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

reemerge in Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus suggests a deeper than generally acknowledged connection between the aesthetic and working methods of the European and the American Weills. The connecting link is embodied in the concept of gestus, a term that eludes precise identification. According to Kim Kowalke, “the crucial aspect of gestus was the translation of dramatic emotion and individual characterization into a typical, reproducible physical realization.”40 In any event, the principle of a gestic music based on rhythm is demonstrable in the aesthetic framework and the compositional process of Weill’s music in America as well as in Europe.

In his 1929 essay on this subject, “Concerning the Gestic Character of Music,” Weill, after explaining that “the gestus is expressed in a rhythmic fixing of the text,” makes a case for the primacy of rhythm.41 Once a composer has located the “proper” gestus, “even the melody is stamped by the gestus of the action that is to be represented.” Weill acknowledges the possibility of more than one rhythmic interpretation of a text (and, one might add, the possibility of more than one text for a given gestus). He also argues that “the rhythmic restriction imposed by the text is no more severe a fetter for the operatic composer than, for example, the formal schemes of the fugue, sonata, or rondo were for the classic master” and that “within the framework of such rhythmically predetermined music, all methods of melodic elaboration and of harmonic and rhythmic differentiation are possible, if only the musical spans of accent conform to the gestic proceeding.”

Weill concludes his discussion of gestic music by citing an example from Brecht’s version of the “Alabama-Song,” in which “a basic gestus has been defined in the most primitive form.”42 While Brecht assigns pitches to his gestus—which may explain why he tried to assume the credit for composing Weill’s music—Weill considers Brecht’s attempt “nothing more than an inventory of the speech-rhythm and cannot be used as music.”43 Weill explains that he retains “the same basic gestus” but that he “composed” this gestus “with the much freer means of the musician.” Weill’s tune “extends much farther afield melodically, and even has a totally different rhythmic foundation as a result of the pattern of the accompaniment—but the gestic character has been preserved, although it occurs in a completely different outward form.” Several compositional drafts and self-borrowings reveal that in America as well as in Germany, Weill, like Loesser to follow, continued to establish a rhythmic gestus before he worked out his songs melodically.

Kowalke suggests that eighteenth-century Baroque opera seria served as the aesthetic model for Brecht and Weill’s music drama of alienation widely known as epic opera.44 Kowalke goes on to describe more specific stylistic similarities, including the relationship between the Baroque doctrine of affections and Weill’s interchangeable song types based on a related gestus.45 An especially applicable example can be found in the genesis of “My Ship” from Lady in the Dark. Both the opening of the second sketch draft and the final version feature a rising diminished seventh, F-A-C-E (a resemblance noted by bruce d. mcclung).46 It is also clear that Weill had established a gestus, if not the melodic working out, by the time he drafted this second draft of five eventual versions.

Just as “Surabaya Johnny” (Happy End) constitutes a trope of the “Moritat” (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”) from Die Dreigroschenoper, the borrowed songs in Lady and Venus may be considered tropes from Weill’s European output. Weill’s practice of salvaging material from failed shows closely parallels the practice of other Broadway as well as European operatic composers as far back as Handel in the Baroque era.47 What makes such salvaging possible for Weill is a shared gestus that might, like the Baroque affections, serve several dramatic situations with equal conviction. Weill would continue to develop this particular brand of transformation within his American works. Lady and Venus exhibit an especially notable example as shown in Example 7.1. Even the theater reviewer, Lewis Nichols, remarked after a single hearing in his opening night review of Venus that at the conclusion of act I, Savory “sings the sad story of ‘Dr. Crippen’ in a mood and a tune not unlike that of Mr. Weill’s celebrated ‘Saga of Jenny.’”48

Example 7.1. “The Saga of Jenny” and “Dr. Crippen”

(a) “The Saga of Jenny” (Lady in the Dark)

(b) “Dr. Crippen” (One Touch of Venus)

Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus as Integrated Musicals

Despite his careful selection of librettists and lyricists and his devotion to theatrical integrity, Weill’s Broadway offerings for the most part share the posthumous fate of such popular contemporaries as Kern, Porter, and Rodgers and Hart who are similarly remembered more for their hit songs in most of their shows.49 Even in the case of The Threepenny Opera, an extraordinarily popular musical in its Off-Broadway reincarnation, “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” remains by far its most remembered feature.

It is additionally ironic that the ideal of Weill’s most successful musical deliberately disregards the principle of the so-called integrated model popularized by Rodgers and Hammerstein, a principle that would hold center stage (with some exceptions) at least until the mid-1960s. In Europe, the apparent interchangeability of arias (providing the proper affects were preserved) in opera seria gave way to the increasingly integrated, albeit occasionally heterogeneous, operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and Berg. Many Broadway shows before Rodgers and Hammerstein (and some thereafter), like their Baroque opera counterparts, emphasized great individual songs, stars, and stagecraft more than broader dramatic themes and treated their books and music as autonomous rather than integrated elements.

After Oklahoma! and Carousel the aesthetic goals of Broadway shifted. Two years after the disastrous Firebrand of Florence in 1945 (43 performances), Weill too composed an integrated dramatic work, Street Scene (148 performances), that would eventually achieve a commercial success roughly commensurate with its critical acclaim. The dream that Weill shared on his notes to the cast album of