Sospeso performs songs by Kurt Weill at the Orensanz Center concert in February.

He was one of the outstanding composers in the generation that came to maturity after World War I, and a key figure in the development of modern forms of musical theatre. His successful and innovatory work for Broadway during the 1940s was a development in more popular terms of the exploratory stage works that had made him the foremost avant-garde theatre composer of the Weimar Republic.

Although, unlike his contemporary Hindemith, Weill did not bequeath to posterity a corpus of pedagogical writings or a codifiable musical language, he must be viewed in retrospect as the most influential German composer of his generation. His example is still invoked today by art composers interested in pursuing stylistic pluralism, whether this is taken to mean the adoption of popular idioms, the ‘crossover’ from art to commercial music, or stylistic contrast as a compositional element in its own right. Equally important was his advocacy of ‘gestic music’, by which he meant a theatre score that precisely undergirds and pre-defines the pace, timing, character and mood of the drama. Der Jasager, a casebook example of gestic music reduced to essentials, left an indelible mark on 20th-century music theatre, whether that of his younger German contemporaries (from Blacher to Orff), his American colleagues (Copland’s The Second Hurricane, and thus indirectly Britten’s The Little Sweep) or the minimalist theatre composers of subsequent decades. Another of his influential characteristics, widely attributed to his association with Brecht and the ‘alienation effect’, was a supposedly ironic detachment of his music from the text or context. Further, just as Brecht advocated a ‘separation of elements’ in the art of acting, so Weill’s Weimar scores lend themselves to the kind of analysis in which the ingredients are seen to conflict dialectically rather than cohering into a unified whole.

In none of these respects would Weill himself have claimed to be the innovator, however aware he was of the influence he exerted on his contemporaries. He deferred in his writings to Mozart as a quintessentially ‘gestic’ opera composer, and the stylistic plurality he avowed is, of course, as old as Monteverdi. But by presenting these devices forcefully in modern contexts he offered examples which other composers could, and did, usefully follow. The specific ‘tone’ of Weill’s works of the late 1920s is often consciously quoted, particularly his distinctive handling of bitonal harmony, triadic atonality and jazz timbres. In the Broadway musical his influence has perhaps been less noticeable, partly because of transformations in the genre itself, partly because none of his shows have remotely approached the iconic status accorded to such contemporary productions as Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun or Guys and Dolls. Nonetheless, their importance in elevating the genre’s subject matter, sharpness of characterization and general craftsmanship is unquestionable. Finally, in the search for new audiences and hybrid forms of music theatre, Weill’s name and the protean example of Die Dreigroschenoper continue to be invoked by composers as varied as Hans Werner Henze and John Adams in their own attempts to broaden the base for contemporary music.

J. Bradford Robinson, in the Grove. Image © 2003 Milken Family Foundation.