its mimicry of his sardonic, mocking vamps, established the Weill sound as a more or less compulsory accompaniment to the era...
...He assumes the over-subsidy of German theater is the ideal to which all artistic arenas should aspire...
...A few years back, just before the Berlin Wall fell and took East Germany with it, Weill and Brecht's highest-earning song completed its slow, steady defection and signed up with Madison Avenue: It's the great taste Of McDonald's...
...I'm not saying I'm a Nazi, but, as boneheads go, this one has a point...
...He Americanized his name, too...
...It is utterly incomprehensible, then, that an author who presents thoroughly unGerman works is to be heard again at a theater supported by German taxpayers...
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...The long while is in contrast to his partner: a curt while...
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...Better a death camp in the Fatherland than a camp death on Broadway, surrounded by Gertrude Lawrence and a thousand prancing show queens...
...There's no big deal about why Weill never wrote anything like that in America: he got here and found it wasn't as bad as Brecht had said...
...But, whereas the American-ness of Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot has never been in doubt, Weill's cultural identity is still up for grabs...
...And then you read Schebera's discography of "important interpretations" by "the most important, internationally known interpreters": no mention of that killer arrangement for Sinatra by Quincy Jones, or Louis Armstrong's "Mack," or even Bobby Darin's, one of the biggest-selling pop singles ever...
...By a man's record collection shall ye know him: "important" is a peculiarly joyless term to apply to music, especially to a composer who wrote musical comedies for Mary Martin and Danny Kaye...
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...What's Berlin's musical theater of the twenties, thirties, and forties got that measures up to Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, On the Town, or Carousel...
...averhillso The American Spectator January 1996 73...
...Schebera doesn't have much to say about the music except "another Weill masterpiece," but he's big on such long-forgotten Weimar intellectual factions as Novembergruppe and obscure creeds like Neue Sachlichkeit...
...A man's name is as central to his identity as you can get, but, since his premature death in 1950, even that's been taken away from Weill...
...How German Is KurtWeill...
...In vain, I point out that the man himself, who's surely entitled to a say in the matter, pronounced it, from the moment he arrived in New York, Curt While...
...Schebera doesn't see it that way...
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...his work as a whole...
...And no equivocating, hyphenating, multicultural mumbo-jumbo either: From 1936 on, he spoke and wrote only in English —even to his wife, Lotte Lenya...
...It's a pity Weill isn't a law firm...
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...pop hit, "September Song" (1938), with a sly play on his composer's name: Oh, it's a long, long while From May to December...
...But then you notice the cover, by which I know you shouldn't judge a book, but all the same—granted that his bald pate and rimless specs invariably give him the austere air of a ledger clerk from Kafka, you still couldn't ask for a photograph that looks more, well, German...
...To listen to some of his critics, you'd think that Weill, torn between the devil and the deep blue rinse of the Broadway matinee ladies, should have stuck with Hitler as the lesser evil...
...Weill made his own contribution to those Broadway trailblazers: the extended dream sequences of Lady in the Dark (1941), a genuine vernacular opera in Street Scene (1947), and the prototype concept musical in Love Life (1948), written with Alan Jay Lerner and the forerunner, for better or worse, of much of Stephen Sondheim's work...
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...He is, to be sure, "an authority on the culture of Weimar Germany...
...In his preface to this new biography Jurgen Schebera claims a more even-handed approach: "The musical world has thought in terms of 'two Weills' and has been busy weighing the European and American works against each other—not a terribly productive pursuit," he sniffs, maintaining that we have to view MARK STEYN'S column on American culture begins next month in TAS...
...Musically, all this testifies to is the mesmeric quality of the sixth interval, a device that underpins "The Sheik Of Araby," "The One I Love Belongs To Somebody Else," and a zillion other rinkydink pop songs that don't have the overlaid cachet of Brecht's politics...
...In the years he's been writing about Weill, Schebera has been too busy citing "the leading Berlin film theoretician" to ask any of the composer's American lyricists, directors, and producers for their side of the story...
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...If he were, I'll bet he'd be suing his recent biographers, most of whom have come at him from the German end, and for whom ignorance of all things Broadway—the Broadway in which Weill believed and in which he immersed himself for half his working life—is a badge to be worn with pride...
...Any artistic enterprise dependent on state funding is always going to be vulnerable, simply because the right to free expression is inevitably compromised when it gets jumbled up with the right to public subsidy...
...What a twit...
...I am an American citizen...
...For a "German composer," you can't get more American than that...
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...he didn't mind it in Communist Berlin because he happened to agree with the politics...
...But it fulfills the definition of the American standard song—a melody so muscular and a lyric idea so strong that, transcending all pop fashions, it's endlessly adaptable...
...Where Weill's Broadway collaborators — mainstream showfolk like Lerner, Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart—were interested in fusing the constituent parts into an indivisible whole, Brecht, as Schebera unintentionally concedes, found it easier to fall back on "the separation of the elements of theater and song...
...He got too involved in American show business and all the terrible people in it...
...Subsidized art is always "acceptable" art: In a democratic society, it's what's acceptable to the louche tastes of the funding bodies—Andres Serrano's urine samples and Robert Map72 January 1996 The American Spectator plethorpe's massed ranks of black buttocks glistening like wax fruits...
...Sounds like a law firm...
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...Compare that to the $150 to $250 that you would expect to pay for equivalent U.S...
...The pictures and archival material here are fascinating, but I think it's time we had a Weill biography from the Broadway perspective...
...What does a guy have to do...
...He gives a stage shrug...
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Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
