A profile of the prolific and influential German composer best known for his work with Bertolt Brecht, here in the first years of his New York exile from fascism in Europe.

‘Kurt Weill: The Asphalt Musician’ by Marian Burrows from New Masses. Vol. 22 No. 3. January 12, 1937.

The elusive character of Kurt Weill speaks through his work in writing theater scores

PUBLICITY men have been having their troubles with Kurt Weill, the music-maker whose second score for a Broadway play will be heard this week when Franz Werfel’s The Eternal Road has its much-postponed opening. It was the same way with Johnny Johnson, the music for which was widely hailed as doing much to integrate that strange and haunting play.

The troubles of the gentlemen of the press agentry seem traceable to a combination of two things: first, Weill’s music and his history seem to give him stature as an unusual and important figure in the modern world, and second, the man himself is so self-effacing, calm, and gentle that it’s the devil’s own job to surround him with any special glamorousness or striking individuality.

The fact seems to be that Weill lives, and is quite content to live, by virtue of his work and not by impact as a personality. And in this respect he certainly has lived. In his thirty-six years he essayed a full-length opera at the age of twelve, taught piano at the same time, wrote music for a dozen or more plays, including the international success Dreigroschenoper (Three-Penny Opera), had his works banned by the pre-Hitler government in Germany, become a political exile from the Third Reich, and developed what critics regard as a definitely new musical form in his scorings for plays-scorings which are neither incidental music, operatic structures, revue song-and-dance arrangements, nor mere decoration. It is in terms of this last achievement that Weill has come sharply to the notice of American theatregoers this season. And he takes it all in his comfortable stride, with a quiet smile–which is also, incidentally, the way he parries questions about his political views. “They call me a Kultur Bolshevist,” is all he will say.

During the drawn-out course of its production, The Eternal Road had to meet such ticklish problems as the depiction of God. In regard to the latter, Weill advised that he be a crooner. There was none of your Make-Way-for-the-Lord-Jehovah quality about the Deity of this soft-spoken composer. As might be expected, everyone connected with the production thought the idea preposterous. But as it turned out, Weill notes with quiet satisfaction, God is a crooner.

Weill is short and round, like a cherub in attendance on a crooner god. He has come to America because the Nazis had no use for honesty and indignation on the stage; and he had no use for the stage without these estimable qualities. He hopes here to carry to its fulfillment the theory which forms the basis of all his work: that music must be an integral part of the theater. He sees it as an indispensable feature of the imaginative theater, much in the fashion used by the ancient Greeks; and he sees the imaginative theater replacing the naturalistic one which has predominated in the past few decades.

Concerning his musical theory, Weill is sure he is doing something important. In fact, in his mild way, he has always had this almost naïve self-assurance. Not yet in his teens, and with no training in composition whatsoever, he had the nerve to sit down and write a full opera. At twenty-four, he had the even greater nerve to decide he wanted to work with a first-rate playwright. He was comparatively unknown and still poorer; but he had to have the best. What is more, he got it in Georg Kaiser, author of From Morn to Midnight, then probably the foremost playwright of the experimental theater in Germany.

Weill was born in Dessau in 1900. The fact that his father was a cantor gave him an acquaintance with traditional music which was of considerable help in doing the score for The Eternal Road. His education consisted mainly of a few months of study with Humperdinck, actual directing in provincial theaters, and more study with Busoni in Berlin, where he had to play piano in cafés at night to make his expenses. At this time he was writing complicated, atonal music, in keeping with the fashion of the day. But when a Russian ballet requisitioned him to do some scores, he changed cheerfully to the simple style which he considers more dramatic and which he has kept to ever since. It was this music which led to the beginning of the long association with Kaiser. They did The Protagonist together, produced by the Dresden State Opera.

In a Germany that was still something of a happy hunting ground for artistic expression, Weill, temporarily, had few worries about expenses. He did The Royal Palace with Ivan Goll, which failed, The Czar Has Himself Photographed with Kaiser, which succeeded, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany with Brecht, which was at least spectacular. This latter revue was a savage satire on capitalism, dealing with a fantastic city in which each inhabitant must spend his money–and is killed when it runs out. At its opening in Leipzig in 1930 the bourgeois audience flew into a rage, and precipitated a battle which lasted for hours. Berlin, however, was less hostile to revolutionary ideas and received the production cordially.

Finally in ’33 Weill went to work with Kaiser on The Silver Lake, destined to be his last German production. Shortly before Hitler came to power, the play, which was a grim discussion of unemployment, opened in eleven cities at once, a fact which testifies to the following of these two at the time. It had a successful and turbulent career of just one night. While the audiences cheered, the authorities went into a horrified huddle behind closed doors. The following day they banned the play. The German government could no longer afford to let the artist be outspoken on the stage at least, not these two irrepressibles. Beauty and honesty had to move on to make room for the Nazis; and with them Weill moved too. The atmosphere was becoming unhealthy for a “Kultur Bolshevist.” In Paris and in London Weill continued to seek out the most original playwrights and convince them of the fact that music could enrich their texts. Thence he came to America with Max Reinhardt last year to do the music for Werfel’s Eternal Road. After it failed to open in the 1935-6 season, the story goes, he sought out the Group Theatre because he felt that its pioneering viewpoint would give him the opportunity he sought. His score for Johnny Johnson was the result.

Weill writes haunting, lyric music, employing the familiar devices of jazz, ballad, and even military rhythm. Yet the indefinable, individual touch with which he endows his music takes it out of the commonplace level of these more familiar forms. As such, it is eminently suitable as part satiric, part mournful, even part humorous commentary on our modern displays of greed and hate. Weill doesn’t want his music to be thought of as detached from the theater. It must be judged, he says, not by the standards of concert music, but rather by the standards of the theater itself. This explains in large part his success in the apparently difficult task of adapting actors for musical roles. For his music almost fits in to the cadences of speech, and the actor sings it with the natural voice he would use to give speech its highest intensity.

Of the Johnny Johnson score, R.D. Darrell, writing in the NEW MASSES of December 15, said: “A model of simplicity and economy, Weill’s music neither asks for nor needs highly trained interpreters, yet not at note fails to sound, not a phrase is lacking in significance and point…It is first-rate theatrical music, integrating, intensifying…”

The critics in Germany–when there still were such–used to call him the “asphalt musician.” They meant that his music spoke to the man in the street, in the simple language the people could understand, as opposed to the Wagnerian concept of thundering to the Gods in Valhalla. The critics, of course, used this as a term of derision. But Weill was tremendously pleased. He hopes to popularize music–not in the commercialized sense of the word, but in the manner of a musician who breaks away from conventional forms and yet wants his works to be sung and remembered. So Weill considers their “asphalt” insult the finest compliment they could have paid him.

There is none of the bombastic in his music–and even less in Weill himself. Members of the Group Theatre like to tell how, at one of their most hectic rehearsals, the director stopped them for a customary intermission of silence. Tacitly it was felt that Weill, who was at the piano, should nod when they might resume. Two minutes passed, that being the usual length of such intervals. No motion from Weill. Another few minutes–and he still sat serene at the keyboard. Finally, after an inordinately long time, someone went over to him and asked if anything was wrong. “Not at all,” he answered placidly, “I just wanted to see how long a bunch of actors could stay quiet.”

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1937/v22n03-jan-12-1937-NM.pdf