Follow up on Kurt Weill bio-- a "Weill Mystique"?

Above: Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill at their home in New City, NY

I do not get too many comments on my blog articles of more than a few words..

My writer friend Goddard Graves, however, has this to say about the posting on composer Kurt Weill:

"Weill's life was comparatively brief, his composing career lasting barely three decades.  Since his death, almost two-thirds of a century have passed.  Weill's name is a household one, even in a day of rapidly decaying musical awareness.  But if you subtract half a dozen songs, what does anyone remember? 

 Really, audibly?  If one says "Mozart", or "Flatt & Scruggs" or "Cole Porter", a characteristic sound resonates in the mind.  What really emerges after hearing the name "Weill"?  I suspect that for most people it would be one of those few songs, each of which -- the handful of which I speak, is wildly (I resist the temptation to say "Weilly" different from the others:  e.g. from"Mackie-Messer" to "September Song" or "Alabama Song" to "Speak low".  If I am correct in that respect, then many people are thinking less of Weill's actual music than they are of a Weill mystique?"
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 My reply:

Fair enough. As we have discussed before, most people get their idea of the worth of artists and writers from the opinions of others, notably "opinion makers" and all sorts of "expert critics."

It isn't like baseball or football where you can look at solid stats and even films and videos of past performances and come to your own conclusion whether someone merits the Hall of Fame or the Heisman Trophy.    

But mystique plays a role in how we look at sports figures too...just like people have made Babe Ruth a mythical figure, or, in our times how someone like Joe Namath developed a "cult of personality" about him , or the way people take to the story of the Manning family.

Sports fans can get pretty heated about their likes and dislikes-- the phrase "the Bronx cheer " does not exist for nothing ( and I am not even going to go anywhere near the way Brits are passionate "followers" of different soccer clubs much less some of the past fan behavior over there.)

Yeah, all the arts thrive on "mystique," which is much longer lived for some people than for others.

I can't get out of my head back when one Italian woman filmmaker was the flavor of the month in NYC --largely from press ballyhoo-- and I walked out on  one of her comedies, totally unamused, while an eager Manhattan crowd around me laughed  extremely loudly ( at what? Clumsily expressed comic concepts and inept slapstick?)

Years later I remember talking to a Welsh woman I had met about the passing craze for that director's movies, and she explained "Oh, it's just like being in the hills of Wales, Larry. One of the sheep suddenly and loudly goes "Baaa!" and soon all the other sheep are going "Baaa! Baaa! Baa!" too."

Well I don't know what that proves except that crowd acclaim can be fickle and the apparent now enduring truth of Andy Warhol's quip about "people getting their 15 minutes of fame."   

A "Weill mystique"? More for some than for others, I guess--for instance yet another writer I know who last year pointed out to me Weill's cantor father and a link to Jewish liturgical music--the presence of "cantillation in Weill's music," in an extremely long email...it is all much more concrete than mystique to him, even if he may be in a minority.

(One afterthought: we were just celebrating the birthday of the great Giuseppi Verdi-- Weill's teacher in Berlin, Ferruccio Busoni,  once accused him of aspiring to be " a poor man's Verdi"--the great Maestro was if you check hit up by critics in his time--and very long career--for shifts in musical style. "Rigoletto" is in a different world musically than " Un Ballo En Maschera," and " La Traviata" and "Aida" don't seem to be written by the same composer at all.
And what of " Il Trovatore," which was a bigger hit in Germany  (where they swooned over the "Anvil Chorus") as an outlier?
Just a thought--L.K.)