Book Review

Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life

Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya

Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Edited and translated by Lys Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; pp. 554. $39.95.

Those to whom the name Kurt Weill means Threepenny Opera and little else could do much worse than to consult these two very different but nicely complementary recent books focusing on aspects (professional, amorous, and otherwise) of the German composer's life. The lives of musical composers are often admittedly of limited interest to non-musicologists, but Weill is exempt for several reasons. First, his career (he was born in 1900) follows the historical trajectory of this century in some remarkable ways, from his small-town German-Jewish upbringing as the prodigiously gifted son of a cantor, to his musical training under the twin influences of Busoni and Stravinsky, his ascent into the first ranks of the artistic avant-garde of the Weimar Republic, his vaunted collaboration with Brecht in Berlin, and finally to his exile in Paris and New York. Second, Weill's sharp mind and philosophical acuity on aesthetic and theatrical matters are evident throughout. Third, a veritable Kurt Weill renaissance is underway in this country at last. It's worth the effort to spend some time learning about Weill, the musician and the man.

Kurt Schebera's book bills itself as "an illustrated life," but it is less a biography in the conventional sense (Schebera lacks all personal prurience and psychological interest and coyly refuses to dwell on incidents or deliver juicy details) than a sober, chronologically arranged documentation of Weill's career and compositions. His wife Lotte Lenya said of him, "For Weill there really was nothing but his music" (79), and indeed Schebera's Weill is a man of all-consuming and single-minded energy, restlessly pursuing project after project until his early death from a heart attack at age 50. For an oeuvre of such scope--and the virtue of this study is to remind us how richly varied Weill's work was--the documentary approach works well.

The book is divided into three uneven parts. "The Early Years" outlines Weill's childhood in provincial Dessau (from his father he had both the [End Page 551] musical talent and a deep loyalty to Jewish culture and spirituality), his studies with such luminaries as Humperdinck in Berlin and his first compositions, and in culmination the brief but tremendously influential time spent under the tutelage of the formidable Ferrucio Busoni who became Weill's first mentor. In 1922, Weill composed his first work for the theatre, the pantomime Die Zaubernacht, and made a discovery that became key to his work: "that the stage has its own musical form, which develops organically out of the flow of the plot, and that important events can truly be expressed only through the simplest, least conspicuous means" (42).

Part 2, "Berlin," justifiably takes up the bulk of Schebera's book. The postwar capital was a maelstrom of cultural cross-currents, and Weill, the dedicated modernist (to his brother he wrote: "my imagination is not a bird, it is an airplane!" [19]) seems to have absorbed them all. Friendships with Expressionist playwrights Georg Kaiser and Yvan Goll led to collaborations on three one-act operas that critics quickly recognized as formally innovative and that primed Weill for his most celebrated association, that with Brecht. Unfortunately, Weill's uncanny, catalytic ability to collaborate with playwrights is largely left unexplored. But Schebera shows that it was Weill who initiated the Brecht contact and who pushed for the renewal of opera in Mahagonny, their first mutual project, hoping to give "appropriate expression to the completely transformed manifestations of life in our time" (101-2). Threepenny Opera, completed at "lightning speed" (105), became the hit of 1928 and made both men wealthy. For Weill, the return to the "prototype of opera" (112) in Dreigroschenoper heralded his revival of the operatic form that he later advanced in now neglected works such as the "school opera" Der Jasager (He Who Says Yes, for which Brecht provided the text) which he considered the paramount work of his Berlin period. The Brecht/Weill partnership faltered after four intense years, riven by aesthetic disagreements turned personal: music was, to Weill, always "the overarching element" (149); to Brecht, music remained subordinate to a total dialectic. After Hitler's takeover in 1933, Weill's work was banned in Germany (one chapter gives chilling examples of Nazi diatribes against "cultural Bolsheviks" like Weill); in 1935, he and Lenya found their way via France to New York.

The book's third part, "The United States," is unfortunately its least successful. The fitful process of reinventing himself as "the American Weill" (274) must have been befuddling to the recent immigrant--Weill never looked back, disavowed Germany altogether, and proceeded to create some of the most idiomatically American works of any composer. But, busy with recounting the flurry of projects that occupied Weill in his last fifteen years, from the successful (Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark) to the fascinating discards (such as a musical folk play about slavery, Ulysses Africanus), Schebera aids us little in understanding this complex process of cultural and artistic adaptation. His discussion here is also hobbled by an incomplete and occasionally condescending understanding of the American theatrical scene. It does, however, eloquently make the point that Weill's seminal contributions to American musical theatre remain underappreciated.

The strength of Schebera's book lies primarily in its rich pictorial documentation; production photographs, posters, programs, telegrams, and record labels, although appearing only in black-and-white, are well-selected, informative, and evocative. Other welcome features are capsule descriptions of each work together with reviews, a timeline, and a selected discography. However, Schebera's terse prose style, while factual, has all the charm of a ministerial directive, and it isn't helped by a stumbling translation frequently fraught with painful literalisms. Nonetheless, the book will do good service as a primary reference source on Weill.

Speak Low (When You Speak Love)--also the title of one of Weill's most haunting melodies--delivers what Kurt Weill doesn't: a visceral sense of Lenya's and Weill's personal and professional triumphs and often wrenching failures within a world that seemed dangerous and shifting, however much bravado they mustered. The correspondence of this unlikely couple (he refined, Jewish, cerebral; she impulsive, untutored, strikingly jolie laide, working-class) was clearly not written for prying posterity. It is functional and often concerns trivial things--especially money--but even in translation their two distinct voices (Weill's slightly ironic, Saxonian inflection, Lenya's take-no-prisoners Austrian bluntness) shine through, and their groping for idiomatic language when the letters are written in English after 1938 is often touchingly hilarious.

Because Lenya was the more faithful letter-keeper but the less faithful correspondent, Weill's voice dominates the book; Lenya largely becomes a foil for his reflections or is often absent, as in the highly amusing series of missives Weill sent from the "bourgeois hick town" (203), Hollywood, in 1937. Predictably, the illustrious and the notorious of two continents parade through these pages; the Weills knew them all and worked with many of them: the Gershwins, Max Ernst, Helen Hayes, [End Page 552] Chaplin, Dietrich, and Malraux, among others. One of the guilty pleasures of reading this correspondence is eavesdropping on their laconically unsparing eye-level judgments on the demigods of twentieth-century culture: Brecht is a "swine" (166), Reinhardt "a repulsive publicity hound" (184), Fritz Lang "a really miserable guy" (238). Equally withering contempt is lavished on the obtuseness of American collaborators. The vitriol, it appears, was reserved for the letters. In person they were charming.

But such imprecations are really the veneer on a relationship that was troubled as soon as it got past first blush. Lenya's Dickensian childhood--her startling autobiographical sketch is reprinted here--apparently left her permanently scarred and searching for approval, and she took solace in numerous affairs as Weill retreated into his projects (and his own affairs). Eventually, the partnership reached a carefully crafted equilibrium and Weill could declare: "[W]e've really solved the question of living together, which is so terribly difficult for us, in a very beautiful and proper way" (180).

Among the most interesting aspects of the letters is the subtext of constant cultural friction as Weill first tried unsuccessfully to rescue his legacy into France and England, then to remake himself for the alien American market, simultaneously fearful of being neglected and of being swallowed up by the voracious "cultural industry," as Lenya's career slowly went into temporary eclipse. Unfortunately for us, significant phases like the Brecht collaboration or the work on the "Broadway opera" Street Scene are not covered by the correspondence.

Speak Low is a labor of love in a twofold sense. At its heart, of course, is the love of two of the century's great theatrical artists--and about their love there is no doubt after reading these letters, however laborious the peculiar undulations of their on-again, off-again marriage (they married in 1926; only their closest friends knew of their divorce in 1933; they remarried in 1937). The second labor of love is that of the editors, Lys Simonette and Kim H. Kowalke, who have done exemplary work in editing, translating, footnoting, and commenting this volume. In their conscientious hands, what could have been a marginal correspondence emerges as a worthwhile and highly entertaining resource about European and American theatrical culture between 1925 and 1950. Speak Low is highly recommended to those interested in twentieth-century theatre, both for the letters themselves and for the care with which they are presented in this volume.

Ralf E. Remshardt
University of Florida

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