Virtuosity in Shabby Dress

By Christopher Porterfield

A new Met production gives Berlin's Kurt Weill his due

"What do you want to become," scoffed Ferruccio Busoni at his student, "a Verdi of the poor?" Replied Kurt Weill: "Would that be so bad?" Good or bad, it was not far off the mark. In the German musical scene of the 1920s, Weill emerged along with Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek as a leading operatic experimenter. He tried to recast traditional opera as a vital folk theater that would speak to the masses. Simplicity and comprehensibility were his bywords. He composed in the acid strokes of Berlin's satirical cabarets and the angular accents of dance music and jazz--"the rhythm of our time." As collaborators, he sought out the boldest insurgent playwrights of the day, notably the young Bertolt Brecht. The result was a series of memorable theater works--spare, bittersweet, haunting, utterly original.

Forced into exile by the onset of Nazism, Weill took surprisingly well to more commercial surroundings in the U.S. "If there will ever be anything like an American opera," he announced in 1937, "it is bound to come out of Broadway."

He turned to writing such shows as Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Lady in the Dark (1941) and Street Scene (1947). But he may have succeeded too well in fashioning a popular, accessible style. At his death in 1950, he was mourned mostly as a brilliant Broadway tunesmith, the composer of September Song. Even after off-Broadway's smash 1954 revival of the Brecht-Weill triumph from the Berlin years, The Threepenny Opera--featuring Weill's widow Lotte Lenya--people were all too ready to believe that, in every detail down to the melody of Mack the Knife, Weill had merely filled in Brecht's outlines.

Now the lesser-known Weill, and especially the Berlin Weill, is beginning to get his due. In Kurt Weill in Europe, a pioneering study to be published this month by UMI Research Press, Musicologist Kim Kowalke demolishes the notion that Weill was a sort of musical valet to Brecht, and builds a case for him as "the greatest composer active in modern theater." The New York City Opera, which already has Street Scene in its repertory, plans a spring production of The Silver Lake (1933), Weill's setting of a drama by German Expressionist Georg Kaiser. This week Weill's Symphony No. 2 (1934), his richest instrumental work, will get a rare New York hearing in a concert by the American Symphony Orchestra. Also this week, PBS's Live from the Met will broadcast the Metropolitan Opera's new production of what is probably the masterpiece of the Brecht-Weill collaboration, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930).

Mahagonny is a bleak, biting allegory of capitalist debauchery. Somewhere near a mythical Gold Coast between Florida and Alaska, three crooks on the lam decide to establish a paradise of endless money and pleasure. The malcontents of the world descend on the place to indulge in desperate sprees of booze, sex and gambling, punctuated by fits of boredom and futility. Rape, murder, anything goes in Mahagonny. The only unpardonable crime is running out of cash. When Jimmy Mahoney, a decent-minded lumberjack, commits it, he is sentenced to death.

The Met company, giving the first performance in its history of a Weill work, plunges into the unaccustomed material as if let out of school. Sopranos strut as tough hookers; the scaled-down orchestra sports saxophones and syncopated cymbals. Met Music Director James Levine conducts with idiomatic verve. In the principal roles, Tenor Richard Cassilly is a virile, slightly husky-voiced Jimmy, and Soprano Teresa Stratas gives a fierce, ringing portrayal of Jenny, the prostitute with whom he has a bruised romance.

John Dexter's staging, in its drab authenticity, is stuck with elements that have become cliches of modern theater-- the billboarded texts between scenes, the performers made up as gaunt George Grosz caricatures. It cannot help under lining what seems dated and crudely didactic in Brecht's libretto.

When the city collapses into anarchy in the grand choral finale, Dexter marches placard-bearing per formers up the aisles of the Met to remind us, apparently, that we are all citizens of Mahagonny. It is a point that goes without saying-- and should have.

"The intellectual bearing of this music," Weill once wrote in defense of his deceptively simple style, "is thoroughly serious, bitter, accusing and, in the most pleasant cases, still ironic." In Mahagonny, it is a good bit more besides. The lowdown, choppy episodes constitute sheer operatic virtuosity in shabby dress, including a full range of arias, recitatives, ensembles and massed choruses. If the music never bursts into full flood, the reason is that Weill set himself so sternly against the pumped-up passions of the late romantic style he grew up with. If it never carries along the narrative, the reason is that he rigorously segregated it from the dialogue scenes.

Under the influence of neoclassic works like Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, he sought a formal, static structure in which the music would stand apart as an objective comment on the action.

The man who could compose Mahagonny was far more than a tunesmith. But then, so was the man who could compose Street Scene.

The point of doing justice to the Berlin Weill is not to raise him above the Broadway Weill, but to acknowlege the consistency that connects them both.

Weill's innovative craftsmanship and distinctive flavor left their mark on Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe; and the distance is not far from Street Scene to West Side Story.

Schoenberg disdainfully preferred Franz Lehar. With the advantage of a fuller view and of productions like the Met's Mahagonny, this generation may come closer to Hindemith's verdict: "Weill a small composer? No, at his best a perfect one."

--Christopher Porterfield

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