WEILL, KURT ( b. Dessau, Germany, March 2 1900; d. New York, April 3 1950 )
Weill was the son of a Jewish cantor and his family supported his musical education from an early age. Having studied with a local teacher he attended university. He then went on to work at the opera house in Dessau and as kapellmeister of a small municipal theatre.
By 1920 he was one of six students working under the composer Busoni at the Prussian Academy in Berlin. In the years at the academy he met the actress/dancer/singer Lotte Lenya, whom he married in 1926. She was to become the chief exponent of his works.
Shortly after their marriage his first one-act opera, Der Protagonist was premiered. A second followed before Weill met the radical poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who became his creative partner.
Their first collaboration became Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny ( The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny ). This was followed by two cantatas and their famous reworking of John Gay's Beggar's Opera as Der Dreigroschenoper, ( The Three Penny Opera ).
Both Weill and Brecht were interested in contemporary and political themes. These led to clashes with the German authorities, culminating in the closure, in 1933, of the opera Der Silbersee, ( Silverlake ). In the same year Weill and Lenya fled to Paris, abandoning their possessions to the Nazis.
Paris saw the première of Weill's Die sieben Todsünden ( The Seven Deadly Sins ). Other works were produced when the couple fled to London before the German advance. In 1935 they moved on to New York. There they found other ex-patriots with whom they worked on farther operas and musical plays.
By 1938 Weill was an established figure in American music theatre. In the years that followed he established working relationships with American librettist Moss Hart, and writers Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman. Some of his work was considered too operatic for the theatre-going public, but his experiences with the experimental dramas of Brecht stood him in good stead.
His early death from a heart attack cut short a career that had successfully transferred from the cultural background of nineteenth century Europe to the world of twentieth-century Broadway theatre.
