Lindberghflug kurt weill biography

Kurt Weill

Article by Gregg Wager

Despite the relative brevity of his life, composer Kurt Weill forged a far-reaching career that challenged the purity of preexisting styles.  As a famous German Jew, he fled Nazi Germany, fending for himself in foreign countries such as America, where versatility of styles, unlike anything in Germany, interested him the most. That these varied styles— music and theater, American and European—in which he worked were (and sometimes still are) hostile to one another, places him less in the role of a unifier, and more in the role of a “crossover” artist.

Many who unconditionally praise Weill's output typically pick only one of his musical “personalities” and contrive ways of dismissing whatever other body of his work might offend them (whether his German music, Broadway music, “lowbrow” songs or “highbrow” works). Critics and scholars are presented a perplexing task when called upon to classify or evaluate Weill's importance to music or theater of the 20century, since their critical versatility rarely matches Weill's creative versatility.

As he was sometimes outspoken, attacking with flare what he declared to be outmoded prejudices, Weill provided many quotable statements that lend support to many of his adherents, as well as his detractors. At other times he seemed to maneuver with stealth, using these very same prejudices to cleverly keep his career vital, nonchalantly but deftly pressing the political buttons of the international music world of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

He was deceptively shrewd with business, socially charming, despite his shyness, and, above all, planned everything he did with equanimity and without impetuosity. In all these ways, he was the direct opposite of his most famous collaborator, Bertolt Brecht. 

Early Life

Born in Dessau March 2, 1900, Kurt Julian Weill was the son of a Jewish cantor. D

CD Review

Summary for the Busy Executive: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

In 1940, before the première of his Ballad of Magna Carta, Kurt Weill said to a reporter for the New York Sun, "As for myself, I write for today. I don't give a damn about posterity." In 1929, the buzz over Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic hadn't even begun to die down, and Weill and Bertolt Brecht conceived of music for the radio celebrating heroism, with Lindbergh as the exemplar. Weill had worked in radio since at least 1925 and written several previous scores (at least one of which has been lost), his greatest in this genre probably the Berliner Requiem. The radio fascinated several major composers of this century and seemed to hold out the promise of a new kind of art, as well as a new kind of audience, outside the traditional concert venue. The "new art" never really panned out. Just about every work written expressly for radio (with the exception of John Cage's Music for 13 Radios and 26 Players) owes its life to live performances. Radio operas like The Old Maid and the Thief keep their hold in the repertory not on radio, but with stage performances and CD recordings. Weill's own Down in the Valley, conceived originally for the radio, has been performed as a stage opera mainly by amateur and student groups and with Weill's help. He converted it and doubled its length. The new radio audience, as we know, turned out to be interested in other kinds of music.

The work was also scheduled for the Baden-Baden music festival run by Paul Hindemith, and the festival theme that year was "collaborative works." Since the festival had commissioned Weill and Brecht's Happy End, the two invited Hindemith to compose some of the numbers. This version premièred in a broadcast by the Southwest German Radio Orchestra under the direction of Hermann Scherchen. Weill, however, did not want the joint score consi

German composer (1900–1950)

Not to be confused with Curt Vile, Kurt Vile, or Kurt Weil.

Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 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.

Family and childhood

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 Mus