Der Silbersee (concert version)

Program notes

About the Work

Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake), subtitled ‘A Winter’s Fairy Tale,’ was Kurt Weill’s last work written in Germany, and its fate is inseparable from the catastrophe unfolding around it. A ‘play with music’ in three acts to a text by the great Expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser, it is a bitter, fantastical parable of the Depression: a story of poverty, hunger, guilt and the faint hope of human solidarity, in which a poor man is shot for stealing food and an unlikely redemption is sought across a frozen lake. Kaiser’s barbed social fable gave Weill the chance to write some of his most pointed and varied music, ranging from biting satirical songs to passages of real lyrical warmth.

The timing could hardly have been more dramatic. Der Silbersee was premiered simultaneously in three German cities (Leipzig, Erfurt and Magdeburg) on 18 February 1933, just under three weeks after Hitler became Chancellor. It managed only a few charged performances before the Nazis shut it down: on 4 March 1933 the work was banned as ‘degenerate,’ and Weill and Kaiser were both driven from German cultural life. Both soon went into exile. Tonight’s concert version lifts the score’s musical numbers out of the spoken play, letting Weill’s extraordinary music, caustic, tender and unmistakably his, speak on its own.

What to Listen For

This is Weill in his great Weimar voice, the world of The Threepenny Opera: tunes you can whistle, sharpened by tart harmonies, dance rhythms and a knowing, cabaret edge. Listen for the way he shifts register, from acid, march-like satire to sudden moments of disarming sweetness, often within a single number, so that the music keeps undercutting easy sentiment.

One celebrated number is the savage ‘Ballad of Caesar’s Death,’ a mock-historical cabaret song about a tyrant brought low, whose point could hardly be missed in February 1933. Listen, too, for the contributions of the baritone soloist and the chorus, who carry the work’s storytelling, and for the salty, jazz-inflected orchestration. Above all, listen to this as a document of a vanished world: the sound of Weimar Germany’s daring popular-art experiment, captured at the very moment it was being extinguished.