Customer Reviews

Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life

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Illustrated, yes. A life, well, seems like there's more to be told. Give this book's publisher 1 star, its author 2, and its translator 5. A smooth and seamless read, if not an altogether satisfying one.

Schebera does convey a sympathetic impression of Weill, and the illustrations offer a welcome insight into the historical context of Weill's music and how he was marketed. The difficulty is, none of the illustrated material is in color, a cost-saving move by the publisher that undercuts the value of the illustrations. Another shortcoming is that none of the discusion of Weill's music is accompanied by the music on the page.

Basically, this biography comes down to an itinerary of Weill's life with little said about what motivated and inspired the composer or how his creativity was stimulated and expressed. Remember, this was a man who was exiled from his native Germany in 1936, following the rise of Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party, both because he was a Jew and also because he was regarded as a debaucher of German culture through his efforts to modernized classical music and opera.
Schebera is much better at placing Weill in a history-of-music context than at showing us what made the man tick. He unfortunately portrays a man whose life must have brimmed with emotional reactions to events occurring around him, from the creative explosion of the Weimar Republic to WWII to the Holocaust with a matter-of-fact detachment and, sorry to say, shallowness. Where this lack of emotional insight shows most notably is in Weill's personal relations. For example, he was married to Lotte Lenya twice, yet Schebera offers only a perfunctory and temporal explanation for their divorce and later casually glides over the motivations for their remarriage. His one telling quotation, Weill's remark from their first marriage, "Lenya, you know you come right after my music!" never gets the interpersonal embellishments one assumes is available in the voluminous correspondence between Weill and Lenya.

Weill also had an on-and-off creative relationship with Bertold Brecht whose ruptures Schebera summarizes under "creative differences" without elaborating. These artists, collectively with "Threepenny Opera" and individually or through other collaborations, are two of the most prominent and influential innovators in contemporary musical theater, yet Schebera treats their relationship and break-ups like a change of address or a scheduled vacation.

Behind this lack of detail, there seems to be an unstated assumption that the reader knows as much about the period and about the history of music as the author.

Not a book without merits, but certainly a book that leaves one hungry for more.