Friday, January 24, 2014

One of My Favorite Composers: Kurt Weill...and talking about his music with others

I just recently posted (several hours ago) an essay by my old pal Goddard Graves on his "inspiration" to write.

In my forward to that piece I mentioned his student radio show analysis of how Mozart and Weill had each tackled the task of ending the first act of an opera with an ensemble finale..

Goddard and I had disagreements about Weill, with his insistence that Weill NEEDED Brecht more than vice versa ( I was always leery of "Poor B.B.", who died a millionaire preaching communist doctrine in East Berlin and having also (besides the usual Swiss bank accounts) and Austrian passport to take advantage of if he had to make a run for it)

Anyway, a third person has come into the picture here, also from old high school, the writer George Rosen, who regaled me last year with a VERY long email about "cantillation" in the music of Weill ( Weill's father having been a Jewish cantor in Dessau, Germany).

Why he felt some pressing need to lecture me about this after so many years I do not know, but then who knows what starts to seem more important to us as we age.

Anyway, I have importuned on George to give me his HIS account on what got him writing ( my review of his book of short stories, "The Immanence of God in the Tropics" is on the web at Amazon.com...I liked it but had to warn prospective readers that its far flung stories, set in Africa, Mexico, and the U.S. were more like Chekhov than Harry Potter or even less like say, P.G. Wodehouse...as it happens, I have ignored Potter and love both Chekhov and Wodehouse, but that is neither here nor there).

Like a lot of people, the first Weill song I ever heard was "Mac the Knife," as performed by Louis Armstrong...later I heard "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," or part of it, on a Chicago FM station while in high school and promptly went out and got the Weill discs that were then available ( my mother was very uncomfortable when she checked them out one day and said to me, " I don't know if you should be listening to all this stuff with gangsters and whores in it," but by then no one was going to tell me what I could listen to ...)

I will skip over the role of the redoubtable Lotte Lenya in all this..of course, while we owe her the survival of Weill's music from his earlier days pretty much, I have read accounts which put her reminiscences of the whole Berlin "Jazz Age" scene in the category of "tales told by an unreliable narrator."

Anyway, on to Weill, whose music from the American "Street Scene" I delighted in playing on the saxophone in high school...

But here first is a YouTube Billie Holiday version of "Speak Low" from Weill's "One Touch of Venus"--(and who needs Bertolt Brecht?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kxqFMNQo5U