Kurt Weill refused to set the Communist Manifesto to music
Kurt Weill wrote Mack the Knife with Bertolt Brecht, then sued to stop a film of their Threepenny Opera and won while Brecht lost. Their partnership broke over politics in 1930, and three years later the Nazis drove the cantor's son out of Germany, eventually to New York's theatres.
Weill was born on March 2, 1900, in the Jewish quarter of Dessau, where his father served as a cantor. He began piano and composing at twelve, and his earliest surviving piece, from 1913, is a Jewish wedding song. At eighteen he entered Berlin's Hochschule für Musik to study composition under Engelbert Humperdinck, but postwar money troubles sent him home in 1919 to coach singers at Dessau's Friedrich-Theater under Hans Knappertsbusch.
The decisive teacher was Ferruccio Busoni, who in December 1920 accepted him as one of five master students at the Prussian Academy of Arts. Busoni was a Neoclassicist, and under his influence Weill's stage music drifted away from mirroring characters' feelings toward acting as ironic commentary, an idea close to the distancing effect Brecht would later champion. To pay bills Weill played piano in a beer cellar and took private pupils, among them the pianist Claudio Arrau. In 1924 he met the singer Lotte Lenya at playwright Georg Kaiser's home; they married in 1926, divorced in 1933 and remarried in 1937.
The Threepenny Opera of 1928 reworked John Gay's The Beggar's Opera into satire, and Weill saw it as a way to reform opera for a modern theatre crowd. More Brecht collaborations followed, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, whose Alabama Song was later recorded by The Doors. Weill leaned socialist, yet when Brecht pushed further left, Lenya recalled him saying he could not set the Communist Manifesto to music.
As a prominent Jewish composer, Weill was denounced by the Nazis, who disrupted performances of works such as Der Silbersee. He fled in March 1933 to Paris, where he and Brecht made the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. Franz Werfel's biblical pageant The Eternal Road brought him to America, and he and Lenya settled in New York on September 10, 1935. There he helped shape Broadway with Lady in the Dark and Street Scene before his death on April 3, 1950.
Source: Kurt Weill
