2.1 27-69
There were, as nearly everybody knows by now, two Kurt Weills . . . . The first Weill, it has been said, wrote "authentic" works with a claim on the art music world; the second "sold out" for popular success.
-- Edward Rothstein, 1987 1
In September 1942, Kurt Weill reported to Lotte Lenya on his six-hour meeting with Marlene Dietrich, during which he had tried to persuade her to play the title role in One Touch of Venus: "Marlene liked the music, but started that old business about the different quality of my music here in America. I cut it short by saying, 'Never mind those old German songs. --We're in America now and Broadway is tougher than the Kurfürstendamm.' That stopped her." 2 But it hasn't stopped others. In the subsequent five decades, that familiar theme, the "different quality" of Weill's American music, has become evermore an evergreen, subject to countless variations, most of which have deftly shifted accentuation from "different quality" to "different quality." Meanwhile, posthumous professional productions of Weill's American stage works have been infrequent and access to them at best only partial (through vocal scores and recordings) and at worst entirely misrepresentative (through film adaptations). The perceived stylistic and qualitative differences between Weill's American and European music--already "old business" in 1942--have become so pronounced that today it is commonplace to speak of "two Weills."
This critical construct has even been institutionalized in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, where the final section of David Drew's Weill entry is actually entitled "The Two Weills." Drew asserts that "while some notable artists have simply stopped creating at a certain stage in their careers and a few have put an end to their lives, Weill is perhaps the only one to have done away with his old creative self in order to make way for a new one . . . . With Lady in the Dark a new Weill was born, to the horror of the handful of old admirers who were waiting for an American Dreigroschenoper." 3 Drew infers the genuine composer's suicide from the circumstantial evidence of an alleged sea change in the music Weill composed in America. "This has nothing to do with normal evolutionary processes," he explained in 1969. "It is . . . a psychological and indeed historical phenomenon for which there is no parallel in music. It means that in Weill we have not one, but two composers. The first and important one can and should be evaluated without reference to the second." 4
Today such an opinion cannot be dismissed out of hand as merely Eurocentric, for the "two-Weill" conceit was, in fact, coined in America amid shadows cast by the critical response of French-connected musical modernists to Lady in the Dark's triumphant premiere in January 1941. Weill's erstwhile admirer Virgil Thomson, who five years earlier had claimed in Modern Music that "Weill has almost created style," lamented in the New York Herald Tribune that the émigré composer's effort to master a distinctively American and populist Broadway idiom had failed: "All is monotonous, heavy, ponderously German. It reminds one of Berlinese jazz from the early 1920s, of revues called 'Die Schokoladen Kiddies,' of sentimental ditties called 'Ein kleiner Slow-Fox mit Mary.' . . . His music is just as banal as before; but its banality expresses nothing." 5 Samuel L. M. Barlow, whom Thomson had recommended to the editorial staff of Modern Music, echoed Thomson's views and invoked, for possibly the first time, the notion of a "true Weill" in contrast to the one who had composed Lady in the Dark:
In this long score, there are not three minutes of the true Weill. And in this new medium, this new life, this new success, the promise has been buried under a branch of expensive but imitation laurel. This is sad, and no joking matter. Something first-rate has gone third-rate, which is a loss for everyone who cares deeply for an art, beyond any prejudice or timeliness or mode." 6
Shortly before Weill's death, the distinguished New York drama critic Harold Clurman, one of the founders of the Group Theatre, provided a retrospective of the composer's American career:
Weill's career since Johnny Johnson, despite excellent work now and again--always on a high level of craftsmanship--has been an adaptation toward an increasingly facile, I might say, artistically nondescript goal. The result has been--not unnaturally--an ever more conventional musicality, a decline in real quality, and an increase in journalistic praise, as well as box office receipts . . . . There is nothing wrong in adapting oneself to a new environment, but one must adapt oneself upward rather than downward, that is, to the more challenging and difficult as well as to the simpler and safer. 7
A year later, in a review of a memorial concert for Weill in Town Hall, Virgil Thomson agreed that the aesthetic shift differentiating the two Weills had indeed coincided with the biographical dislocation at the midpoint of his career and succinctly formulated the indictment: "After Weill came to live in America, he ceased to work as a modernist." 8
As musicology now begins to take the historical measure of various strains of high modernism and deconstruct its mythology, Weill emerges as a key re. 9 Although in the introductory statement to the first Ferienkurse für internationale neue Musik in Darmstadt in 1946 Weill was one of the ten composers mentioned by name for European post-War reclamation (curiously Webern and Berg were not), sustainable interest in his post-1933 music did not outlive him there. Weill himself had well recognized the precarious state of his post-war reputation in Germany and did not underestimate the cultural barriers that would prevent a fair hearing of his American works. In 1949, for example, he discouraged the notion of a German production of One Touch of Venus, his Broadway piece most closely resembling conventional musical comedy: "From all I know about the present status of the German theatres my impression is that they are in no way equipped to do justice to a piece like Venus, and a bad production would do a lot of harm to me. My European reputation is worth more to me than the very negligible amount of money I can make with this production." 10 Weill's misgivings were confirmed by Berlin theater critic Friedrich Luft, who marvelled at Weill's and Lerner's "vaudeville" Love Life, the "most beautiful and most powerful evening of theater" he had encountered in New York in 1949: "Such a combination of music, lighting, dance, and wit could hardly be produced with such nonchalant precision by us at home, today or in the foreseeable future." 11
But those European critics who could know Weill's American work only by reputation, popular arrangements of individual songs, or grossly disred screen adaptations of his stage works, tended to concur with Otto Klemperer's assessment: "Weill's last pieces I find awful." 12 The vehemence with which Weill's American work was repudiated in the post-War European musical environment is indicative less of its intrinsic value than of the challenge it seemed to pose to prevailing canons and hierarchies. 13 For example, in the opening line of his obituary of Weill, T. W. Adorno suggested that "the profile of this composer, who died in America, can hardly be encompassed by the concept of a composer at all." Thereby, Adorno implied that Weill's individual works, his total output, and his compositional evolution lacked the organic unity, stylistic progression, and internal consistency expected of a genuine composer. 14
Adorno, of course, had long been a, if not the, key re in Weill-reception, at least in Central Europe. A virtuoso display of dialectical gymnastics had initially allowed him to defend Die Dreigroschenoper, and consequently Brecht and Weill, from that work's popular success. Squeezed into an almost unmaneuverable space between an idiosyncratic Marxist world view and his modernist dictum that "all good music since 1850 has renounced commercialism altogether," Adorno declared Dreigroschenoper's popularity to have been a misunderstanding. The music's parodistic surface is so appealing, he noted, that "those who don't observe sharply enough might think it's all fun" rather than a negative example, a warning against "the demonic abyss of inanity." 15 Although themselves assembled from "the debris of old, atrophied material," Dreigroschenoper and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny brilliantly exposed the folly, in Adorno's view, of attempting to revive dead (read tonal) music. But Weill was unwilling to follow the implicit agenda that Adorno was thus setting out for him under the label "surrealism." 16 After writing an enthusiastic essay about the Berlin production of the Mahagonny opera at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Adorno predictably reneged on his commitment to review Der Jasager and Die Bürgschaft, whose path led away from the parts of Mahagonny that had attracted him. Erstwhile praise for the composer he had constructed was becoming something of an embarrassment. Weill had left Brecht behind, and, with him, what had been the basis for Adorno's defense. Further comment would require disavowal, as Weill had renounced the values Adorno considered to be absolute: subjective expression's exclusive claim to authenticity, the historical necessity of atonality, and the existence of objective, integral laws of musical structure. In contrast, long before he would arrive in America, Weill claimed that the European tradition of autonomous art music had reached its appointed historical end and was thus doomed to extinction. 17 In his works composed after 1925, Weill had tried to break out of New Music's splendid isolation, to attract a non-specialist audience, to dismantle the barricades that the "art-for-art's-sake" wing of modernism had erected against mass culture. He suggested that an art work must arise from some sort of social consciousness.
By 1940 Adorno and Weill were both in New York. They had very little, if any, direct social or professional contact. 18 As Weill was composing Lady in the Dark, Adorno was writing his Schoenberg study, "Schoenberg and Progress," later to be published as part of his Philosophie der neuen Musik (philosophy of modern music). 19 Therein Adorno insists that "even the loneliest language of the artist" communicates by renouncing communication, and that this lonely discourse "reveals more about social tendencies than does communicative discourse." In an interview the same year, Weill categorically rejected "Einsamkeit" (loneliness) and once again affirmed his commitment to accessibility over autonomy: "I do not feel that I compromise my integrity as a musician by working for the theater, the radio, the motion pictures or any other medium which can reach the public which wants to listen to my music." 20
After Adorno moved to Los Angeles in 1941, he corresponded with Weill only once, at Brecht's instigation, concerning a proposed all-Black production of The Threepenny Opera. 21 Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949, and the occasion of his next public statement on Weill was the obituary, which, although it evinces no firsthand knowledge of Weill's stage works after Lady in the Dark, nevertheless dismisses them all as concessions to the American culture industry: "He had tried to write grand opera. The most pretentious was Die Bürgschaft. But he no doubt realized the inadequacy of that." Then, modelling himself on Cole Porter, "Weill yielded," Adorno claimed, "to the pressures and enticements of exile, without fully counting the cost." But critic and Schoenberg-biographer H. H. Stuckenschmidt soon did and tallied the balance sheet: Weill's success in America "was dearly bought by loss of quality." 22
"Success" is almost an idée fixe within the two-Weill debate, and it has already become something of a leitmotif in this discussion. Although most modernist critics have tended to date Weill's purported "sellout" for popular success as roughly coinciding with his arrival in America, his search for a wider audience in commercial venues had begun in Berlin. Already in the cultural setting of 1928, success and Amerikanismus--and in Siegfried Kracauer's formulation, also "mass ornaments" and neue Sachlichkeit (new matter-of-factness)--were widely seen to be linked: "The content of Americanism reaches its peak not in cultural values but in the idea of success. Work only rarely means something for its own sake to Americans . . . while pure creativity in all forms not immediately concerned with success assumes the status of a social wallflower." 23 After the worldwide success of Die Dreigroschenoper, even Hans Heinsheimer, representing Weill's publisher, Universal Edition, expressed concern over Weill's most recent "commercialized artistic activity," the score for Brecht's and Elisabeth Hauptmann's slight Amerikanismus-Stück, Happy End:
You should and must free yourself once and for all from Berlin's commercialized artistic activity now that the success of your recent works has given you complete independence and freedom, not only financially, but also artistically. . . . You must once again create works which can truly endure, works which aren't just created for the moment as accompaniment for plays, but which follow the great path of development I have always perceived in all your works. 24
Two decades later, having just seen Weill's and Maxwell Anderson's anti-apartheid "musical tragedy" Lost in the Stars, New York Times music critic Olin Downes wrote to the composer to express opinions similar to Heinsheimer's:
In many respects I think Lost in the Stars is the best thing you have done yet for the theater . . . . But I am still waiting for the day when you get exactly the subject which you can treat without the faintest consideration of public taste or expediency of any sort, while in the meantime you are constantly developing a reputation for making it more and more possible for you to do exactly what you want to do ultimately. 25
In attempting to persuade Weill to abandon the more "accessible" path and turn back onto a "higher," albeit more difficult road, without regard for an audience, both Heinsheimer and Downes seemed unable to perceive or accept the central thread linking the two halves of Weill's career. The composer's responses to each of them, though formulated in different languages and under drastically different circumstances, are remarkably alike in content and even diction. Weill wrote to Heinsheimer:
The fact that my Dreigroschenoper music has been commercialized doesn't speak against it, but for it, and we would be falling back into our old mistakes if we were to deny some music its importance and artistic value simply because it found its way to the masses . . . . I am the only creative musician who for years has worked consistently and uncompromisingly in the face of opposition from the snobs and aesthetes toward the creation of fundamental forms of a new, simple, popular musical theater. Even my least significant music theater works during this time have been written with this sense of responsibility and have grown out of a constant effort to further a development which seems to me the only one possible. Is that commercialized artistic activity? 26
And to Downes:
It must be somewhat surprising indeed to find a serious subject treated in a form which (in this country at least) has been used so far only for a lighter form of entertainment. But that was exactly the nature of my experiment--to do a "musical tragedy" for the American theater so that the typical American audience (not a specialized audience) can accept it, and the real success of the piece to me is the fact that the audience did accept it without hesitation, that they accepted a lot of very serious, tragic, quite un-Broadway-ish music of operatic dimensions, together with some songs written in a more familiar style. Personally I don't feel that this represents a compromise. 27
Weill's expulsion from Germany and subsequent emigration certainly complicated the issue of "success," for theories of assimilation or resistance in exile are closely intertwined with certain aesthetic precepts of modernism. In Adorno's words, "every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly closed doors of his self-esteem." 28 As might be expected, Weill felt just the opposite. In 1949, he wrote (in English) to one of his old friends in Germany:
My success here (which people usually ascribe to "luck") is mostly due to the fact that I took a very positive and constructive attitude towards the American way of life and the cultural possibilities in this country of which most of the German intellectuals who came here at the same time, were critical and doubtful. I found enormous latent possibilities in my special field, the musical theatre . . . . Of the ten theatre pieces I've written since I came here, about half were successes, the other half failures. 29
Success of the collaborative venture of Broadway musical theater entailed high stakes and was unambiguously defined: if a musical play failed to find an audience, it disappeared, sometimes after only a single performance. And after a flop in New York, rarely was there the possibility of a second chance for revision and restaging that Rossini and Verdi had taken for granted, or even Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny had eventually managed. The intertwined processes of creation and production of American musical theater blurred the boundaries between "work" and "event," composition and performance, with out-of-town previews serving as a lower-stakes opportunity for the collaborators to proof the pudding and refine its recipe before a paying audience, which on Broadway would function as final arbiter, an all-powerful, democratically constituted collective critic. Predictably Adorno considered such an approach to the creative process a capitulation to cultural commercialism: "Popularity is psychologically calculated down to the last note for its effect on the listener." 30 Weill disagreed; "It wouldn't be so much fun if it weren't so dangerous, so unpredictable," he told Lenya. "It is safer to work in the movies. But how dull, how uninspiring!" 31 Whereas "the enormous amounts of money involved" in radio, television, and film forced the "creative artist to adapt himself to the requirements of that industry," in the theater "investments are smaller so one is much freer." 32
The 1930s were a grim decade for the Broadway musical, and not just because of the Great Depression. Competing with radio and movie musicals that had lured away many of its creative teams and performers, the stage musical was searching for both new form and function. To envision Broadway in 1936 as "a perfect place to develop a musical theater which, in time, will become to [America] what opera was to Europe" required considerable imagination, especially after the financial failure of Porgy and Bess, Weill's misleading initiation to the American musical theater. 33 In an essay published in 1937, Weill appended "in America" to a title--"The Future of Opera,"--that Schoenberg had used a decade earlier (and Busoni two decades previous), and set out an ambitious agenda for a "music theater which would develop on a new plane fixed by the conditions in the United States." Whereas Schoenberg had insisted that "art and success have to part company," Weill critiqued the moribund European operatic tradition that had lost its way with "an almost diseased passion for musical originality." 34 He asserted that "it would be much healthier for an American musical theater to make certain concessions to Broadway showmanship than to cater to a traditional opera form which is European in concept and purpose." 35
Adorno scoffed at what he considered to be self-deception: "Weill talked as if concession to the commercial field were no concession, but only a pure test of 'skill' which made everything possible even within standardized boundaries." Yet, the substance and manner of Weill's Broadway works (with one or two exceptions, perhaps) virtually guaranteed that they would not be the box office successes of his competitors. As Stephen Hinton has observed, "Weill's American works--each breaking new ground, each laying claim to the status sui generis--are no less Urformen than the European." 36 Weill's emigration had unexpectedly given him the freedom to explore new hybrid forms of musical theater which the state-subsidized theatrical system in Germany had largely failed to accommodate. The composer described his own Linie from 1927 to 1947, from the Songspiel Mahagonny through Street Scene, as continuous, a striving toward "a special brand of musical theater" ("CT").
Most critics, however, have disagreed. Ernst Krenek, in his essay "America's Influence On Its Emigre Composers," included Weill among those colleagues who took "great pains, against their better judgment, to cultivate modes of writing conditioned by their surroundings" and "whose American works point up new characteristics unknown to their earlier works." Weill, with his "irrepressible urge to communicate via the musical theater," Krenek observed, "adapted this communication to the only vehicle at his disposal, namely the Broadway stage." 37 Adorno was less empathetic: "He could no longer do what he knew how to do. He had to renounce all those elements in his musical language which once had created a Weillian atmosphere." 38 Decades later, even the composer's staunchest champion positioned one Weill at the greatest possible distance from the other: "In all principles--of composition, of direction, of character--everything Weill wrote in America is fundamentally different from the way that was Weill's in Europe." 39
But is it? By what criteria? Aesthetic, technical, sociological, dramaturgical, or ideological? This represents the central question in Weill scholarship today, and it impinges upon many wider issues about the nature, function, and reception of music in the twentieth century. In addressing it, we are immediately thrust into an ongoing postmodern debate where contextualists and relativists battle against culture-specific assumptions, which have long purported themselves to be universals. If, as Weill consistently maintained in private and public, all his works were stepping stones along the same path toward an accessible modern musical theater, that accessibility demanded that he take into account his audience, his "reader." "Being a theatrical composer," he believed, "I have to present my music in a manner which would be accepted by a realistic public." 40 Therefore, as his public changed, from Berlin to Paris to London to New York, his manner would also have to change. It is in this sense that Harold Clurman's description of Weill as a musical Gulliver, "characteristically twentieth-century" in his adaptability, gains meaning: "He could write music in any country so that it would seem as if he were a native. If he had landed among the Hottentots, he would have become the outstanding Hottentot composer of the Hottentot theater. Weill was all theater and all 'mask.'" 41 If, in Weill's case, style is defined as neither "idea" nor the immutable essence that encodes its composer's identity, but as a manner in which he chooses to communicate a particular musical thought, then his style indeed changed. But not once, in America, but rather, again and again. That this stylistic diversity does not follow a linear biographical progression becomes obvious in a sample of works composed almost simultaneously in France in 1933-34: the second symphony, the biblical spectacle Der Weg der Verheissung, the satirical operetta Der Kuhhandel, the quintessentially French incidental score for Marie galante, as well as cabaret songs for Marlene Dietrich and chansons for Lys Gauty. The variety here--of composition, direction, character--would seem to exceed that between Die Dreigroschenoper and Love Life or between Der Silbersee and Street Scene.
Rather than attempting to sort and classify Weill's various stylistic masks as either "European" or "American" in origin and design, it may be instructive instead to identify those features which remained invariable throughout his career. "I need poetry to set my imagination in motion, for my imagination is not a bird but an airplane," Weill had admitted to his sister in 1919, the year he determined "that his special field of activity would be the theater." 42 Thirty years later he proudly observed:
One of the first decisions I made was to get the leading dramatists of my time interested in the problems of the musical theater . . . . The list of my collaborators reads like a good selection of contemporary playwrights from different countries. 43
In private, however, he continually lamented how big a role he always had to play in writing a libretto and how difficult it was to find a qualified librettist. In New York, Weill avoided working with the practitioners of formulaic musical comedy; his distinguished list of near-collaborators included such unlikely librettists as John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Herman Wouk, William Saroyan, and Tennessee Williams. And the failure of Weill's and Brecht's attempt to renew their partnership in the mid-forties for musical versions of Schweyk and Sezuan must be imputed largely to Brecht's refusal to deal with the realities of the American producing system rather than any artistic or political reticence on Weill's part. When Weill joined the Playwrights Producing Company so that "things [could be] handled with more courage and imagination" 44 than could be expected from most commercial producers, he found little altered from the modus operandi of the Brecht or Piscator collectives in Berlin, except, as Weill told Adorno, that "there exist certain rules of 'fair play' in the American Theatre." 45
Weill's working methods were at odds with the Broadway norm in other ways, as well. For example, his collaboration with Ira Gershwin was initially problematic, because Ira was accustomed to fitting lyrics to George's preexistent tunes, the usual procedure for popular songwriting teams. Weill, on the other hand, found it virtually impossible to compose without a text in hand. As a compromise, at first they worked in the same room, creating text and music almost simultaneously; later Gershwin would give Weill a quatrain to set before writing the remainder of the lyric. Weill also insisted on orchestrating the bulk of his own Broadway music, something few others after Victor Herbert have attempted, either because they lacked the requisite expertise or the production schedule imposed deadlines that could be met without heroic efforts only by a team of orchestrators and copyists. Willingly turning over to specialists just a very few "hot" jazz or dance numbers with which he was uncomfortable, Weill often wrote full score as he watched rehearsals and stayed up all night during tryouts to accommodate new material and changes. Because orchestration was such a key stage in his compositional process, he risked his health rather than compromise this dimension of his artistic vision. He sought dispensation from union rules and agreements specifying a minimum number of players in order to outfit each Broadway work with its own characteristic orchestral palette and texture. Therefore, the ad hoc mixed ensembles of his American works seldom conformed to the standard twenty-odd piece Broadway pit orchestra of the forties. Street Scene used the largest orchestra, approximately thirty-five; Lost in the Stars, the smallest, only twelve. He considered the latter the most ingenious orchestral effort of his career, and a detailed study of Weill's Broadway orchestrations would reveal subtlety and skill unsurpassed in any of his European scores. But to date none of his American theater works has been published in orchestral score, and they have seldom been heard. Only two have been recorded in their entirety; and Weill's instrumentation rarely survived in the well-known pop song versions and film adaptations of his stage works.
Weill finished no independent instrumental compositions in America. After the opening of Lady in the Dark, he reported to Ira Gershwin, "I've written some orchester [sic] music, but I threw it away. It seems so silly just to write music at a time like this." 46 His attitude was consistent with his lifelong desire to write "committed" music that would have demonstrable impact on the culture and society for which it was intended. To appreciate the historical and sociological context for his work, one must recall that the African American lyricist of Street Scene, Langston Hughes, was not permitted to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the company in Philadelphia, and the tour of Lost in the Stars was cancelled for the same reason of enforced racial segregation. If Adorno had experienced Weill's American scores as performed in their original Broadway productions, he would not have found the music "hard to distinguish from Cole Porter." 47 Rather he would have encountered (and surely recognized) familiar Weillian elements: melodies, harmonic procedures, formal structures, text-music relationships, tonal language--even movements taken over intact from the European works. The most obvious carryovers, of course, were literal self-borrowings, often resurrecting material from pieces unlikely to be resuscitated as a whole. Something from Der Kuhhandel , for example, turns up in virtually every score prior to Street Scene (including both Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus). 48 A memorable contrafactum from a tenor aria in Der Kuhhandel accompanied Maxwell Anderson's lyric "Oh, it's a long, long way from May to September" in Knickerbocker Holiday and thus was transformed into Weill's most famous American song. Some "Salvation Army material" from Happy End was interpolated into Johnny Johnson and One Touch of Venus , without any tinge of exoticism. Finding the war music of Die Bürgschaft in the "Divorce Ballet" of Love Life , however, is more surprising.
Sometimes literal quotation of earlier material was motivated by textual correspondence. For example, in the Ballad of Magna Carta , as King John strikes down the Seneschal with his mailed fist, Weill composed music virtually identical to the end of the boxing scene in Act II of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny , when Joe sinks to the ground and Fatty calls it a knockout. By far the lengthiest self-borrowing is the instrumental introduction ("Nocturne") to Act II of Street Scene, lifted with only slight modification from the "Nachtszene" of Weill's incidental music for Piscator's 1928 production of Leo Lania's Konjunktur. 49 What is significant about passages such as these is not that Weill has reused music from his European works; self-borrowing, only rarely intended to be heard as allusive, had long red in his compositional process: Die sieben Todsünden appropriated portions of Der Silbersee, for example, and the Second Symphony borrowed material from both Die Bürgschaft and Silbersee. Rather, it is that these passages could be taken over with little or no alteration without seeming "foreign" or borrowed. They seldom needed translation in their new contexts.
Such occurrences, however, remain only superficial echoes of specific passages from Weill's European music. More telling are deeper resonances within his musical language: the treatment of strophic and verse-refrain structures (cf., for example, the form and function of the 16-measure, strophic "Moritat vom Mackie Messer" and "The Saga of Jenny"); characteristically "Weillian" harmonic progressions (cf. the refrain of "Das schöne Kind" [1917] and the climax of Maurrant's Aria from Street Scene [1947]); the unfolding of large-scale double-tonic structural units with explicit non-triadic cadential resolutions (cf. Sonata for Cello and Piano [1920] and "My Ship" from Lady in the Dark [1940]); fifth-generated harmonies and pentatonic melodies (cf. Mvt. IV of Frauentanz [1923] and "What Good Would the Moon Be?" from Street Scene); and ubiquitous semitone vacillations between major and minor within melodic and harmonic structures. While such examples put the lie to Adorno's assertion that in America Weill "could no longer do what he knew how to do," generalizations of any sort are inadequate with respect to Weill, European or American. Unmasking one work reveals little about the stylistic identity of another. Each aspires to its own manner and form: in Weill's words, "each show of this type has to create its own style. its own texture, its own relationship between text and music." 50 Thus, even contiguous pieces such as Street Scene, Down in the Valley, and Love Life differ from each other as fundamentally in "composition, direction, and character" as they do from any European predecessors in Weill's oeuvre. 51
For a number of reasons, Street Scene may be the most compelling case study for testing the two-Weill hypothesis. 52 As he was composing it, Weill told his brother Hans that "it is without doubt the most important piece I've written since Die Bürgschaft, and it might turn out to be the best of all my works." 53 Shortly before his death, Weill affirmed that appraisal and prophesied that "Seventy-five years from now, Street Scene will be remembered as my major work." 54 It represented, he said, the culmination of two dreams: 1. the dream of "a special brand of musical theater that would completely integrate drama and music, spoken word, song and movement," toward which all his previous works had aspired; 2. the dream of an American opera on Broadway. 55 Thus, if Weill privately acknowledged any split in his musical personality, in Street Scene the two personas met and merged again. As a self-consciously American opera--written about America, intended for America, idiomatically of America--there is no Broadway score of Weill's, before or after, that seems to David Drew "so remote from his European experience." 56 And during the first three decades after Weill's death, Street Scene was virtually the only Broadway work by Weill to be produced in recognizable form in Europe and thus impact directly upon the "two-Weill" debate there. Thirty-five years after its European premiere in Düsseldorf in 1955, release of the first two complete recordings of the opera and subsequent productions in Bielefeld and Munich--as well as an influential co-production with the Houston Grand Opera in 1994 by the Theater im Pfalzbau in Ludwigshafen and the Theater des Westens in Berlin--have rekindled the controversy that now seems to center on Street Scene rather than Lady in the Dark.
Weill said that he had first experienced Elmer Rice's 1929 Pultizer Prize-winning play Street Scene when it was produced as Die Straße in Berlin in 1930. 57 He met the playwright in New York during rehearsals of Johnny Johnson in 1936 and told him that "he had thought of it many times as a perfect vehicle for a musical play" ("SP"). But Rice, having been approached by a number of other composers, including Deems Taylor and William Schuman, thought it was too early for such a musical adaptation. After the end of the war in 1945, however, it again seemed feasible to consider producing a play about the urban American melting pot, in which outsiders strove to be insiders. 58 Weill and Maxwell Anderson had already started work on an outline of a musical version, when Rice insisted that he would have to adapt the play himself. He did agree to bring in a poet to write the lyrics, which were to have none of what Weill called the slickness of typical Broadway lyrics, but rather would "attempt to lift the everyday language of the people into a simple, unsophisticated poetry" ("SP"). After submitting several audition drafts, one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, landed the commission, even though he had never worked in the musical theater before. The subsequent collaboration only barely accommodated the team's conflicting agendas. Rice resisted changes to his veristic play, so that after a year of work what emerged was far closer to Literaturoper than Weill had originally hoped. The first number Weill is known to have composed in January 1946 was, appropriately, "Wouldn't You Like To Be On Broadway?" 59
Rice later described Street Scene as the "most experimental" play he ever attempted, in that the apparent classical unities of time and place were overwhelmed by a "multitude of varied and seemingly irrelevant incidents," which somehow had to be arranged into "a patterned mosaic" whose construction would depend upon "concealed architectonics." Rice recalled:
I was helped by concert-going, as well as picture-gazing. No musician, I yet had some grasp of the structure of symphonic music: the statement, restatement, and development of themes . . . . I had been strongly influenced by the work of the 17th-century French painter Claude Lorrain, in most of whose pictures there was a dominant architectural unit; . . . in the foreground were groups of res, seen always in relation to the pervasive structure . . . . I was excited by the concept of a large number of diverse individuals whose behavior and relationships were largely conditioned by their accidental common occupancy of a looming architectural pile. In keeping with this plastic approach, I thought of calling the play "Landscape with res." 60
Thus the apartment building, modelled on an actual one on West 65th Street, served as a microcosmic melting pot, in which working class characters of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds experienced, within a single twenty-four-hour period, birth, death, love, jealousy, bigotry, poverty, violence, and reconciliation. (A plot summary from the souvenir program of the original Broadway production is reproduced in 1.)
Rice's naturalistic drama now seems a most unlikely source for a libretto. Despite Weill's post facto insistence that it was a "perfect vehicle for the sort of popular opera" he wanted to write, he wrote to his parents that "it was the riskiest project" he'd yet undertaken. 61 Although foreign to the naturalism of the play, traditional operatic discourse could certainly articulate the principal characters's aspirations, dashed hopes, and unfulfilled dreams. But finding a musical analogue for the "urban landscape with res" represented by the house, the "musicodramatic agent" that Weill described as "a prison for the human spirit," presented more of a challenge:
As soon as I began to think about the music for Street Scene I discovered that the play lent itself to a great variety of music, just as the streets of New York themselves embrace the music of many lands and many people. I had an opportunity to use different forms of musical expression, from popular songs to operatic arias and ensembles, music of mood and dramatic music, music of young love, music of passion and death. 62
Thus Weill was inspired to invent an equivalent for the Melting Pot: he planned to precede Sam's arietta, "Lonely House," with a huge five-section scene-complex entitled "A Nation of Nations," which would serve as the central metaphor for the opera's pluralistic subject matter and manner. He instructed Hughes:
The Melting Pot scene we have worked out somewhat on the following line: it should start out with a very funny description of Columbus's trip by Lippo, always at the end of stanza interrupted by Olsen's dry remark "But Erickson was first." Then we'll have a number of rather short songs of the different nationalities, built on a refrain "if it weren't for the Irish (Germans, Negros, etc.), where would America be?" This would lead into a short t. Then we decided, Sam should come in and should give them the Melting Pot idea, and this leads into a big ensemble. 63
Sam, the shy Jewish intellectual, with palpable autobiographical resonance for both Rice and Weill, would seem, in comparison, an isolated re, the genuine outsider of the play. Standing on the street in front of the house, Sam would then sing a "blues," what Weill called the "theme song" of the show. ("Funny, you can be so lonely with all these folks around," the first verse of its refrain, ironically corresponds to Adorno's definition of Expressionist "Einsamkeit": "the loneliness of city dwellers who are totally unaware of each other.") 64 Eventually the entire "Melting Pot" ensemble had to be dropped because of its length (it survives in an incomplete twenty-page piano draft), but the relationship it bore to Sam's arietta was extrapolated to all of Act I. (See 2 for the Musical Design of Street Scene.)
The musical design of Act I corresponds to what Rice called the "patterned mosaic" structure of the original play and is also suggestive of the res foregrounded in Lorrain's landscapes. 65 The private drama of the Maurrant family is set in relief against a broader musical backdrop of the community living in Number 346. After the introductory unit of the first four numbers, successive "I am . . ." musical monologues by each of the four principal characters in the Maurrant drama (Anna, Frank, Sam, and Rose) alternate with pieces of the collective facade, presented by an ensemble populated by people with different dialects and ethnic backgrounds: the "Gossip Quartet," the "Ice Cream Sextet," "Wrapped in a Ribbon," "Wouldn't You [re 2] [Begin Page 42] Like to Be On Broadway," and "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed." In the space of these nine numbers, the audience is confronted with two full-blown arias, a parody of a nineteenth-century Italian opera ensemble, a gloss on the Gossip Trio in d'Albert's Tiefland, a charm song à la Rodgers and Hammerstein, a seductive soft-shoe, a jitterbug, a blues, and a slow fox torch song. Note, however, that the only musical numbers to receive overtly operatic generic labels (arias for the elder Maurrants, cavatina and arietta for Rose and Sam) are sung by the four principals, and minor mode is reserved almost exclusively for their use.
The centripetal force of so many diverse idioms packed into less than an hour might threaten musical coherence, had Weill not counteracted this stylistic plurality with an analogue for the symphonic technique Rice had utilized to hold his text together, by which words and images (especially celestial ones relating the moon, stars, and dreams) recur, interact, and evolve when presented by various characters at different points in the drama. Despite its collage-like surface, there is no score of Weill more tightly interwoven motivically and thematically than Street Scene; this is especially remarkable given how much material from his original conception was ultimately deleted. He uses all manner and scale of musical repetition, development, and transformation to unify seemingly un-unifiable elements: reprise of large sections of numbers; refrains within musical scenes; motivic generation and thematic reminiscence, transformation, and development. The resulting integration of diverse idioms and sources within a single distinctive voice and coherent musical structure was virtually unique in the Broadway musical theater of Weill's time. Many of the associative relationships are too subtle and complex to be diagrammed, but some of the most significant large-scale thematic correspondences are indicated in a primitive chart on the right side of 2. (Note also that the opera begins and ends in D, with the minor mode of that key recurring at key tragic moments of the drama.) 66 The cumulative effect of such highly self-referential construction draws the audience into the scene and rivets attention on the domestic drama unfolding within the house.
Some instances are entirely traditional in technique and function: a four-measure orchestral reprise of "Lonely House" closes Act I to recapitulate the central theme of the drama as Sam is left alone on stage, dwarfed by the building; the orchestra plays the melody associated with Mrs. Maurrant's words "Somehow I never could believe" at the climax of the Choral Lament as she is carried off on a stretcher, never to regain consciousness; the reprise at the end of the opera of the opening number "Ain't It Awful, the Heat" brings the drama full circle to emphasize the ultimate futility of individual human endeavor; with characteristic Weillian irony in the final two-bar cadence of the work the orchestra blares the principal melodic re associated with Mr. Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was." The densest web of associative material occurs in the underscoring, which Weill uses not only to reinforce the illusion of naturalism by mediating between what is spoken and what is sung, but also to comment on the stage action, usually from an omniscient authorial point of view--a familiar technique in film, which it in turn had appropriated from opera and operetta. 67
"The results are something like Carmen," Weill said. "The entire musical score thus becomes a form of storytelling." 68 The impetus toward "narrativizing" orchestral discourse is apparent at the very outset of the opera: in the verse section of Number 10 "Lonely House" a static, chromatic ostinato re is repeated nineteen times in the bass line; its laconic surface is agitated by a secco vertical presentation of a minor second. When Weill later composed the Introduction to Act I, he started the opera with the first four measures of the refrain from "Lonely House," brutally scored and symmetrically harmonized for maximum distortion. Then, over a pentatonic ostinato invoking a cinematic cliché for a bustling metropolis, the minor second unfolds linearly, before stretto entries by the violas and cellos double the motion of the "molto agitato." Thus what Weill called the "theme song" of the opera also generated the principal musical material of its introduction. Both elements of that opening are then recalled at the moment of greatest tension immediately preceding the double murder in Act II.
Clues to the function or meaning of such intratextual references are encoded entirely within Street Scene. But what Weill termed the "great variety of musical idioms" in the score was not intended to work merely on a "phenomenal" level as the vernacular music one might hear "on a hot summer evening in New York" ("SP"). (He and Hughes had spent several evenings observing children at play so that the Children's Game at the opening of Act II would sound authentic, and he used an actual school song of the Julia Richman School to lead into "Wrapped in a Ribbon.") Rather, with Street Scene's collage of styles Weill has constructed a matrix of inter-textual allusions, as large and complex as the intratextual one. They invite associations with specific works, musical idioms, or stylistic conventions external to Street Scene and thereby force the audience to pull back from the proscenium into a larger world.
Weill was thus still doing what he knew how to do: defamiliarizing the conventional, distancing musical content from function, estranging music from its text, allowing well-known musical icons to become particularized within the unfolding drama at hand. As he had formulated it in 1933, "Everyone who knows something about me knows that a text is merely a starting point for me--that every text I've composed looks entirely different once it's been filtered through my music." 69 At its most blatant, Weill paraphrases the "fate motive" from Carmen, as well as the melody associated with the words "I Pagliacci," at appropriate points in the stage action, thereby foreshadowing the inevitability of the tragic outcome of the love triangle in Street Scene and aligning his everyday characters with their grander operatic predecessors. And what Adorno had admired in Die Dreigroschenoper, refunctioning old conventions by "transferring the 'estranging effect' into the musical realm" ("VA"), is also characteristic of sections of Street Scene. The parodic references to the Rigoletto Quartet and the Lucia di Lammermoor Sextet in Street Scene's "Ice Cream Sextet" recall the technique of the Handelian Third Dreigroschenfinale. In furnishing Hughes with a blueprint for Nurses' Lullaby in Act II, Weill allows us a glimpse into the workshop where its "Brechtian irony" was crafted:
Whatever we will do with the last scene, I am sure the nursemaids will be in, and they need badly an amusing song. As you remember, it should be a sort of waltz song about the newspaper reports and pictures, using the whole Daily News terminology which is typical of fifty million women in America who are more interested in murder stories than anything else. If you want to, the number could also talk about their Park Avenue employers, maybe they could indicate their wish that a murder like this should happen to their mistresses. This part should be a regular little waltz chorus, then it would be interrupted by a little ditty in a different rhythm (short lines) where they are scolding the babies in the carriages to be quiet . . . I know that this kind of lyric which should be gay and funny and bitter at the same time is not easy to write and that's why I am anxious for you to get started so that we won't get into trouble. 70
Whereas epic Verfremdung had relied almost exclusively on parody and irony, fifteen years later Weill had at his disposal a number of different, sometimes more subtle, metadramatic devices for aesthetic distancing. 71 Precisely because of this subtlety, however, Street Scene's audiences were even more likely than Die Dreigroschenoper's to mistake its surface for its substance. Invited rather than required to adopt a critical stance, the "strong reader" was challenged to decode the musical text while others in the audience could simply enjoy it without bother. In many cases Weill's intentions remained ambiguous, concealed behind his proverbial theatrical mask. Intertextual references could be recognized and interpreted only if the listener were equipped to differentiate them from the conventional backgrounds from which they emerged. In this sense, the original title I had envisioned for this essay, "Öffentlichkeit als Stil: Musical Experiences of a European Composer in America," and the music of Street Scene (and most of Weill's other American works, especially Love Life) are comparable: "readers" must apprehend their intertextuality if they wish to place the particular within a larger universe. To be understood fully, my abandoned title would have required not only familiarity with two languages but recognition of the titles and content of the two essays by Adorno being troped: "Einsamkeit als Stil" (loneliness as style), a key section from "Schoenberg and Progress," and "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America," Adorno's retrospective on his own years of "exile" in the United States. The incongruities between the title and subtitle prevent the astute reader from mistaking Adorno himself for the "European Composer in America" whose stylistic credo was accessibility.
Those referents would have been as foreign to Street Scene's American "readership" as many of Street Scene's were to Adorno and most of the European audience. While he could never have taken at face value the treakly operetta idiom parodied in Polly and Macheath's "Liebeslied" in Die Dreigroschenoper, only someone more familiar with the traditions and repertory of the American musical theater might be expected to see something standing behind the polyanna sentimentality of "We'll Go Away Together" or "Wrapped in a Ribbon." With these pointed allusions to two generations of American operetta--Romberg/Kern and Hammerstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein respectively--Weill manages both to relish and to critique, while locating Street Scene within a larger theatrical environment and its inhabitants within a wider sociological landscape. In the end, however, meaning of such intertextuality--even multiple layers of meaning--depends less on attempts to fathom the composer's intentions than on the spectator's independent interrogation and interpretation of an often ambiguous text.
That the most "conventional" and seductive music in Street Scene is reserved for its shallowest, least mature characters is discernible from the Musical Design outlined in 2. The items marked by asterisks are the only musical numbers that utilize one of the two standard forms of American popular songs, with the 32-bar refrain or chorus generally comprising four 8-bar phrases in either AABA or ABAB patterns. There are five such songs in a row in Act I, Numbers 9-13, four of which are sung naively or impetuously by youthful characters, the fifth seductively by Harry Easter, Street Scene's counterpart to Porgy and Bess's Sportin' Life. The two popular song forms in Act II, Numbers 18 and 20, frame the great choral lament, and thus serve a double function. The extent to which each of these seven numbers departs from or distorts the 32-bar conventional form indicates the degree of independence and spontaneity of thought expressed by the character who is singing.
Of the seven, the most conventional in form and content is "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed," but it invites the closest reading. It first appears at the end of the orchestral introduction to Act I, immediately preceding "Ain't It Awful, the Heat," itself an allusion to "Summertime" in Porgy and Bess. Just as that work's overture had originally dovetailed into Jazzbo Brown's on-stage piano solo, in Street Scene the orchestra drops out two bars after the curtain goes up, leaving an on-stage radio playing a bebop arrangement of the first part of "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed." Obviously to be interpreted as an actual popular song of the day, it simultaneously fixes the time period of the opera as the forties (as opposed to the original play's twenties) and draws the audience into the setting prior to the first rhythmically spoken lines of dialogue, when the orchestra once again enters and takes control. Seventy-five minutes later, the recklessly youthful Mae Jones and her date Dick McGann each sing, in the penultimate number of Act I, a full 32-bar chorus of the song, interrupted by melodrama, i.e. diaglogue with musical underscoring, particular to their own immediate situation. Here "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" is presented as a popular song they both know, thereby allowing the audience to suspend disbelief as the characters break into virtuoso jitterbugging which seldom fails to bring down the house ( 3). The lyrics of the song convert into the most inane clichés the celestial imagery that had previously conveyed central characters's personal visions of the American dream. 72 Taken at face value, the number would indeed have placed Weill in the hit parade down Tin Pan Alley with the popular tunesmiths and jitterbuggers who symbolized for Adorno everything that was mindless and sick about American culture. But the musical moment demands to be "defamiliarized," without assistance from so blatant a distancing device as Jack O'Brien provides in Mahagonny by proclaiming the "Maiden's Prayer" to be "die ewige Kunst" (eternal art).
To make sure that the audience for Street Scene understood the most important intertextual reference in the opera, the inside front and back covers of the souvenir program book for the Broadway production featured decidedly kitschy photographs of lilac sprigs illustrating two stanzas of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Walt Whitman's famous elegy in memory of Abraham Lincoln, which is recited, but only in small part, by Sam to Rose at the climax of Act I in the 1929 play. Langston Hughes may have been a Broadway novice at the time, but he was widely recognized as the foremost Whitman disciple of his generation, going beyond Carl Sandburg to embrace Whitman as not only the American nationalist poet, but also a visionary "outsider," a champion of social justice. During the two years he worked on Street Scene, Hughes edited and introduced two collections of Whitman's poetry and proposed to a publisher an anthology of recent Negro and Indian poetry entitled "Walt Whitman's Darker Brothers." In his introduction to the Whitman collection published by Young World Books, Hughes articulated what might be construed as the principal theme of Street Scene: "Singing the greatness of the individual, Whitman also sings the greatness of unity, cooperation, and understanding." 73 Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Weill, too, had turned to a volume of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which Paul Green had given him in 1938. Weill marked a number of poems from the Civil War collection Drum Taps, set three of them as songs for voice and piano, and then orchestrated them for a recording that never materialized. Thus Whitman had helped to shape all three collaborators's impressions of the American scene and by the time the opera opened, a web of Whitmanesque imagery saturated dialogue, lyrics, and music, stretching from the black janitor's "Marble and a Star" to the final strains of Act II.
The musical adaptation of Rice's play preserved its intertextual reference to Whitman's "Lilacs" as the conclusion to Act I, the duet "Remember That I Care." Comparison of the corresponding scenes in the 1929 script and the 1946 libretto (see 4) demonstrates how closely the libretto adhered to the text of the original play, although this duet was not among the ten numbers for which Elmer Rice ultimately received credit as co-lyricist with Hughes. In both play and opera, the scene containing the Whitman recitation serves a pastoral function within "verismo" surroundings, as Sam and Rose enact a ritual of innocence prior to their elders's ritual of violence.
Weill began his musical scene with melodrama, underscoring Rose's and Sam's conversation in response to Sam's rhetorical question, "What good does [graduating from college with honors] do you when nobody ever looks at you--when nobody cares whether you exist or not?" Anticipating Rose's answer, "I care, Sam," Weill reprises, with muted strings, the refrain of Rose's ballad "What Good Would the Moon Be?" in which she had asked herself similar questions. When the topic of their dialogue turns to rumors about Rose's mother and her affair with the milk collector, the orchestra presents chromatically twisted variations on Mrs. Maurrant's aria, "Somehow I Never Could Believe." Mrs. Buchanan's scream of labor pain precipitates Sam's monologue on the subject of his own existential torment and wrenches the musical idiom out of melodrama and onto a highly charged operatic plane, accompanied by full orchestra and characterized by the greatest density of chromaticism, dissonance, and asymmetries in Act I. At the fortissimo climax of this expressionistic outburst--as close as one comes to Der Protagonist in Weill's Broadway works--"the scream of birth, the moan of death" give way to a dejected reformulation of Sam's question, "What else has life got to give?" The orchestra dwindles to only the lowest members of the woodwind, brass, and string choirs, thereby providing maximum timbral contrast with Rose's response.
Her answer, now sung rather than spoken, is once again anticipated orchestrally, with a reprise of the instrumental introduction to "What Good Would the Moon Be?" Marked "tranquillo" in its original appearance in Number 12, the recalled music opens up a pastoral space, a folk-like realm suffused with pentatonicism, where urban musical intrusions are banished by almost magically transcendent instrumental textures and fifth-generated harmonies which coalesce from celeste, bells, harp, strings, and solo woodwinds. Here the intratextual reference to Rose's cavatina articulates the scene's (and the opera's) central visual and poetic image, "the lilac bush flow'ring bright." Her recollection of seeing the lilac bush in the park is accompanied in the orchestra by the melody to which Sam will soon recite the third [re 4] [Begin Page 49] stanza of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." A single stanza stands in for that entire elegy, because Weill omitted the first strophe, the "false start" of the poem in the play. The remaining fragment seems self-contained in its imagery: Sam and Rose, two first-generation children of immigrants, yearn for a small parcel of the utopian America symbolized by lilacs in Whitman's pastoral vision and denied those trapped in the city's prisons for the human spirit. With the first stanza omitted, the referent of "the great star early droop'd in the western sky" is no longer explicit, and thus available only to those in the audience already familiar with the entire poem. Similarly, the lilac sprigs are not associated explicitly with President Lincoln's casket, so they can function as a symbol of hope rather than mourning. Weill thereby transforms Whitman's memorial for Lincoln into a universalized expression of mutual affection, a bond between individuals that must be the basis for any honest relationship or just society. And yet, this diatonic respite from Sam's existential despair can be only temporary; those in the audience who know their Whitman already intuit that the thrush's death carol must soon be tallied.
Weill's reading makes Whitman's text seem both more and less than it was originally and as quoted in Rice's play. As soon as Sam begins to recite the poem, to luxuriant, cantabile orchestral sonorities, intratextual references to Rose's cavatina give way to an intertextual allusion to the last vocal utterance in Act II of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, the "sostenuto dolcemente" at rehearsal Number 84: "Dammi sul viso un tocco di carmino," (put on a touch of rouge). 74 Puccini's and Weill's melodies are nearly identical for three measures, yet there seem to be no directly congruent textual parallels that might account for the musical reference (5). However, the moment in Puccini follows immediately upon Butterfly's and Suzuki's famous "flower duet," where images of fragrant cherry blossoms, lilies, jasmine, and violets from the spring garden give Butterfly new hope as she decorates the house in anticipation of Pinkerton's arrival: "diedi pianto alla zolla, essa i suoi fior mi da" (I have given tears to the earth and she gives her flowers to me). Suspicions, voiced by numerous critics ever since Street Scene's premiere, that the allusion might be fortuitous or the musical idiom merely "secondhand Puccini" in a more general sense may be dispelled if one recalls that the corresponding pastoral moment in Madama Butterfly is prompted by the appearance of an American warship in port: "Hold my trembling hand so that I may read the name: ABRAHAM LINCOLN!"
For those in Street Scene's audience who really knew their Puccini, this must have seemed the quintessential musical pun; on reflection, however, the allusion is characteristically ambiguous. Because it both "distances" and "affects," its reading presents a challenge. In their duet, Butterfly and Suzuki sing ecstatically of anticipated happiness now that Butterfly's long-suffering faith and hope appear to have been vindicated. They decorate the house with flowers; then Suzuki applies makeup to both Butterfly and her son, in anticipation of Butterfly's reunion with his father. Soon, of course, her "American dream" will be dashed; Pinkerton, incapable of bridging the ethnic/cultural gulf that separates them, has married someone else in America. Butterfly's pastoral respite is now recognized to have been false hope. [re 5a; re 5b] [Begin Page 51] In Act II of Street Scene, Sam's sister Shirley tries to protect her younger brother and gives Rose advice that could have been lifted from the libretto of Madama Butterfly: "It's better to marry with your own kind. You can't mix oil and water." The cultural chasm between first-generation Russian Jewish and Irish Catholic immigrants living within the same apartment building seems even more forbidding than that separating Puccini's couple: the allusion tells us that Sam and Rose's relationship is doomed, before it has a chance to blossom. 75
As Rose echoes Sam's recitation of Whitman, she gets carried away by his rapturous personalization of the poem. Sam then builds to a climax as he sings of breaking off a sprig of lilac, and Rose joins him in claiming their fair share of the American dream. Immediately, however, Rose retreats from the emotional heights she had briefly scaled with Sam and recounts the reality she had encountered in the park earlier in the day. Here the libretto again paraphrases dialogue from the play, and all inter- and intratextual references are left behind. But Buchanan does not enter at this point, as he did in the play. Instead Sam regains the emotional pitch of his "pain" monologue as he rails against the obstacles standing between him and the lilac bush. Weill had explained to Hughes how he wanted the borders of the finale's lyrical space extended at this moment, compensating for the omission of the first stanza of Whitman:
When Rose sings about the policeman in the park she should continue but the lilac bush is there, it is ours, nobody can take it from us--and that should build into a beutiful [sic] duet which reaches its climax (after a short interruption with Buchanan) when he asks her to kiss him, and here, the lilac-bush theme should sing out in the orchestra. 76
Indeed, Rose's reminder that the lilac bush is theirs--at least in their dreams--allows them to regain, for the first time singing in unison, the ecstatic heights of "A sprig with its flower we break." Then, with Rose leading the way, they finally arrive at a "tranquillo" plateau: "And when you see the lilac bush, Bright in the morning air, Remember, always remember, Remember that I care." Singing as if with one voice, Sam and Rose sustain fortissimo high A's for three measures on the word "remember," while the orchestra creates an overwhelming Puccinian climax with a tutti recall of the Butterfly-related melodic material--in the manner of a parallel fortississimo moment when Puccini's heroine sings "Trionfa il mio amor! La mia fè trionfa intera" (My love triumphs! My faith triumphs over everything!), also climaxing on a high A (rehearsal Number 70).
As Weill had suggested to Hughes, Buchanan's entry then cuts off the final cadence of the Whitman Duet, and underscoring abruptly disrupts the idyll. Maurrant calls Rose into the house, but before she goes upstairs Sam asks awkwardly, "Rose, will you kiss me?" She responds as she had in the play, "Why, of course I will, Sam." But after the Whitman text had been filtered through Weill's passionate music, the stage directions from the original play proved unsuitable for the kiss: "She offers him her lips. He clasps her in a fervent embrace, to which she submits but does not respond. Freeing herself gently . . ." Instead the opera's libretto indicates only that "she kisses him," and the orchestra accompanies the embrace with a "molto crescendo" of the lilac theme. Weill knew the power of his own music; the same day he had outlined the Whitman Duet for Hughes, he wrote to Rouben Mamoulian, whom he hoped to persuade to direct the production, and summarized the differences between the original play and his plans for the opera: "The love story between Sam and Rose will be made more important and more passionate." Indeed, in the musical adaptation, it is Rose who initiates the reprise of the Whitman duet after the kiss. This time, however, any associations of the orchestral flourish with Butterfly are sublimated to the fresher memory of the "lilac bush, Bright in the morning air," as the intratextual reminiscence overwhelms the intertextual allusion. Sam rejoins the reverie, but Henry, the black janitor, cuts short any possibility of prolonged rhapsody, as he reiterates a shred of his own utopic credo, the blues-tempo "I got a marble and a star," code words for his less-than-cosmic game of craps.
This was again Weill doing what he knew how to do, although "love duets" are as rare in his American works as in his European ones. The Whitman duet calls to mind, both textually and musically, another which serves as an act finale, "Auf jener Straße," the ending of Act II of Der Silbersee . Here too the soprano and tenor, Fennimore and Severin, sing with unveiled idealism, eschewing avowals of erotic love in favor of another pastoral vision, not of a lilac bush but of a magical frozen lake that "will carry whoever must go further" (Wer weiter muß, den trägt der Silbersee). On the eve of Germany's darkest decade, Weill had responded in his unguarded lyrical mode to Georg Kaiser's glimpse of a socialist utopia, with exquisite pentatonic orchestral filigree embellishing a diatonic vocal line. 77 Perhaps the earliest manifestation in one of Weill's dramatic works of what Horst Koegler would describe as "a sincerity of feeling that is not afraid to reveal itself as such" was the so-called "Kraniche Duett," composed in 1929 as a substitute for the censored "Liebe" brothel scene in Act II of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. 78 There, too, uncensored expression of affection by another decidedly non-stereotypical couple stands near the center of the drama in sharp relief against highly intertextual and estranging musical surroundings. The head of Universal Edition's opera department, Hans Heinsheimer, recognized the "Crane Duet" as a stylistic breakthrough:
This is the reason I consider this scene in Mahagonny so especially important: here you bring the style of 1928 to a close, here the new sound of the coming years becomes audible, that sound which I believe is created out of a new romanticism, a new longing, a new search for the "unattainable," in short, an emotional realm which must fully embrace the neue Sachlichkeit in order to transcend it. 79Agreeing that the music of Mahagonny far surpassed that of Die Dreigroschenoper, Adorno too singled out the "carmenhaft" duet of Jimmy and Jenny: like Carmen, it is at once "captivating and enigmatic." 80
But when Heinsheimer's prediction for Weill's future path was validated in Der Jasager, Die Bürgschaft, and Der Silbersee, such lyrical passages of direct emotional expression challenged the prescription for "surrealist music" Adorno had extrapolated from Mahagonny:
The surrealistic intentions of Mahagonny are borne out by the music, which, from the first note to the last, is dedicated to the shock which the sudden representation of the disintegrated bourgeois world engenders . . . . This music, pieced together from triads and off-notes with the steady beat of old music hall songs, which we hardly recognize any more but are nonetheless remembered like an heirloom, is hammered and glued together with the fetid mucilage of a soggy potpourri of operas. This music, made up of the debris of past music, is completely contemporary . . . . The music is allowed to make use of triads because it doesn't believe in them; rather, it destroys them through the very manner in which they are used. 81
When, therefore, Weill's post-Mahagonny European music failed to "shy away from direct expression," "superimpose its own criticism," or "electrify its audiences while slapping them in the face," Adorno turned his back on it, and Weill. 82 Weill himself recognized that he had left the Mahagonny-manner behind. After the war, in December 1948, he wrote to La Scala in Milan: "Mahagonny is very much an expression of the decade after the First World War." He suggested that instead the famous opera house should consider Street Scene, "an American opera in the true sense of the word, probably the only opera in the vernacular of the large American city." 83
Shortly before Street Scene had closed its Broadway run after 148 performances attended by nearly a quarter of a million people (but at a loss of the producers' entire investment of $148,000), Weill received a letter from Georg Kaiser's widow, with the news that the Hebbel Theater in Berlin intended to produce Der Silbersee. Weill did not object, but could supply no music: "I had a letter from Universal Edition with the laconic notification that all my full scores had been confiscated by the Gestapo . . . . I don't have a single partitur of my European works and therefore at the moment I can't say if one can procure them anywhere." 84 Thus he devoted his energies toward interesting European opera houses and publishers in what had been a Broadway "flop." He wrote to Langston Hughes: "It is no use fooling ourselves that the songs we have written are hit-parade material, because they are not." 85 When discussing European representation of the work with Boosey and Hawkes and Universal Edition, he offered to expand the orchestration from 33 to the standard opera orchestra and to effect several other musical changes that would make the piece less "Broadway" and more "opera." 86 During his only trip back to Europe (in 1947), he personally promoted Street Scene in London, Paris, and Zürich. He avoided Germany. Upon his return, he told Maxwell Anderson that he was planning a symphonic suite from Street Scene and several more Whitman songs. But Weill completed only "Come Up From the Fields, Father" and did not live to see the stage work that he deemed his most significant performed in the Old World.
The posthumous European premiere of Street Scene in Düsseldorf during the 1955-56 season promised to be an auspicious occasion: the cast would include Randolph Symonette (who had played the role of Mr. Maurrant for most of the Broadway run), two numbers cut from the opera during Philadelphia tryouts were to be restored, Lenya would attend, and, not least, Adorno--of all people--would write an essay for the program book. But his essay, "Nach einem Vierteljahrhundert" (after a quarter-century), turned out to be little more than a refunctioning of his obituary of Weill in the guise of a retrospective on Die Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny. Although Adorno dismissed the genre of the "Musical" as "merchandised nuisance," he never mentioned Street Scene or any of Weill's other American works by name. Instead, Adorno again hailed those works with Brecht that were characteristic of the "dilemma of all modern art," while planting seeds of doubt about Weill's own awareness of the nature of his achievement:
Like no other music, Weill's stood for the collective image of the time during which it became famous . . . . Its power depends on the decline of the time whose passing it chronicles . . . . Only derision and mockery of sentiment were left in his music, thereby giving expression to a mourning for all that had been doomed by history . . . . But it remains ambiguous just how far the music commits itself to this and how far Weill denounced what he had co-executed without commentary . . . . He would rather sacrifice musical standards than coherence of theatrical effect, for which his method of response had been calculated à la Offenbach, to whom he liked to compare himself. 87The subversive power of Adorno's essay was sufficient to sabotage critical reception of Street Scene, as the young Horst Koegler, a recent refugee from East Berlin, observed in a review essay entitled "Der Vortrupp der Musicals" (the vanguard of the musical):
It should come as no surprise that two days after the premiere the Düsseldorfers opened their morning papers to be told by their critics that they had attended an operatic funeral of the first class. Those present at the premiere would hardly have noticed anything like a funereal atmosphere. Instead they applauded after almost every other number of the score and at the end called the members of the cast in front of the curtain some twenty times . . . . Though none of the critics denied the success with the audience, it didn't prevent one of them from putting two short sentences together: "Reicher Beifall. Wie denn auch nicht!" [Lots of applause. What else would you expect!] Those six words are too beautiful to resist the temptation to reflect upon a group of critics who obviously champion progressivism at any price--to whom any genuine public success is suspect from the outset. 88
Throwing down the gauntlet at Adorno's feet, Koegler jumped to the defense of American musical theater in general and Weill in particular, while challenging ideological and aesthetic clichés:
The assessment of Kurt Weill's Broadway successes swings back and forth according to the critics'--or their respective newspaper's--political point of view. Between them, practically every perspective is represented: from the tradition-conscious European's feeling of infinite superiority, nonchalantly looking down on the fully-automatic American "un-culture"; to the rueful mea culpa one--after all, we were the ones who had driven Weill into the desert of the rich flesh pots. Therefore over here--or at least as far as our critics are concerned--practically everything which carries the stamp of a Broadway success has been condemned to failure. 89Although his counteroffensive may have been overstated and under-documented, Koegler correctly observed that--before his emigration--Weill had severed himself from Brecht and what Adorno termed surrealism: "At that time he had long outgrown the Dreigroschenoper, to which some people stubbornly try to weld him . . . . Nobody who knows his work not just from the shark with the teeth in his face will deny that Weill secretly has been a romantic." 90
In his reply to Koegler, "Vortrupp und Avantgarde," Adorno made passing reference to Down in the Valley and the songs from Lady and Venus which he found difficult to distinguish from Cole Porter, but there is still nothing to indicate that he had become more familiar with or had actually attended a performance of Street Scene. Instead, he rebuffed Koegler's attack by expanding his original argument, this time making more explicit its underlying premises, respectively technical and sociological: 1. Weill-after-Brecht had failed to adopt a progressive musical language and thus was more culpable than Stravinsky (or Britten and Shostakovich) of the charges which Weill-with-Brecht had only narrowly avoided by transferring the "Verfremdungseffekt" (estranging effect) into the musical realm; 2. objections to the pseudo-individualized, mass-produced cultural merchandise Adorno thought to be "jazz" (actually German commercial music of the 1920s) were equally applicable to American musical theater. 91 Jazz and the "Musical" were linked in Adorno's mind because the "popular song," Schlager, served as the central unit of both. As so-called "mass music," popular songs, jazz, and musicals are all necessarily anonymous, or at best pseudo-individualized. Only the formulas need be deciphered, not the individual uses thereof, for this music is not "that which it is" but "that for which it is employed." And just as Adorno rarely mentions in his jazz criticism the name of a jazz composer or performer, the title of a song or jazz number, or a particular recording or live performance, so the "Musical" is discussed only in generic terms, without reference to specific works. The person responsible for the music of a "Musical" is not a real composer, but a Musikregisseur, comparable to the jazz arranger, making music to fit the contingencies of the situation. Adorno closed his sarcastic reply by declining Koegler's suggestion that he write an essay "Vom Altern der neuen Kritik" (new criticism is growing old) and countering with his own assignment for Koegler, "Der Highbrow als Lowbrow," the theme of which he outlined: "The highbrow has in many places set himself up as the staunch cultural advocate of the lowbrow. For God's sake, it would be better for him to remain a highbrow and let himself be called a snob." 92
In this assignment for Koegler, Adorno had unwittingly invoked terminology from Constant Lambert's 1933 review of Die sieben Todsünden, in which he compared Weill with Adorno's teacher:
Even those who do not find Weill's music sympathetic must realize that he symbolizes the split that is taking place not between highbrow and lowbrow, but between highbrow and highbrow . . . . He and Alban Berg represent the two extremes of Central European aesthetic, and in their widely different ways are the most successful exponents of their respective styles. 93Had Adorno been more familiar with Weill's Broadway works in general and Street Scene in particular, he surely would have chosen different turf for his battle with Koegler, for Street Scene, as we have seen, can't be easily dismissed as "Kitsch," the category to which Adorno automatically assigns the "Musical." On the other hand, in the wake of the triumphant European tours of Robert Breen's production of Porgy and Bess, Koegler's appropriation of Street Scene as a platform from which to challenge the prevailing ideology of post-World War II Central European musical modernism must have seemed strategically defensible. It is in this larger aesthetic context that we must ultimately situate the Adorno-Koegler polemic in particular and the two-Weill debate in general.
Weill, the composer whom Richard Taruskin has identified as "perhaps the twentieth century's most problematical major musician" ("RT"), seems in retrospect a, if not the, representative re reifying the key issues at hand: modernism versus counter- or postmodernism, elitism versus populism; autonomy versus accessibility; originality versus comprehensibility; atonality versus tonality. He anticipated in the second quarter of our century what can now be seen in the fourth as the central "problem" of the entire post-War period: what is the "genuine" or "authentic" modern music of our century? It was precisely this question which Adorno himself raised in 1949 at the conclusion of his Philosophie der neuen Musik: "Perhaps the only authentic art will be that which renounces the very idea of authenticity itself, of being one particular way rather than another." 94 However, Adorno's ongoing attempts to refunction the historical paradigm of musical progress, extending from Bach through Beethoven to Schoenberg and his serial successors, required affirmation of aesthetic autonomy, work immanence, and originality as the sine qua non for "authenticity." When these values came under increasing scrutiny and attack in the "pluralistic, postmodern, and aesthetically entropic world" Adorno left behind at the time of his death in 1969, salvaging that part of his mission which would stave off collapse of the Austro-German "great works" tradition became a key component in what James Hepokoski has called the "Dahlhaus Project." 95 Although Weill's name appears in Carl Dahlhaus's writings only rarely and always in tandem with Brecht's, he is by inference one of those "opera composers who felt unequal to the aesthetic problems imposed upon their genre by Modernism" and therefore "sacrificed stylistic modernity to theatrical effectiveness and thereby lost all claim to historical 'authenticity.'" 96 In a history of music whose ideology required "relative autonomy" for itself as well as its subject, it becomes clear, for reasons too obvious to restate, why Weill ends up on Dahlhaus's "ash heap of music history."
"Had Weill continued to develop after 1933 as he had in the previous years," begins David Drew's final paragraph in the New Groves Weill-entry, "he could have become one of the commanding res in German music" rather than "one of music's great 'might have beens,'" as its last sentence concludes. It would seem, therefore, that Weill's American works will require a defense protecting them against their success which is more vigorous and imaginative than Adorno's for Die Dreigroschenoper, because the split between autonomy and accessibility and what Richard Crawford has termed "composers' music" and "performers' music" (as an alternative to the categories of E-Musik/U-Musik, "serious"/"popular," or "cultivated"/"vernacular") has always seemed more pronounced on American soil. In The American Musical Landscape, Crawford frames the debate in post-Adornian terms:
autonomy--the right to compose essentially outside the strictures of audience esteem, or critic's approval, or the tastes and preferences of performers . . . Through hard labor and the acceptance of a lofty, lonely vision of their calling, composers have carved out for themselves an autonomous niche. Autonomy has expressed itself in a feeling that . . . composers are perhaps the best judges of each others' works. The twentieth century has seen the gradual alienation of many composers of composers' music from other musical trades and occupations and from much of the concert-going audience as well.
In contrast, Crawford says, "where music reflects the pressures of the marketplace, money and musical style are closely intermingled. Accessibility seeks out the center of the marketplace. It privileges occasions over works. And it invests ultimate authority in the present-day audience." Authenticity in performance is closely linked with autonomy, as "authenticity privileges works over occasions." 97
Among Central European émigré composers, the extreme exemplars of Crawford's taxonomy were, of course, Schoenberg and Weill. When asked in 1950 how migration had affected the character and quality of his own work in America, Schoenberg replied: "If immigration to America has changed me--I am not aware of it . . . . Maybe I would have written more when remaining in Europe, but I think: nothing comes out, what was not in. And two times two equals four in every climate.  But I made no concessions to the market." 98 In his own manifesto of 1940, Weill articulated his agenda by contrasting it with Schoenberg's: "I'm convinced that many modern composers have a feeling of superiority toward their audiences . . . . I write for today." 99 Such statements make Andreas Huyssen's bold assertion that "mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project" seem almost a truism, and they call to mind aesthetic and sociological conflicts that extend at least as far back as Nietzsche's indictment of Wagner: "Success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic . . . . Wherever the decision comes to rest with the masses, authenticity becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, a liability." 100
In the American musical theater, Weill encountered these same issues, intricately intertwined: compositional "work" and performance "event" overlapped and merged in the process of production; in non-subsidized venues accessibility took precedence over autonomy; and popular exploitation and adaptation of single numbers (stripped of their original dramatic context and function) by performers active in commercial music tended to undermine the integrity of his music for the theater. But if we recall Heinsheimer's and Downes's parallel exhortations to the composer, written in 1929 and 1949 respectively ("You should and must free yourself once and for all from Berlin's commercialized artistic activity" and "I am still waiting for the day when you get exactly the subject which you can treat without the faintest consideration of public taste or expediency of any sort"), the "two-Weill" debate cannot be disguised as cultural or geographical--European versus American--in nature or origin. Though ostensibly raised by biographical circumstances and historical events, the issues are central to the self-conscious dilemma during the entire modernist period concerning the nature, meaning, and purpose of art in general and of musical expression in particular.
"What are the aims of music?" Weill's teacher Ferruccio Busoni had asked in his Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst (sketch for a new aesthetic of music; 1907) and then tried to answer anew after World War I with his concept of "junge Klassizität" and his opera Doktor Faust. 101 Such post-war attempts to reconcile past and present were characteristic of what Martha Bayles calls "extroverted modernism," whose attitude toward accessibility/popularity differentiates it from its "introverted" and "perverse" kin. 102 If, in aspiring to be, as Busoni quipped, "a Verdi of the poor," 103 by 1927 Weill had rejected the former option--"working toward the solution of aesthetic problems as if behind closed doors," eliminating the criterion of accessibility or popularity from aesthetic judgments, and cultivating indifference, even hostility toward the audience--his subsequent "perverse" or surrealist phase did not outlast his collaboration with Brecht and the fall of Mahagonny. 104
In 1930 Erwin Stein, then the head of Universal Edition's orchestral division, tried to change Weill's mind and convince him "to make another appearance as an absolute composer," thereby "expanding your sphere of influence and making your work felt in circles which have been up in arms against you": "And don't tell me that you don't give a for such people--you must make an effort to win them over as musicians." 105 Shortly before he fled Berlin for Paris Weill did accept a commission for a symphony from the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, but after its premiere by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bruno Walter in 1934 he dismissed the effort as "not very important." Soon after his arrival in the United States, Weill reaffirmed the futility of writing autonomous music:
In our time theater-music is far more important than absolute music. Maybe that was not true in previous centuries, but it certainly is now. Concerts are becoming more and more the property of--how do you call them?--stuffed shirts. The recital hall is obsolete. 106
In privileging stylistic diversity over individual subjectivity, the theater over the concert hall, the audience over the composer-critic, the "immediate" over the "difficult," Weill made no apologies: "I want to use whatever gifts I have for practical purposes, not waste them on things which have no life, or which have to be kept alive by artificial means. That's why I've made that theater which exists without benefit of subsidy my life work" ("CT"). Music could not afford to be only "in and of itself." Weill required that it aspire to extrinsic value and serve as a means to moral or political impact on an audience expecting to be pleased and entertained as well as edified. No wonder, then, that within Adorno's uncompromising and rigorously "introverted" stance, such a composer scarcely qualified as a Komponist at all, and two Weills had to be created so that the "historically authentic" part of him could be salvaged. But in declining to be einsam and daring to be öffentlich, Weill had been attempting all along to redefine not himself, but modern music theater and its audience, as well as the aesthetic and historical model in which he must be divided in two.
Kim H. Kowalke is Professor of Musicology at the University of Rochester. He has written extensively on twentieth-century music and theater, including Kurt Weill in Europe , A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill (ed., 1986), and A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt Weill Studien (ed., 1993). His translation and edition of the Weill-Lenya correspondence is forthcoming from the University of California Press in February 1996.
Excerpts from Street Scene with the original Broadway cast under Maurice Abravanel have been re-released on CD (CBS Masterworks MK 44668). There are two recordings of the entire opera: the English National Opera's production on TER Classics (TER2 1173) and an ad hoc international cast including Jerry Hadley, Samuel Ramey, Josephine Barstow, and Angelina Réaux, conducted by John Mauceri on Decca (433 371-2). The co-production of Street Scene by the Houston Grand Opera and the Theater des Westens (directed by Francesca Zambello) opened in Berlin on 15 January 1995 for a six-week consecutive run. In 1994, the opera entered the repertory of the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich as well. --Editor
Earlier drafts of sections of this essay were presented at a symposium on Weill's American works co-sponsored by the Houston Grand Opera and the Goethe House, Houston (29 January 1994) and a conference "Biographische Konstellation und künstlerisches Handeln" in Frankfurt am Main, co-sponsored by the Paul Hindemith Institute and the Hochschule für Musik (25 February 1994). A longer version of this essay, directed toward a European musicological audience, will be published with the proceedings of the conference: Frankfürter Studien 7, ed. Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott, 1996). Stephen Hinton, Lys Symonette, and bruce mcclung read drafts of this essay, and I am grateful for their suggestions.
1. Edward Rothstein, "On Music: Kurt Weill's Deadly Sin," The New Republic, 23 November 1987, 25-26.
2. Letter from Weill to Lenya, 28 September 1942. Original in the Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York, N. Y. Unless otherwise noted, all documents cited in this essay are housed in the Weill/Lenya Archives at Yale University, New Haven, Conn., with photocopies at the Weill-Lenya Research Center. All uncredited English translations are my own; citations from unpublished sources are given the original language in the notes. Correspondence of Kurt Weill is quoted by permission of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.
Dietrich eventually declined the role, claiming that it was "too sexy and profane" for her, an ironic excuse made more so by Mary Martin's portrayal of Venus. In autumn 1933 Dietrich had requested two songs from Weill as revue and recording material, but there is no record of her performing or recording either of his responses, "Der Abschiedsbrief" and "Es regnet." In March 1934 Dietrich did, however, lobby Josef von Sternberg to invite Weill to Hollywood to collaborate on her planned musical film; protracted negotiations came to naught.
3. Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980), s.v. "Weill, Kurt," by David Drew. In another section of the New Groves, in the article on "Symphony," Stephen Walsh invokes the equally pervasive metaphor of "Weill as traitor" to the cause of modernism: "Weill's Second Symphony . . . shows the loss incurred by serious music when he later defected to Broadway." s.v. "Symphony, III, 2: 20th-century, France and Germany After 1918."
4. Letter from Drew to Hans Curjel, 26 November 1969; original in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv/Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach a.N. Curjel had been Klemperer's dramaturg at the Kroll in the late 1920s; he was one of Weill's strongest supporters and became a close friend. In the late 1960s Curjel abandoned plans to write a biography of Weill.
5. Virgil Thomson, "Plays With Music," New York Herald Tribune, 23 February 1941. Weill was wounded by Thomson's review and informed Ira Gershwin in a letter of 8 March 1941:
Virgil Thomson wrote a violent attack against me. t was all very personal and his main point was that I am no good any more since I stopped working with Brecht and that I am "constantly avoiding" collaborating with "major poets" (a rather bold statement, don't you think so?). Well, I am used to this kind of attacks from the part of jealous composers. In some form or another it happens every time I do a new show.
Original document in the Library of Congress; photocopy in the Weill-Lenya Research Center.
6. Samuel L. M. Barlow, "In the Theatre," Modern Music 18 (March-April 1941): 192. This was Barlow's inaugural contribution; his next was a flattering profile of Virgil Thomson. After other attacks similar to Barlow's and Thomson's, Weill discouraged his producers from inviting music critics, with the exception of the Times's Olin Downes, to opening nights of his new stage works.
7. The Saturday Review of Literature, 31 December 1949. It is in this essay that Clurman first articulates his "Hottentot metaphor." Clurman had been one of three founding directors of the Group Theatre; in 1936 he was replaced during rehearsals as stage director of Johnny Johnson by Lee Strasberg. After the Group disbanded, Clurman became one of the most highly respected theater critics in New York. Weill was deeply offended by the essay; among his surviving papers are (mostly illegible) pencil notes and two typewritten paragraphs in response to Clurman (Series 41, Box 2). Weill's prefatory paragraph does not disguise his sense of personal betrayal: "It always seemed to me one of the more commendable customs of our time is that a man should not talk back to his critic. If I don't adhere to this rule in the case of Harold Clurman's article 'Lost in the Stars of Broadway,' it is because it seems to me that this article was not written as a criticism of my music (since Clurman certainly is not a music critic), but as a well-meant advice from an old friend." Weill's projected defense seems to rest on the premise that "certain musical circles are so far removed from the living theater that they have little understanding for a movement which has its roots more in theatrical than in musical developments. This is nothing new . . . . When I started writing music in Europe in the early twenties, Verdi was looked upon as a writer of 'Circus Music' and Carmen was generally considered an 'operetta' in musical circles. . . . Some people don't seem to think that music [written for Broadway] is 'good music.'"
8. Virgil Thomson, "Kurt Weill Concert," New York Herald Tribune, 5 February 1951. Note that Thomson's assessment had been quite different in his 1950 obituary of Weill: "Everything he wrote became in one way or another historic. He was probably the most original single workman in the whole musical theatre, internationally considered, during the last quarter century . . . Every work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution of dramatic problems." New York Herald Tribune, 9 April 1950.
9. See Richard Taruskin, review of David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook in Kurt Weill Newsletter 6 (Spring 1988): 3; hereafter abbreviated "RT."
10. Letter from Weill to agent Leah Salisbury, 7 January 1950.
11. Letter from Friedrich Luft to Weill, 14 May 1949. Love Life is often cited as one of the first concept musicals, with echoes in the work of Harold Prince and Bob Fosse, in particular. The original reads: "Solche Mischung von Musik, Licht, Tanz und Witz dürfte bei uns zuhaus heute und in absehbarer Zeit in solcher lässigen Präzision kaum herzustellen sein."
12. Peter Heyworth, comp. and ed., Conversations with Klemperer, rev. ed. (London: Gollancz, 1985), 78.
13. For further discussion of this point, see "RT," 3-4; Stephen Hinton, "Fragwürdiges in der deutschen Rezeption" in A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt Weill Studien, ed. Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1993), 23-32; and Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: MacMillan, 1992), s.v. "Weill, Kurt," by Stephen Hinton; hereafter abbreviated "WK."
14. Theodor W. Adorno, "Kurt Weill," Frankfurter Rundschau, 15 April 1950; reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), 18:544-47; hereafter abbreviated GS. The original reads: "Die r des Komponisten, der in Amerika starb, wird vom Begriff des Komponisten kaum recht getroffen." For more on this point, see "WK."
15. Theodor W. Adorno, Die Musik 21 (March 1929): 424-28; trans. in Hinton, The Threepenny Opera (Cambridge Opera Handbook) (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129-133.
16. See Stephen Hinton, "Weill: Neue Sachlichkeit, Surrealism, and Gebrauchsmusik" in A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill, ed. Kim H. Kowalke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 61-82.
17. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, s.v. "Weill, Kurt," by David Drew.
18. In 1938, however, Lenya had reported to Weill in Hollywood that she was going "to have dinner with that Ho-ho-Wiesengrund at the home of Jews from Frankfurt . . . After dinner, they will make an abortion of the music they'll play." Letter from Lenya to Weill, 10 May 1938. Apparently Weill and Adorno never met in New York, as a letter of 31 March 1942 from Adorno in Brentwood Heights, Los Angeles, to Weill in New City, New York, begins: "Dear Weill, it will amaze you to hear from me all of a sudden after so long a time and an ill-fated rendezvous in New York." The original reads: "Lieber Weill, es wird Sie erstaunen nach so langer Zeit und einem verunglückten New Yorker Rendez-vous mit einem Mal von mir zu hören."
19. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1948). Reprinted in GS, vol. 12.
20. William G. King, "Composer for the Theater--Kurt Weill Talks about 'Practical' Music," New York Sun, 3 February 1940; hereafter abbreviated "CT."
21. For a description of Adorno's and Weill's exchange of letters on this matter, see Kim H. Kowalke, "The Threepenny Opera in America" in The Threepenny Opera (Cambridge Opera Handbook), 90-95. Brecht's journal entry for 15 April 1942: "since WEILL was making difficulties about the negro production of DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER, i asked wiesengrund-adorno to write to him. weill responded with a nasty letter full of attacks on me and praise of broadway, which will put on anything if it is good and has been developing the experiments Europe pioneered. the last play he did the music for ran 14 months. it was called LADY IN THE DARK (they say it's an amusing potboiler)." Bertolt Brecht, Journals, 1934-55, trans. Hugh Rorrison and ed. John Willett (New York: Routledge, 1993), 220-222. With his letter, which is now in the Weill/Lenya Archive, Adorno had included his reviews of American Jazz Music by Wilder Hobson and Jazz: Hot and Hybrid by Winthrop Sargent. Weill's response to Adorno has not been located; his summary to Lenya (letter of 8 April 1942) differs from Brecht's:
[Clarence] Muse writes me that Brecht had told him last summer he had written to me and I didn't answer! The good old swinish Brecht method. Well, I wrote Wiesengrund a letter which he won't forget for some time. I wrote him: It is a shame that a man of your intelligence should be so misinformed. Then I explained him that the American Theatre isn't as bad as he thinks and in the end I said, "maybe the main difference between the German and the American theatre is the fact that there exist certain rules of fair play in the American theatre."
22. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, 20th-Century Composers: Germany and Central Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 145.
23. Adolf Halfeld, "Amerika und die neue Sachlichkeit," Der Diedrichs-Löwe 2/4 : 244; partially reprinted in Anton Kaes, ed., Weimarer Republik: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1918-1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 278-280; the original reads: "Im Erfolgsgedanken und nicht in Kulturwerten gipfelt der Inhalt des Amerikanismus.  English translation in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 407. See also Siegfried Kracauer, "Das Ornament der Masse," Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 June 1927 (trans. in Kaes, ibid., 404-07).
24. Letter from Heinsheimer to Weill, 10 October 1929.
Translated into English by Christopher Hailey in "Creating a Public, Addressing a Market: Kurt Weill and Universal Edition" in A New Orpheus, 29-31. Even if he had been so inclined, Weill would have been unable, given political and economic circumstances, to follow his publisher's admonition to avoid "commercialized artistic activity." Not a single work of Weill composed after 1927 and intended for production by state-subsidized theaters or opera houses found a secure home there. Most notably, all three of Berlin's opera houses declined to produce Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny after its highly politicized reception in the provinces. Similarly, the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur assured that there could be no successors to the three productions of Die Bürgschaft which premiered within a single week in March 1932. Less than a year later three productions of Der Silbersee opened simultaneously in Leipzig, Erfurt, and Magdeburg, but soon closed under a blanket edict. Der Kuhhandel and Der Weg der Verheissung could find no appropriate venue anywhere in Europe. Already in Europe, then, more and more of Weill's plans and projects had addressed themselves to alternative institutions where diverse combinations of executants and audiences could be assembled ad hoc: radio, schools, film, metropolitan commercial theaters.
25. Letter from Downes to Weill, 9 December 1949. Downes noted the "remarkable technique" and "amazing orchestration" of Lost in the Stars, and observed: "It's awfully interesting to me to see your hand get firmer with each thing you are doing, and your new treatments and forms and new technical resources. It is wonderful that you've got such an opera over on the stage. This work, and the Street Scene, will be among the most significant steps which have so far been taken both to modernize and popularize the operatic principle, and say something worthwhile in the artistic sense."
26. Letter from Weill to Heinsheimer, 14 October 1929. The original reads:
Daß meine Musik zur Dreigroschenoper industrialisiert worden ist, spricht ja nach unserem Standpunkt nicht gegen sondern für sie, und wir würden in unsere alten Fehler zurückfallen, wenn wir einer Musik ihren künstlerischen Wert und ihre Bedeutung absprechen würden, nur weil sie den Weg zur Menge gefunden hat. . . . Ich arbeite seit Jahren als einziger schaffender Musiker konsequent und konzessionslos, gegen den Widerstand der Snobs und der Aestheten, an der Schaffung von Urformen eines neuen, einfachen, volkstümlichen musikalischen Theaters.  Ist das industrielle Kunstbetätigung?
27. Letter from Weill to Downes, 14 December 1949.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America," in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 338-39.
29. Weill's letter to Heinz Jolles, dated 27 May 1949, continued: "I am not rich but I make a good living and I enjoy the work I am doing. ...I will send you a score of 'Street Scene' as soon as I have a chance." Weill lapsed into German only in the final sentence inquiring about Jolles's own work.
30. Theodor W. Adorno, "Vortrupp und Avantgarde: Replik an Horst Koegler," Typescript in Weill/Lenya Archive, Box 74, Folder 1, 3; hereafter abbreviated "VA"; reprinted in GS, 18:800-804. Much of the rhetoric of this essay derives from Adorno's previous writing about jazz; see J. Bradford Robinson, "The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany," Popular Music 13, no. 1 : 1-15.
31. Letter from Weill to Lenya, 18 April 1945, after learning that The Firebrand of Florence was going to close after only a few weeks' run on Broadway.
32. Interview, WCBS, Weill with Margaret Arlen, 7 January 1950; reprinted in Kurt Weill Newsletter 10 (Spring 1992): 11-13.
33. Letter from Weill to David Ewen, 13 August 1945. Maurice Abravanel recalled: "I went to the Metropolitan Opera and I said to the manager, 'You ought to play Kurt Weill's opera.' He looked at me as if I were completely crazy. And then I would say to Kurt, 'You must write an opera.' And he would say, 'You are crazy, there is no opera!' This was in 1936. The Metropolitan Opera had a season of sixteen weeks, San Francisco, I think, had six weeks, Chicago had Stock. And then there was the Cincinnati Zoo in the summer. That's it." "Recollections by Maurice Abravanel," Kurt Weill Newsletter 5 (Spring 1987): 8.
34. Kurt Weill, "The Future of Opera in America," Modern Music 14 (May-June 1937): 183-188.
35. Kurt Weill, "Broadway and the Musical Theatre," The Composer's News-Record (published by the National Composer Members of the League of Composers) 2 (May 1947): 1.
36. "WK." Alan Jay Lerner noted:
Kurt wanted desperately to succeed in American terms and yet could never be satisfied with the purely commercial idea. Time after time he rejected ideas that he knew could be successful but were not for him . . . . He would always reject the type of show that would have given [a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-type success] to him--like The King and I, which I suggested and Kurt said, "Leave that to somebody else." . . . No matter how daring or unconventional an idea was, Kurt was determined to find a way for the public to accept it.
Unpublished transcript of interview of Alan Jay Lerner by George Davis, Series 37, Box 1, Folder 17, Weill-Lenya Research Center, 2.
37. Ernst Krenek, Perspectives of New Music 8 (Spring-Summer 1970): 115.  Originally published as "Amerikas Einfluß auf eingewanderte Komponisten," Musica 13 (December 1959): 757-761.
38. "VA," 1. The original reads: "he is too artistic" als Todesurteil verwendet, nicht mehr alles, was er konnte.
39. Letter from Drew to Hans Curjel, 26 November 1969.
40. Kurt Weill, as told to Edward J. Smith, "Broadway Opera: Our Composers' Hope for the Future," The Musical Digest : 42. In a 1929 article "Die Oper--Wohin?" Berliner Tageblatt, 31 October 1929, Weill had already claimed: "We may change our music only to the extent that we can carry on our intellectual tasks, the duties of the artist in his time, in an entirely perceptible, entirely understandable language." The original reads: "Wir dürfen nur unsere Musik so weit umstellen, daß wir unsere geistigen Aufgaben, die Aufgaben des Künstlers in seiner Zeit, in einer allen vernehmbaren, allen verständlichen Sprache durchführen können."
41. Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 128-9. Note how this formulation varies from the original published in 1949: "Weill is so much the adaptable artist--he is characteristically twentieth century in this respect--that if he were forced to live among Hottentots he would in the shortest possible span of time become the leading Hottentot composer" (The Saturday Review of Literature, 31 December 1949).
42. Letter from Weill to his sister Ruth, 27 June 1919; the original reads: "Eine Dichtung brauche ich, um meine Phantasie in Schwung zu bringen; meine Phantasie ist kein Vogel, sondern ein Flugzeug." Tamara Levitz has demonstrated that Weill felt it necessary to utilize several settings of Rilke's poems as an intermediate step in the compositional process for the orchestral Fantasia, Passacaglia, und Hymnus, op. 6 ; at least one of the Lieder seems never to have been intended as an independent composition, but rather a study which could then serve as the basis for a type of "paraphrase technique" in constructing an instrumental movement. Tamara Levitz, "Teaching New Classicality: Busoni's Master Class in Composition," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester, N. Y., 1994, 256-293.
43. "Two Dreams Come True," published in 1947 as liner note for the original cast recording of Street Scene, CBS OL 4139.
44. Letter from Weill to John Wharton, 13 March 1947.
45. Although Weill's letter to Adorno has not been located, Weill quoted several passages from it in his letter to Lenya on 8 April 1942.
46. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, 28 May 1941. Original in the Music Division of the Library of Congress; photocopy in the Weill-Lenya Research Center.
47. "VA," 1; the original text reads: "Man braucht nur Songs aus der alten Fassung von Mahagonny und aus der Dreigroschenoper und unmittelbar danach solche aus Lady in the Dark und One Touch of Venus zu spielen, und man wird hören, was alles Weill der geschleckten Glätte der popular music opfern mußte. Das ist wirklich . . . von Cole Porter nur schwer zu unterscheiden."
48. For a listing of borrowings from Der Kuhhandel, see David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 274.
49. Both have now been recorded: Street Scene on Decca 433 371-2; Oel-Musik on Berlin im Licht, Argo CD 5114.
50. Kurt Weill, "Score for a Play," New York Times, 5 January 1947; hereafter abbreviated "SP."
51. Down in the Valley, Stephen Hinton has observed, "is an extreme manifestation of Weill's attitude toward musical material: the principal melodies are not original, but folksongs, allowing his creative imagination to be employed elsewhere, in the skillful arrangement of the material into a dramatically convincing whole" ("WK").
52. All citations from the spoken drama Street Scene are taken from Elmer Rice, Street Scene: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1929); those from the libretto and score of the opera are from the piano-vocal score, Street Scene: An American Opera (New York: Chappell Music Company, 1948).
53. Undated letter from Weill to his brother Hans, November 1946.
54. Weill quoted by Arnold Sundgaard, "Portrait of the Librettist as Silenced Composer," Dramatists Guild Quarterly 16 (Winter 1980): 26.
55. Weill, "Two Dreams Come True."
56. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 354.
57. "SP." The production was directed by Heinz Hilpert, with Grete Mosheim and Albert Bassermann in principal roles.
58. In his Ph.D. dissertation on Weill's final three works for Broadway, "Kurt Weill on Broadway: The Postwar Years (1945-1950)," Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1992, David Kilroy compares the "outsider" characters Jud and Sam and contrasts the mid- and post-War cultural contexts of Oklahoma! and Street Scene:
The lonely Jud is the uncritical male antagonist, ostracized as an outsider who threatens the lily-white "folk"; the lonely Sam is an intellectual male protagonist, both admired and mistrusted for is outsider's criticism of American society . . . Weill's presentation of his view had to wait until after the war's end, for to suggest that "outsider" citizens be treated with all due rights and privileges may well have been considered anti-American during World War II . . .After the war had ended, however, he and Rice could hope that the suspension of civil liberties that were to some degree warranted by wartime exigencies would cease. Yet, fueled by Oklahoma!'s unprecedented longevity and continued proclamation that vigilante justice was "OK" in the United States, the country was very slow in reversing its ideological direction and became embroiled in other repressive activities, especially against real and supposed Communists. (160, 169)
59. For an account of the genesis of the music for Street Scene, see William Thornhill, "Kurt Weill's Street Scene," Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1990.
60. Elmer Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 237.
61. Letter from Weill to his parents, 9 September 1946.
62. "SP." The term "musicodramatic agent" has been borrowed from Carl Dahlhaus's description of the function of setting within verismo opera, where "milieu moves center stage as a musicodramatic 'agent.'" In this sense at least, Street Scene seems to conform to Dahlhaus's category of operas which feature local color or "milieu-painting": "although verismo adopted a realist or naturalist pose by choosing subjects from normal life and the present day, from the standpoint of intellectual history it can be viewed as a variant of exoticism, the appeal of the faraway and remote . . . Local color, which seemed 'new' and yet was immediately accessible, offered a refuge to opera composers who felt unequal to the aesthetic problems imposed upon their genre by modernism." Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 354.
63. Letter from Weill to Hughes, 22 January 1946; original in Langston Hughes Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.
64. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), 47: "herein lies the formula of the style of loneliness. This loneliness is a common one: that of city dwellers who are totally unaware of each other. The expressionist reveals loneliness as universal."
65. In Act II the individual tragedy of Anna Maurrant is played out against the communal backdrop of the two large choral numbers which frame her death.
66. During tryouts in Philadelphia, "Marble and a Star" was moved from its original position immediately preceding the "Ice Cream Sextet" to the Number 2 position in Act I, thus interrupting the opening stretch of D that had originally extended through the "Gossip Trio."
67. For a perceptive comparison of "music as a delineator or inducer of mood, as emotional expression, as sheer sensuous presence" in opera and film, see Richard Taruskin, "The Golden Age of Kitsch," The New Republic 21 March 1994, 28-38.
68. Kurt Weill, quoted in "Broadway Opera: Our Composers' Hope for the Future."
69. Undated letter from Weill to Erika Neher, May 1933; photocopy in Weill-Lenya Research Center.
70. Letter from Weill to Hughes, 20 September 1946. David Kilroy notes that Weill even offered Hughes (in a letter of 15 May 1946) Christopher Isherwood's translation of Peachum's "Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens" as a model for a lyric for Kaplan. "Kurt Weill on Broadway," 96. It was Hughes's sense that Weill continually tried to make Street Scene into something more like Die Dreigroschenoper than what Elmer Rice had in mind.
71. For a brief summary of "metadrama," see "Kurt Weill on Broadway," 43-53.
72. When the collaborators needed a lyric for a dance number, Hughes had brought "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" out of his trunk; although it had been written years earlier, it required virtually no changes as the text of a 32-bar popular song. Eventually it was cited as the best lyric of the Broadway season.
73. Quoted by Arnold Rampersad in The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, 1941-1967 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 112. See also George B. Hutchinson, "Langston Hughes and the 'Other' Whitman" in The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman, ed. Robert K. Martin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 16-27. Hughes had celebrated the centenary of Leaves of Grass by writing a poem entitled "Old Walt" and concluded his first poetry collection, The Weary Blues (New York: Knopf, 1929) with an epilogue: "I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes."
74. I am grateful to Michael Pisani for pointing out the melodic similarity of these two passages. Although Kilroy noted the pastoral features of the Whitman Duet, he maintained that "the music to which Weill set the quotation from Whitman is virtually free of intertextual allusions" ("Kurt Weill on Broadway," 194).
75. Shortly after Street Scene had opened on Broadway, Weill agreed to appear on "Opera News on the Air," during the intermission of a radio broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera--the only such invitation he is known to have accepted. The opera Weill agreed to discuss was Madama Butterfly. The host of the program, Boris Goldovsky, introduced the topic of Street Scene's Puccini-isms: "You know, it occurs to me, Mr. Weill, that your Street Scene is just the sort of play that would have appealed to Puccini if he were living and writing in America today." Weill: "I'm mighty glad that Puccini didn't have a chance to see Street Scene when it was produced as a play almost 20 years ago. Because he might have beat me to it." Weill then described Puccini and his opera as if speaking of himself and Street Scene: "I have the feeling that Puccini wasn't particularly interested in musical experimentation for its own sake, but rather in the effect it would have on the audience in the opera house . . . . His audience had probably never heard a score which introduced present day people, dressed in present day clothes, [which] translates a realistic story completely into music, so that the story moves along as swiftly as in a legitimate play." Weill's copy of the typescript for the interview, annotated with his own handwritten additions and corrections (Series 41, Box 3), called for Goldovsky's other guest, Irene Jordan, to mention as one of the highlights of Madama Butterfly the "glorious duet with Suzuki, where they decorate the house with flowers for Pinkerton's arrival." Goldovsky played the end of the flower duet, and then "another interesting example": "the section just after the flower duet, where Butterfly looks at herself in the mirror and wonders whether the passing of three years has robbed her of her beauty. 'I have changed,' she says. 'My lips have sighed too many sighs and my eyes have scanned the horizon too long.'" Weill commented: "We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that all these musical devices are a means to an end, not an end in themselves." Madama Butterfly was not among the eight vocal scores of operas in Weill's library inventoried by David Drew in 1960; Turandot, however, was: it had been an opening night present for Lady in the Dark inscribed to "Giacomo Weill from Gabriele Gershwin." Ralph Locke has suggested to me that the repetitive harmonic oscillation underlying the Whitman Duet may have been modelled on a similarly constructed passage in Calaf's Act I aria, "Non piangere, Liù," eleven measures before Rehearsal Number 46. The orchestral accompaniment of Sam and Rose's other duet, "We'll Go Away Together," may call to mind ironically the passage immediately preceding "Un bel di," in which Butterfly insists "He'll come back."
76. Letter from Weill to Hughes, 22 January 1946; Langston Hughes Papers, Yale University Library. Cited by Kilroy, 91.
77. Der Silbersee and Street Scene bear comparison in other respects: both are hybrid works intended for performance by a mixed cast of singers and actors, with comparably sized orchestras. Melodrama plays a larger role in the musical texture of these two works than in any others of Weill. Note also the textual and musical parallels between "Auf jener Straße" and another pastoral number, "The Hills of Ixopo," the opening of Lost in the Stars. The musical setting of this picture of pre-urban South Africa is also suffused with pentatonicism, but as that idyllic landscape is corrupted, chromaticism enters the musical language and soon overwhelms the folk-like idiom of the opening.
78. Koegler, "Der Vortrupp der Musicals," Der Monat (January 1956): 71.
79. Letter from Hans Heinsheimer to Weill, 10 October 1929. The original reads:
Aus diesem Grunde halte ich diese Szene in Mahagonny für so besonders wesentlich.
"Unerreichbaren" is a reference to the final chorus of Der Lindberghflug, which Weill was recomposing, sans Hindemith, on commission from Otto Klemperer.
80. Trans. Jamie Owen Daniel in Discourse 12 (Fall-Winter 1989-90): 70-77. The original reads: "In alldem geht Mahagonny weit über die Bühnenmusik der Dreigroschenoper hinaus . . . Vor allem in der ausdruckslosen, carmenhaft gefangenen und rätselvollen Duettmusik Jimmys und Jennys." Der Scheinwerfer 14 (April 1930): 111-115; reprinted in Moments musicaux (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964), 131-40. In his review of Aufricht's 1931 production at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm--Adorno's third essay on Mahagonny--he lamented that the lyrical center of the piece, the "Duett von den Kranichen" had been sacrificed (when Lenya couldn't cope with its vocal demands). Anbruch 14 (February-March 1932): 53.
81. Der Scheinwerfer, translated by Jamie Owen Daniel.
82. "Nach einem Vierteljahrhundert," Programmheft der Städtischen Bühnen Düsseldorf 1955/56, volume 6, 64-67; reprinted in GS, 18:548-551.
83. Letter dated from December 1947 to F. Ballo; photocopy in Weill-Lenya Research Center.
84. Letter from Weill to Margarethe Kaiser, 1 May 1947.
85. Letter dated 19 April 1947; Langston Hughes Papers, Yale University Library; photocopy in Weill-Lenya Research Center.
86. On 9 October 1947 Weill wrote to Max Dreyfus of Chappell: "As you remember, I had great hesitations to have Street Scene published by Chappell's. I wanted to give it to Boosey and Hawkes because with them I would have been sure of the kind of standard exploitation which this score calls for, of an English production (Covent Garden) and of performances in European opera houses." On 11 December 1948, Weill wrote to Traute von Witt at Universal Edition in Vienna: "Die Oper war für die speziellen Erfordernisse des Broadway-Theaters für ein verhältnismässig kleines Orchester geschrieben, und ich frage mich, ob das für die grossen Opernhäuser ausreichend wäre. Da es wahrscheinlich für eine Aufführung in dieser Saison schon zu spät ist, würde ich die Möglichkeit in Betracht ziehen, eine neue Orchestration für Opernhäuser ausuarbeiten, und in diesem Fall auch einige musikalische Aenderungen (weniger Dialog, mehr Musik) vornehmen."
87.   Zweideutig bleibt, wie weit diese Musik selbst dem sich verschrieb, und wie weit Weill denunzierte, was er kommentarlos mitvollzog . . . .
Die Straße (Street Scene), Düsseldorf Städtische Bühnen (1955-56, Heft 6), Europäische Erstaufführung: 26 November 1955.
88. Koegler, "Der Vortrupp der Musicals," 69. The original reads:
War es da erstaunlich, daß sich die Düsseldorfer, als sie wei Tage nach der Premiere ihre Morgenzeitungen aufschlugen, von ihren Kritikern bescheinigen lassen mußten einem Opernbegräbnis erster Klasse beigewohnt zu haben? Die bei der Premiere dabeigewesen waren, hatten zwar nichts von einer Begräbnisstimmung gemerkt, sondern fast jede zweite Nummer der Partitur beklatscht und die Mitwirkenden am Schluß einige zwanzig Male vor den Vorhang gerufen. . . . Den Publikumserfolg des Werkes stellte zwar keiner der Kritiker in Abrede, was sie jedoch davon hielten, faßte einer von ihnen in zwei kurzen Sätzen zusammen: "Reicher Beifall. Wie denn auch nicht!" . . .
89. Ibid., 69.  So ist denn bei uns--oder doch umindest bei unserer Kritik--so ziemlich alles zum Scheitern verdammt, was den Stempel eines Broadway-Erfolgs trägt.
90. Ibid., 71.  Daß Weill insgeheim ein Romantiker war, wird niemand in Abrede stellen, der sein Werk nicht nur von der Seite des Haifischs mit den Zähnen im Gesicht kennt." Koegler's point had been made by Constant Lambert already in 1934: "Kurt Weill for all his deliberately sordid topicality is as essentially romantic as Marschner....In the nineteenth century they cried for the moon and today we cry: 'Oh, show us the way to the next whisky bar.' The sense of frustration is the same, however." Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber, 1934), 171.
91. For a discussion of Adorno's problematic opinions about what he called "jazz," see J. Bradford Robinson, "The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany"; Theodore A. Gracyk, "Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music," The Musical Quarterly 76 (Winter 1992): 526-42.
92. "VA." The original reads: "der highbrow hat sich vielerorten als biederer kultureller Advokat der lowbrows etabliert. Lieber sollte er in Gottes Namen ein highbrow bleiben und sogar sich einen Snob schimpfen lassen." Koegler's title, "Vom Altern der neuen Kritik," is an intertextual reference to a famous essay by Adorno, delivered as a lecture for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart the year before, entitled "Das Altern der neuen Musik" (modern music is growing old), first published in Dissonanzen (Göttingen: Van den Hoeck & Ruprecht, 1956).
93. Constant Lambert, "Matters Musical: Lotte Lenja and Kurt Weill," The Times (London), 13 August 1933.
94.
95. James Hepokoski, "The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources," Nineteenth-Century Music 14 (Spring 1991): 221-246. See also Phillip Gossett, "Up from Beethoven," The New York Review of Books, 23 June 1994, 55-62.