Kurt Weill Kept Reinventing Himself

“Music is no longer a matter for the few,” Kurt Weill declared in 1928, the year he wrote “The Threepenny Opera.” In Weill’s opinion, composers educated in the classical tradition had lost touch with the broader public and sunk into obscurantism. They should make their music “simpler, clearer, more transparent,” and they should address contemporary concerns. Seldom has an artist followed his own credo so faithfully. From “Threepenny” to “Lost in the Stars,” from Berlin to Broadway, Weill forged mass art on modern themes. The feat was all the more impressive given that the composer had to win over an entirely new audience after his flight from Nazi Germany, in 1933. Of the countless twentieth-century figures who attempted the hazardous leap from Europe to America, Weill was one of very few—Ernst Lubitsch also comes to mind—who found commercial and artistic success on both sides of the Atlantic.

In recent weeks, New York has witnessed a fortuitous mini-festival of Weill’s singular career. “Threepenny,” his epochal collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a German-language production by Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble. “Love Life,” which Weill created with Alan Jay Lerner in 1948, had a rare revival in the Encores! series, at New York City Center. Further afield, Jonathan Groff is belting out “Mack the Knife” in “Just in Time,” a new Broadway musical about Bobby Darin. Adding to the timeliness of this welter of Weill is the composer’s reputation for political courage. Three weeks after the Nazis came to power, Brown Shirts disrupted a performance of Weill and Georg Kaiser’s “Der Silbersee,” in which the marching song “Caesar’s Death” takes clear aim at Hitler.

Weill remains omnipresent, yet his achievement is not easily grasped in full. A newcomer listening to “Threepenny” and “Love Life” in succession—one spare and brittle, the other eclectic and expansive—might well conclude that they were by different composers. For a long time, critics fretted over such differences, generally rating the German Weill above the American. In recent decades, though, scholars such as Kim H. Kowalke and Stephen Hinton have highlighted the daring of the later work. Almost all of Weill’s projects were sui generis, rejecting routine and experimenting anew. He wrote in 1928, “When musicians had attained everything that they imagined in their most daring dreams, they started all over again.”

The primary thesis of “Threepenny” is elementary but eternally relevant: gangsterism prevails in all spheres of power. John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” the main source of Brecht and Hauptmann’s text, had made the same point two centuries earlier. The sybaritic highwayman Macheath maneuvers between a cutthroat capitalist milieu (Mr. and Mrs. Peachum) and a corrupt police force (led by Tiger Brown) while seducing daughters from both worlds (Polly Peachum and Lucy Brown). Weill, for his part, levels distinctions between high opera and pop styles. “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” or “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” worms its way into the ears with its E-G-A-A motto, although the stress on A in a C-major context gives the song a wobbly, off-kilter air. (“Mack the Knife” became a hit only when Marc Blitzstein’s English-language adaptation downplayed the original’s intimations of serial rape and murder.)

The Berliner Ensemble’s previous take on “Threepenny,” a languid, sepulchral staging by Robert Wilson, travelled to BAM in 2011. The new version, first seen in 2021, emanates from the antic mind of Barrie Kosky, who has directed everything from “Das Rheingold” to “La Cage aux Folles.” Where Wilson went slow, Kosky goes fast; his performers engage in vaudevillian prancing, slapstick scampering, Chaplinesque waddling, and acrobatic clambering. (The set, by Rebecca Ringst, resembles an industrial jungle gym.) At times, the alienation effects smack of college-level Brecht, as when Macheath badgers the pit musicians and burns a fake copy of the score. Yet the score itself is treated with perfect respect. Adam Benzwi, who led the ensemble from the piano and the harmonium, combines scholarly expertise with virtuoso chops.

As Hinton has pointed out, the character of Macheath evolved as Brecht revised the text in an effort to bolster the work’s Marxist credentials. The sexy rogue that Harald Paulsen created at the première became an older, crustier mastermind who hopes to pivot from robbing to banking. Gabriel Schneider, who played the role at BAM, restored the roguishness, adding a dollop of sexual ambiguity; Mackie’s coterie of prostitutes includes a couple of rent boys. At the same time, Schneider avoids the sort of ersatz Weimar Republic decadence that has overrun “Threepenny” productions since the advent of Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret.” There’s a scrawny desperation to Mackie’s swagger; you sense that he has filched and shtupped his way up from nothing. When, at the end, he is strung up at the gallows, he seems unaware that the playwright is about to grant him a reprieve; his panic in the face of death is piercing.

Kosky’s cast had no weak links. Constanze Becker, as Mrs. Peachum, displayed period-perfect style, her dusky voice dripping with disdain. Tilo Nest radiated fat-cat authority as Mr. Peachum, although he struggled to animate the character’s disquisitions on poverty. (Oddly, Kosky sometimes uses Brecht’s lecture-prone 1931 text in place of the tighter, tarter original.) Maeve Metelka lent her hefty, Broadway-ready voice to Polly; Laura Balzer, as Lucy, exuded dazed girlishness, somewhat in the manner of the great cabaret singer Blandine Ebinger. Bettina Hoppe was a hauntingly plaintive Jenny, Kathrin Wehlisch an impishly cross-dressed Brown. Josefin Platt rasped the “Moritat” and returned twice more to sing strophes that Brecht added in later years, including the incomparable kicker: “There are those who dwell in darkness, / There are those who dwell in light / And you see the ones in lightness / Those in darkness drop from sight.” As in any good “Threepenny,” Kosky leaves you uncertain which are which.

The old narrative of Weill’s career held that he ceased to be progressive, in either the musical or the political sense, after moving to the United States. According to the modernist mandarin Theodor W. Adorno, Weill “persuaded himself that concessions to commercial practice were not that, but merely a test of know-how.” Yet, just as the radical thrust of “Threepenny” has often been overstated—in seeing gangsterism everywhere, it risks a facile cynicism—the subversive power of the Broadway musicals has long been overlooked. “Love Life” is no exception; behind its portrait of a collapsing marriage is a sly satire of American capitalist culture. In light of the Cold War paranoia that was gathering when “Love Life” was first performed, it’s surprising that the work had as much success as it did—a run of two hundred and fifty-two performances, respectable but insufficient to recoup investment. Still, memories of the show lingered in a few significant minds: both Stephen Sondheim and Fred Ebb felt its influence.

“Love Life” kicks off, in semi-Brechtian style, with a Magician, who performs tricks on Sam and Susan Cooper, the main characters, levitating the former and sawing the latter in half. The action then jumps back more than a hundred and fifty years: the marriage of Sam and Susan will play out against changing American scenes from 1791 onward. The characters remain the same, but rampant industrialization and consumerism strain the relationship. In contrast to Brecht’s harangues, the broader social points are conveyed through such peppy, radio-ready numbers as “Economics” and “Progress,” patterned after records by the Ink Spots and other Black groups of the thirties and forties (“One day the prices / Begin to soar! / You made a living, / Now you need more”). After the marriage has fallen apart, another framing device offers a path to reconciliation: an “Illusion Minstrel Show” first punctures Hollywood fantasy (“Mr. Right”) and then argues for pragmatism in romantic relationships.

This intricate conceit poses challenges for modern audiences. For one thing, Susan’s incipient feminism, on display in “Women’s Club Blues,” a suffragette number set in 1894, comes across as one more problem caused by Progress. The bump-and-grind swing music that Weill whips up for the occasion can’t hide the condescension of Lerner’s lyrics (“I toss and turn in bed alone at night, / My body aching for the right / To vote”). If the couple indeed gets back together—the ending is left open—Susan will probably have to surrender some of her newly won independence, as often happens in Hollywood romantic comedies of the period. Victoria Clark, who directed the Encores! show, successfully finessed some of these issues. Kate Baldwin, as Susan, revved up “Women’s Club Blues” with a defiantly full-throated performance, winning unironic cheers from the crowd. Likewise, Brian Stokes Mitchell, as Sam, complicated the figure of the alienated husband. “This Is the Life,” in which the divorced Sam sits alone in a hotel room and tries to convince himself that he is free, was a fine-tuned study in curdled bravado.

More could have been made of the work’s critical subtext. In 1948, the roles of the Magician and of the minstrel-show m.c. were assumed by the vaudevillian Rex Weber, who had portrayed Peachum in the failed Broadway première of “Threepenny,” in 1933. At City Center, Christopher Jordan and Andrea Rosa Guzman, who played the Coopers’ kids, took over the magic act. The child actors were adorably quick-witted, but the sequence lacked bite. Still, Encores! deserves praise for restoring “Love Life” to New York stages after a seventy-six-year absence. Strangely, it struck me as the more political of the Weill shows on offer this spring—the one that indicts false consciousness in popular culture and hints at a way out. ♦