About KURT WEILL

Essay by Alvin Epstein

In 1927, just as Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera was becoming the rage of Berlin and spreading his fame throughout Europe, the Nazis were also claiming world attention. And when Weill and Bertolt Brecht opened their next collaboration, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Hitler's thugs moved in. Weill's shows were critically and physically attacked and soon forced to close. His startlingly original music was "verboten" and consigned to the Nazi trash-heap along with work of many other innovators.

In 1937 the Nazis organized an exhibition called "Entartete Kunst" [Degenerate Art] and of course Weill's music was included. He and hundreds of other artists, writers and musicians who had the honor of appearing on the "Degenerate" list were forced to flee the horror that Germany had become.

In America, where most of them took refuge, Weill soon became as brilliant a Broadway composer as he had been a revolutionary one in Europe. But his music had experienced an amazing sea-change; he wanted to be, and was, as American a tune-smith as his great contemporaries Gershwin, Kern and Porter.