Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

before his arrival in America, had established himself as a reputable classical composer from Germany in what Stravinsky called the “main stem” of the classical tradition. At fifteen he began studying theory and composition as well as piano, at sixteen he was creating “serious” compositions, and by seventeen he was acquiring skills in instrumentation, orchestration—unlike most Broadway composers Weill would score his own shows—and score-reading. In 1918 he enrolled at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik to study composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of Hänsel und Gretel. Conducting and counterpoint studies with equally distinguished teachers would continue.

At twenty, Weill was accepted as one of Ferruccio Busoni’s six composition students at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. After composing an impressive series of instrumental as well as stage works, Weill made his pivotal decision to devote his career to the latter in 1926. The next year he began his most famous collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, a collaboration that over the next six years yielded the works by which Weill remains best remembered and most appreciated, at least in classical circles: Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) (1928), Happy End (1929), and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) (1930).

Those who saw the collaborations with Brecht as the summit of Weill’s creative life concluded that when Weill immigrated to America after a two-year Parisian interregnum, he traded in his artistic soul for fourteen years of hits—and still more misses—in the cultural wasteland of Broadway. Even writers sympathetic to his American musicals recounted the compromises that Weill was forced to make to reach the lowest common Broadway denominators.2 Just as politicians frequently do not survive a change of party allegiance or a conspicuous change of mind on a sensitive issue, composers who abandon the trappings of “high culture” for the commercial marketplace can be expected to pay a price for their pact with Mammon. Schoenberg’s idea that great works are inherently inaccessible to general audiences and that audiences who like great works cannot possibly understand them, died a slow and lingering death.

In a reflective entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Weill authority David Drew helped to place the transplanted German’s “divided” career in perspective when he pointed out that even with his sharper-edged collaborations with Brecht, Weill had also aimed to please a particular audience in a particular time and place.3 According to Drew, Weill discovered with Die Dreigroschenoper “that a ‘serious’ modern composer could still reach the broad masses without sacrifice of originality or contemporaneity.” Similarly, when discussing the Broadway works, Drew helped to clarify the altered aesthetic transformation between the “cultural implications” of a work like Mahagonny and the Broadway period: “The creation of ‘works of art’ was not Weill’s primary concern…. Weill now attempted to subordinate all aesthetic criteria to purely pragmatic and populist ones. Musical ideas, and dramatic ones too, were not to be judged in terms of originality or intrinsic interest … but in terms of their power to evoke, immediately and unambiguously, the required emotional response from a given audience.”

Drew went on to remark that Weill continued to take risks on Broadway in dramatic form or subject matter. Even in the conventional One Touch of Venus Weill took a risk by allowing dance to tell a story and by teaming up with Broadway newcomers, librettist S. J. Perelman (1904–1979) and lyricist Ogden Nash (1902–1971). But Drew seemed to share the view held by even those sympathetic to Weill’s American adventure when he wrote that Broadway “exacted from him a degree of self-sacrifice greater than any that would have been demanded by a totalitarian ministry of culture.” In Europe, Weill was a leading modernist and a composer “accustomed to measure his talents and achievements against those of the most eminent of his German contemporaries, Paul Hindemith.” In America, “the composer whom he now saw as his chief rival was Richard Rodgers.” Nevertheless, Weill’s “aural imagination” and “highly cultivated sense of musical character and theatrical form” enabled him to secure “a special place in the history of American popular music.”

Drew and other Weill biographers assumed that Weill sacrificed his potential for growth and artistic achievement (albeit willingly) in order to serve “a larger interest than his own, namely that of the American musical theatre.” In any event, the absence of subsidized American theater and the scarce opportunities for new works to be performed in what he viewed as artistically stagnant American operatic institutions allowed Weill no place to turn but to the somewhat restricted world of Broadway.

In its English translation by Blitzstein, Die Dreigroschenoper has demonstrated its durability in the American musical theater repertory as The Threepenny Opera. Of the works originally composed for American audiences perhaps only Street Scene (1947), a modest success in its own time with 148 performances, and the comparably successful Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lost in the Stars (1949) (168 and 273 performances, respectively) have gained increasing popular and critical acclaim (in the years since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, Weill performances have become increasingly common). In fact, Street Scene has achieved a reasonably secure place in the operatic repertory. Meanwhile, despite an increasing number of performances on American and European stages, neither of Weill’s wartime hits, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, has returned for a full-scale staged Broadway production. It is indeed a peculiar legacy that Weill’s popularly designed American works remain unrevived, if not revivable.4

Despite its long neglect, Lady in the Dark can be found in nearly every list of notable musicals. While it failed to make Lehman Engel’s short list, this pioneering critic confidently predicted that it “will come back again and again.”5One Touch of Venus was greeted as “an unhackneyed and imaginative musical that spurns the easy formulas of Broadway” and “the best score by Mr. Weill that we recall.”6 Even Weill, in a letter to Ira Gershwin, expressed the opinion that he had for the most part succeeded in producing an audience-worthy show: