The New Yorker:

Fresh New York stagings of “The Threepenny Opera” and “Love Life” show off the composer’s daring and range.

By Alex Ross

“Music is no longer a matter for the few,” Kurt Weill declared in 1928, the year he wrote “The Threepenny Opera.” In Weill’s opinion, composers educated in the classical tradition had lost touch with the broader public and sunk into obscurantism. They should make their music “simpler, clearer, more transparent,” and they should address contemporary concerns. Seldom has an artist followed his own credo so faithfully. From “Threepenny” to “Lost in the Stars,” from Berlin to Broadway, Weill forged mass art on modern themes. The feat was all the more impressive given that the composer had to win over an entirely new audience after his flight from Nazi Germany, in 1933. Of the countless twentieth-century figures who attempted the hazardous leap from Europe to America, Weill was one of very few—Ernst Lubitsch also comes to mind—who found commercial and artistic success on both sides of the Atlantic.

In recent weeks, New York has witnessed a fortuitous mini-festival of Weill’s singular career. “Threepenny,” his epochal collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a German-language production by Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble. “Love Life,” which Weill created with Alan Jay Lerner in 1948, had a rare revival in the Encores! series, at New York City Center. Further afield, Jonathan Groff is belting out “Mack the Knife” in “Just in Time,” a new Broadway musical about Bobby Darin. Adding to the timeliness of this welter of Weill is the composer’s reputation for political courage. Three weeks after the Nazis came to power, Brown Shirts disrupted a performance of Weill and Georg Kaiser’s “Der Silbersee,” in which the marching song “Caesar’s Death” takes clear aim at Hitler.

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