Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill (1900–1950) was one of the most distinctive musical voices of the twentieth century, a composer who moved between worlds, bringing the bite of popular song and cabaret into the concert hall and the opera house. Born in Dessau, the son of a Jewish cantor, he trained in Berlin with Engelbert Humperdinck and Ferruccio Busoni, and in the 1920s became a central figure of the Weimar Republic’s explosive cultural life. His collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, above all The Threepenny Opera (1928) with its worldwide hit ‘Mack the Knife’, fused theatre, jazz and social critique into something entirely new. When the Nazis came to power, Weill, as a Jew and a creator of ‘degenerate’ music, was forced to flee; he settled eventually in the United States, where he reinvented himself as a composer for Broadway, writing shows such as Lady in the Dark and Street Scene. Often caricatured as two separate composers, the acid Berliner and the Broadway tunesmith, Weill is better understood as a single artist with an unwavering belief that serious music could speak directly to ordinary audiences.