Kurt Weill

Born: 1900 | Died: 1950

Composer

Kurt Weill was born in 1900 and raised in a religious Jewish family in Dessau in eastern Germany. He began his career in the early 1920’s, after a musical childhood and several years of study in Berlin.

By the time his first opera, The Protagonist, was performed in April 1926, he was an established young German composer. He devoted himself to the musical theater, and his works with Bertolt Brecht, including Mahagonny (a collection of songs), Three Penny Opera and Happy End, soon made him famous all over Europe.

Weill fled the new Nazi leadership in March 1933 and continued his indefatigable efforts, first in Paris (1933-35), then in the U.S. until his death. Certain common threads tie together his career: a concern for social justice, an aggressive pursuit of highly-regarded playwrights and lyricists as collaborators, and the ability to adapt to audience tastes no matter where he found himself.

His most important works are: the “Violin Concerto” (1925); “The Threepenny Opera” (with Bertolt Brecht, 1928) - featuring Weill’s most famous song "Mack the Knife;" “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” (Brecht, 1930); “The Pledge” (Caspar Neher, 1932); “The Seven Deadly Sins” (Brecht, 1933); “Lady in the Dark” (Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, 1941); “One Touch of Venus” (S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, 1943); “Street Scene” (Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, 1947); the American folk opera: “Down in the Valley” (1948) and “Lost in the Stars” (Maxwell Anderson, 1949). He died of heart failure in 1950, shortly after he and Anderson began work on a musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, leaving behind a large catalogue of works and a reputation that continues to grow as more of his music is performed.

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