Курт Вайль: Жизнь и творчество немецкого композитора

German composer (1900–1950)

Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900April 3, 1950) was a German born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen in 1943.

Weill was born on March 2, 1900, the third of four children to Albert Weill (1867–1950) and Emma Weill (née Ackermann; 1872–1955). He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the "Sandvorstadt", the Jewish quarter in Dessau in Saxony, where his father was a cantor. At the age of twelve, Weill started taking piano lessons and made his first attempts at writing music; his earliest preserved composition was written in 1913 and is titled "Mi Addir: Jewish Wedding Song". In 1915, Weill started taking private lessons with Albert Bing, kapellmeister at the "Herzogliches Hoftheater zu Dessau", who taught him piano, composition, music theory, and conducting. Weill performed publicly on piano for the first time in 1915, both as an accompanist and soloist. The following years he composed numerous lieder to the lyrics of poets such as Joseph von Eichendorff, Arno Holz, and Anna Ritter, as well as a cycle of five songs titled Ofrahs Lieder to a German translation of a text by Yehuda Halevi. Weill graduated with an Abitur from the Oberrealschule of Dessau in 1918, and enrolled at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik at the age of 18, where he studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, Nikos Skalkottas, and Esther Zweig. Arrau, Abravanel, and Jolles remained members of Weill's circle of friends thereafter, and Jolles's sole surviving composition predating the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 is a fragment of a work for four pianos he and Weill wrote jointly. In February 1924 the conductor Fritz Busch introduced him to the dramatist Georg Kaiser, with whom Weill would have a long lasting creative partnership resulting in several one act operas. At Kaiser's house in Grünheide, Weill first met the singer and actress Lotte Lenya in the summer of 1924. The couple were married twice: in 1926 and again in 1937 (after their divorce in 1933). She 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. From November 1924 to May 1929, Weill wrote hundreds of reviews for the influential and comprehensive radio program guide Der deutsche Rundfunk; Hans Siebert von Heister had already worked with Weill in the November Group, and offered Weill the job shortly after becoming editor in chief. Although he had some success with his first mature non stage works (such as the String Quartet, Op. 8, and 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 towards vocal music and musical theatre. His musical theatre work and his songs were extremely popular in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Weill's music was admired by composers such as Alban Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Darius Milhaud and Stravinsky, but it was also criticized by others: Schoenberg, who later revised his opinion, and Anton Webern. 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. Engel directed the original production of The Threepenny Opera in 1928. It contains Weill's most famous song, "Mack the Knife" ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer"). but for Weill, coming from a musical perspective, it was something else as well: "It gives us the opportunity to make opera the subject matter for an evening in the theater", part of what Weill saw as a lifelong process to "reform" opera for the modern stage. The stage success was filmed by G. W. Pabst in two language versions: Die 3 Groschen Oper and L'opéra de quat' sous. Weill and Brecht tried to stop the film adaptation through a well publicized lawsuit—which Weill won and Brecht lost. Weill continued to work with Brecht on the musical Happy End (1929), best known for the songs "Surabaya Johnny", "Bilbao Song", and "Sailor's Tango"; the children's opera Der Jasager (1930); and the opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), best known for "Alabama Song" (later recorded by The Doors, among many others). Weill's working association with Brecht, although successful, came to an end over politics in 1930. Though Weill associated with socialism, after Brecht tried to push their work even further in a left wing direction, Weill commented, according to his wife Lotte Lenya, that he was unable to "set the Communist Manifesto to music." While in Germany in the early 1930s, Weill also collaborated with the American virtuoso banjoist Mike Danzi in an early production of his opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. During a rehearsal, Weill congratulated Danzi for his accurate interpretation of the chords found in his score while noting that most other banjoists had complained that they were not actually written for the banjo at all.

The Kurt Weill Centre (German:Kurt Weill Zentrum) in Dessau was founded in 1993. It provides a museum, library, archive and media centre and organises an annual festival celebrating the composer's work. It is housed in the Feininger house, a house designed by the architect Walter Gropius which was originally lived in by the artist Lyonel Feininger. The property is part of the World Heritage site the Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau. The centre, with its collection of material on Weill, is listed as a cultural memorial of national importance. The centre is one of the "Beacons of light" of the Konferenz Nationaler Kultureinrichtungen (Conference of National Cultural Institutions), a union of cultural institutions in the new states of Germany i. e. area that was formerly East Germany.

Founded by Lotte Lenya in 1962, the non profit, private foundation is dedicated to promoting understanding of Weill's life and works and preserving the legacies of Weill and Lenya. The foundation administers the internationally recognized Lotte Lenya Competition, a grant program, various sponsorships and fellowships, the Weill Lenya Research Center, and the Kurt Weill Prize, and publishes the Kurt Weill Edition and the Kurt Weill Newsletter. Trustees of the New York based organization have included Harold Prince, Victoria Clark, Jeanine Tesori, Tazewell Thompson, and Teresa Stratas.

Weill's grandmother was Jeanette Hochstetter of Liedolsheim in Baden Württemberg. Weill was one of four members of the same Hochstetter family to lead distinguished careers in the fields of music and literature. His first cousin once removed was Caesar Hochstetter (born January 12, 1863, in Ladenburg, a suburb of Mannheim – his date and place of death are unknown but this was probably during The Holocaust), a composer and arranger who collaborated with Max Reger and who dedicated Aquarelles, Op. 25, to him. Caesar's younger brother was Gustav Hochstetter [de] (born May 12, 1873, Mannheim – died 1942, Theresienstadt concentration camp), Professor of Literature at the University of Brussels, writer and poet and friend of Wilhelm Busch. His second cousin was the childhood prodigy pianist, Lisy Fischer (born August 22, 1900, Zürich, Switzerland – died June 6, 1999, Newcastle upon Tyne, England).

1923 : Recordare, Op. 11