Kurt Weill - On Stage: From Berlin to Broadway [Paperback]

Foster Hirsch (Author), Kurt Weill (Composer)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2004

His best-known song is "Mack the Knife," with words by Bertolt Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera, first performed in Weimar Berlin in 1928. Five years later, Kurt Weill fled the Nazis to come to America, where he soon emerged as one of the most admired composers of the Broadway musical stage. His shows included: Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Street Scene and Lost in the Stars. His songs: "My Ship," "September Song," "Speak Low" and "It Never Was You." This biography concentrates on Weill's career in the United States, but its aim is to explore the truth in the comment made by Weill's wife, the unforgettable Lotte Lenya: "There is no American Weill, there is no German Weill. There is no difference between them. There is only Weill."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A provocative but uneven look at the composer of The Threepenny Opera, Lady in the Dark and other well-known musicals, this biography traces Weill's career from his satirical Weimar collaborations with Brecht to the musicals he created for Broadway after fleeing the Nazis in 1933. Brooklyn College film professor Hirsch (Harold Prince and the American Musical Theater) draws on extensive documentation from New York's Kurt Weill Foundation and new interviews with surviving participants to argue that the distinction most writers make between "Berlin Weill" and "Broadway Weill" is artificial. He explores, instead, what remained constant in Weill's creative personality despite the divergent styles of the Broadway and Berlin years. This intriguing approach is somewhat undermined by questionable assertions throughout the book. (For example, he cites the notoriously anti-Semitic music critic Virgil Thomson as an authority for the dubious notion that Weill's music evoked "the Jewish underworld of Berlin.") The book does, however, offer a textured portrait of Weill's Broadway career, and there are useful details about how his widow, the gifted performer Lotte Lenya, helped resuscitate his reputation with the 1950s production of Threepenny Opera in Greenwich Village. Hirsch's volume is good for casual enthusiasts and larger theater collections, though music fans may find the absence of analytical comment on Weill's compositions a drawback.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The Berlin premiere of The Threepenny Opera in 1928 was a pivotal event for Kurt Weill, securing him wide notoriety as a composer for musical theater and provoking a number of raised eyebrows from traditional figures in Weimar Germany. His exotic rhythms, evocative harmonic changes, and unique jazzy flavor all combined to produce a distinctive sound. Hirsch (film, CUNY, Brooklyn Coll.) traces Weill's illustrious career from these early days through his immigration to the United States, his ultimate destination after fleeing from the Nazis. Here, Weill wrote the scores for such memorable shows as Lady in the Dark, Knickerbocker Holiday, Lost in the Stars, and others. Hirsch provides details about each production, including an analysis of its artistic, theatrical, and social components as well as commentary on its public reception. Insights are offered into Weill's relationships, including his complex marriage to Lotte Lenya, his collaborations with the mercurial Bertolt Brecht, and his associations with Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner, Agnes de Mille, and countless others. In addition to his basic research, Hirsch incorporates material based upon a number of interviews that he recently conducted with prominent individuals (Harold Prince, Fred Ebb, etc.), enabling him to present additional perspectives on Weill's life and work as compared to previous biographies. This absorbing and well-researched work should be especially appealing to those interested in the history and evolution of musical theater. Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 406 pages
• Publisher: Limelight Editions; New edition edition (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879109904
• ISBN-13: 978-0879109905
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,264,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Overview of Weill's Work for the Theatre, April 10, 2007

By 

krebsman (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Kurt Weill - On Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (Paperback)

Kurt Weill's career has been hotly debated for more than 60 years. The questions began while he was still alive: Did he sell out his German artistry for the crass commercialism of Broadway? Or did he only really come into his own when he was freed from European snobbery? The answer is that both opinions are somewhat true and somewhat false. Rather than treat Weill's work as two separate careers, a European one and an American one as most commentators seem to do, Foster Hirsch treats Weill's career as a single entity. Hirsch's KURT WEILL ON STAGE is a superb chronological overview of Kurt Weill's work for the theatre, showing the logical evolution of his work. Weill became a world famous celebrity by age 30 as a result of his sensational THREEPENNY OPERA and MAHAGONNY. With the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, Weill wisely fled Germany, ending up in America after a period in Paris. But could he succeed in a new country and a new culture? Many distinguished European artist-refugees of that period simply could not adapt and faded into obscurity. Weill determined that he could succeed by writing in an American idiom. He made the transition quite smoothly, creating a string of popular Broadway shows that spawned hit songs like "September Song" and "Speak Low" before dying of a heart attack at age 50. At the time of his death he seems to have been just another Broadway composer, but with the passage of time, Weill's reputation has grown and he is now recognized as one of the 20th Century's great composers. In Hirsch's book, Weill's American shows are revealed to be a continuation of the innovative thrust of THREEPENNY OPERA. Just as he had worked with the prodigy Berthold Brecht in Germany, in America he collaborated with the nation's most prestigious writers, including the Pulitzer Prize winners Paul Green, Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart and Elmer Rice. Among his other collaborators were Ogden Nash and a pre-MY FAIR LADY Alan Jay Lerner. He worked with such noted directors as Max Reinhardt, Elia Kazan and Josh Logan and choreographers George Balanchine and Agnes DeMille. Mary Martin had her first starring role on Broadway in ONE TOUCH OF VENUS. Gertrude Lawrence made a huge hit in LADY IN THE DARK, which also catapulted Danny Kaye and Victor Mature to fame. And of course, there was Lotte Lenya, the German star whose unorthodox marriage to Weill is still confounding to most people. She had affairs with members of both sexes before, during and after the marriage to Weill; He made no secret of his affairs with other women. But they had an unbreakable bond that went beyond sex. Lenya devoted her life to promoting his work after he died and achieved her greatest fame late in life.

Hirsch keeps his opinions of the work fairly restricted, which I appreciated. The only Weill score he really seems to denigrate is LOST IN THE STARS. (I have to agree with him, though.) This is not really a biography of Weill. The biographical aspects of the book are very sketchy. They are there to provide a context for the work. I enjoyed this book enormously and listened to all my old Weill recordings (and bought some new ones) during the weeks I was reading it. There will probably be a revival of interest in Weill with the arrival of the new Broadway show LOVE MUSIK, which deals with the relationship of Weill and Lenya. KURT WEILL ON STAGE provides an excellent overview of Weill's life and work that I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiration for those who write for the musical stage, May 29, 2006

By 

The SAVI Savant (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (Hardcover)

Kurt Weill On Stage, a scholarly study published in 2002 by Foster Hirsch, is an outstanding overview of the theatrical career of one of the most talented and ambitious composers writing for the stage in the 20th century. Hirsch has access to the excellent materials of the Weill-Lenya Research Center and the support of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music; he supplements the vast array of correspondence and interviews available to him with interviews and accounts of the creation of the works from participants and spectators. He writes compellingly about Weill's gifts as musical dramatist and collaborator. The book is utterly inspiring to anyone (like me) who has ambitions to write for the musical stage.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Biography that focuses on Weill's enitre career, July 18, 2003

By 

Michael P. Nolan (Sarasota, Fl) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (Hardcover)

Too often, scholarly work on Kurt Weill focuses mainly on his German career in the 1920s-- "The Threepenny Opera," "Mahagonny"-- but Weill had a career that extended well into the 1940s as a Broadway composer, and Hirsch's book explores both aspects, although it is clear he's a fan of Weill's later American work.

I would recommend this book as a suppliment to Ronald Sanders' biography "The Days Grow Short," the standard of Weill biographies. However, Hirsch has access to different primary sources that Sanders did not have in the 1970s, and therefore can provide a different perspective. There is also a great deal of text devoted to Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife.

It has been criticzed that Hirsch's book deemphasizes musical analysis, which is true, but that is not the purpose. Analyse the music yourself or find the writings of Kim Kowalke for musical analysis.

I found this book enjoyable and a good supplient to many other Weill biographies on the shelves