KURT WEILL
Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”, like any work of genius, has both permanence and universality. But it is also intrinsically the product of a particular time and place, the Weimar Republic: it gave a voice to the cynicism rampant in Germany following upon the defeat of 1918 and a decade of social turmoil; it cocked a snook at establishment values; and it blended a traditional language of compositional technique with accessible but acerbic borrowings from the language of jazz. Small wonder, therefore, that it was proscribed by the Nazis, when they came to power, as degenerate art; for it represented the kind of Kultur that impelled Goering, so he said, to reach for his gun. However, even though it was clearly at odds, both aesthetically and politically, with the ethos of the Third Reich, one cannot ignore a third factor that contributed to its banning: Weill was a Jew; this made him anathema to Hitler, persona non grata to the government, and an object of distaste to much of the population. Shrewdly, he left while the going was good, and made a new career for himself in the United States. There, his Broadway shows achieved a certain box-office popularity, but none of his later music has either the bite or the originality of what he had composed in Germany: it was as though he now lacked a valid creative context, and settled instead for commercial success. The earlier works, though, endure; and today, eighty years later, they can be considered modern classics.
Weill’s music, from that Berlin period, is idiosyncratic in flavour, instantly recognizable, and always true to itself. His later music, for Broadway, was never wholly devoid of individual flavour; but it lacked a convincing stamp of authenticity. Ever the competent craftsman, he churned out persuasive melodies, attractively orchestrated; but they lacked the sardonic tang of the earlier work. This shift, this falling off, can be ascribed in part to his being a stranger in a strange land: the American way of life, at the time, had little of the intellectual and political sophistication he was used to; and its vocabulary, at least in the theatre, was humdrum, cliché-ridden, and sentimental. Unquestioningly, he accepted Broadway for what it was, and moulded himself to its requirements.
History should not judge him harshly for this. Immigrants to the United States usually try to fit in, adapting themselves to the prevailing weather and taking on the colour of their surroundings. Weill was no exception. In Europe, while there was still freedom of expression, he had rung up a whole series of artistic successes which, far from being hampered by their radicalism, had directly benefitted from it. In America, where conformity was the key to acceptance, Success was spelt with a capital letter, was viewed as an end in itself, and was measured in the bank balance, the debt-free home, and the shiny new car. Anything that sounded like criticism of the local mores would have been met with hostility — might even have led to deportation, back to the land of swastikas and gas-ovens. Weill (and who can blame him?) accommodated himself to the dictates of necessity.
Not everyone did, of course. Schoenberg and Hindemith, his fellow-refugees, held fast to the course they had charted for themselves in Vienna and Berlin: not for them the green pastures of compromise. Schoenberg’s had always been an austere, almost hieratic, talent; and his music, at once elitist and arcane, was never for a moment besmirched with the taint of populism. Hindemith’s idiom, in his serious work, was more accessible, but still inarguably highbrow; on the side, for his own philosophic reasons, he composed pieces that he called “practical music”, for amateurs; but he did not have the common touch, and these pieces never caught on.
Weill, by contrast, at least in his Berlin years, had somehow bridged the gulf between the intelligentsia and the general public, and he did so without sacrificing his creative integrity. Some of the credit for this must go to his librettist, Bertolt Brecht: as a playwright, Brecht combined a hard-hitting political intelligence with an innovative approach to dramatic technique and with a gift for writing dialogue in street-language. This was the ideal match for Weill, who responded with a similar fusion of his own, combining a highly original version of modernism with a deft use of a kind of musical slang. The partnership of these two artists was a perfect fit: they were exactly suited to each other, and their work uniquely captured the spirit of its time and place.
Nothing of the sort was possible for Weill in the United States. It might be argued that he could have gone right on doing what he had been doing in Germany, for Brecht had also fled across the Atlantic. Brecht was still writing, and would always write, in German, with no diminution of political and social acumen. In theory, there was no reason why the partnership could not have continued. But how and where could their work have been staged? There was no German-speaking public in the United States, apart from a few pockets of recent immigration. Anything that Brecht and Weill might have written and composed together, along former lines, would have existed in a vacuum, unproduced and unheard; and it would have been without interest to the American public at large and, for that matter, without relevance to the strengths and weaknesses of American society.
So the two men went their separate ways. Brecht followed a dedicated path through the jungle of Communism, eventually returning to Europe, to offer his services to the tyrannical regime of East Germany. And Weill found a niche on Broadway, never wholly abandoning his wry way of looking at the world, his slightly off-beat idiom as a composer. Yet the true artist, once so flourishing on his home ground, was unable to put down new roots of the same vitality. He seems not to have mourned the loss of his former career: in fact, he turned his back on it, mentally and emotionally, and rationalized what he was now doing; to him, it was a choice, not a loss. But the loss to twentieth-century music was immense.
