Kurt Weill, the stranger.

Kurt Weill the “stranger”

  The Jewish-european composer seems to have many facets that even today are difficult to classify.  Weill was the socialist composer, who truly believe in the social function of the music and work hand to hand with Berthold Brecht in works who’s mainly objective was to expose and criticized the capitalism and bourgeois societies. On other side we have the so called “American” composer who wrote Broadway musicals and who was a fervent nationalist in the war against his natal Germany. And finally we have the pure composer, the modernist highly intellectual who wrote operatic, orchestral and chamber music that we rarely get chance to hear. Which of this is the “true” Weill?

In his history we can find the tragedy that thousands of German Jews shared in the first fifty years of the twenty century, a tragic history of survival and fate that determines Weill’s intellectual development and his devote to the social responsibility of the artist. At the end, all of his musical statements are part of the substance of his compositions.

Weill was an extrovert character, reserve and modest, and in a way, according to many biographers, a workaholic. He subject everything on his art, even though his marriage with Lotte Lenya, who always complain for occupying a second place in Weill’s life.  He was a “highly conscious” musician who was aware of the important role of art in society and the artist’s obligations to that society. In all the works that he developed from Berlin to Broadway, we can sense the socio-aesthetic position that pops out and that was Weill’s special touch.

In 1933, when he was officially denounced for his socialist views and became a target for the Nazis, he was forced to leave Germany. He spent some time between Paris and London promoting some of his works and finally he decides to settle in the United States and is when Weill starts his American adventure.  He begins to study the American popular stage music and became fascinated with jazz.  Is in this scenario is where Weill’s came with the idea of One of his Broadway’s hit, “A touch of Venus”, who was written between 1942 and 1943. The show was a contemporary play that satirizes the contemporary American suburban values of romance and sex and takes the Pygmalion myth to illustrate this theme.  

Although is ironic how Weill managed accommodated himself in the most capitalist entertainment industry, he converted the American experience of being exile into a compelling musical statement, just as he did with his previous works. Besides the creations of Broadway’s musicals we can find also in his works during the American years, a composition moment when in a way he reconciles the German and Austrian musical tradition and start to create Lieders.

And what can we read between the lines of his Brodway’s musical works? In the play “A touch of Venus”, who talks about a statue of the goddess Venus who comes to life and become the object of affection of a good-hearted window dresser who happens to be engaged, we can find some of Weill statements.  When the female protagonist, Venus herself, sing a beautiful almost-aria called “I’m a stranger here myself”.

Tell me is love still
A popular suggestion,
Or merely an obsolete art?
 This simple question;
I'm unfamiliar with his heart,
I am a stranger here myself

Are the misadventures of Venus and her inability to understand the local idiosyncrasies an allegory of what Weill’s was living in the exile? Venus sense of estrangement was the melancholy that perhaps chased Weill in his American exile.  Like Camus allegory in his Novel “L’Etranger” (the stranger, the outsider), that happens to be published one year before the premier of Weill’s play. Kurt Weill, like Mersault, Camus principal protagonist who kills an Arab just because; Weill was also an outcast, an outsider.  How can he possible refuse? When he was a stranger himself.