Songs and Their Singers, Part Three

In commenting on Wilfrid Sheed's book, I pointed out that he had omitted Kurt Weill. This review, which originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, makes the case for Weill.

KURT WEILL ON STAGE: From Berlin to Broadway
By Foster Hirsch
Limelight, 416 pp., $20 paperback

Kurt Weill led two lives, and Foster Hirsch looks at both of them in ''Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway.'' There was Weill the classically trained composer, who teamed up with Bertolt Brecht in the avant-garde of the Weimar Republic and gave the world ''The Threepenny Opera'' and ''Mahagonny.'' And there was Weill the Broadway composer, whose musical collaborations with the likes of Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, Ogden Nash and Alan Jay Lerner paved the way for the achievements of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

For once, Fitzgerald's much-quoted line about there being no second acts in American lives doesn't seem to apply. Weill's second act was his life in America, which he embraced with the enthusiasm of someone who had found the promised land: At his death in 1950 he was planning a series of musical works drawn from American literature and had started work on songs for a musical version of ''Huckleberry Finn.'' (I think maybe I'm glad we were spared Weill's proposed musical based on ''Moby-Dick.'')

In 1946, Weill had written a letter in protest when Life magazine referred to him as a ''German composer.'' But there were those who thought the move to America in 1935, and the subsequent involvement with Broadway, deprived music of a serious composer. (On the other hand, remaining in Europe would likely have deprived music entirely of Weill, who was Jewish.)

Virgil Thomson was among those who thought Weill was slumming. In an article for the New York Herald-Tribune in 1941 about Weill's biggest American hit, ''Lady in the Dark,'' Thomson lamented that Weill was no longer working with writers of the quality of Brecht, and even suggested that the strengths of ''The Threepenny Opera'' and ''Mahagonny'' had been Brecht's words, not Weill's music. In those works, Thomson noted, Weill was ''parodying cheap sentiment,'' but Thomson found his music for ''Lady in the Dark'' ''just as banal as before, but its banality expresses nothing.'' (It may be worth noting that Thomson had also panned ''Porgy and Bess'' -- he was not particularly tolerant of composers straying from what he saw as their proper spheres.)

In the new book, Hirsch aims to rehabilitate Weill's post-Berlin reputation -- not without some difficulty. For none of Weill's works for the American theater has been as enduring as the mordant ''Threepenny Opera,'' which, in Hirsch's words, ''is one of the great theatre works of the twentieth century.'' In contrast, Weill's most successful Broadway show, ''Lady in the Dark,'' Hirsch admits, ''has slipped into a historical limbo from which it is likely never to emerge.'' Still, the fault is not Weill's: The book for the show, by Moss Hart, has dated badly -- it's filled with Hart's naive enthusiasm for the wonders of psychoanalysis and a sexist condescension toward career women.

Most of us will never see a Weill show -- ''Johnny Johnson,'' ''Knickerbocker Holiday,'' ''One Touch of Venus'' and ''Love Life'' have fallen into that limbo of theatrical non-performance with ''Lady in the Dark.'' Only ''Street Scene'' and ''Lost in the Stars'' are occasionally revived, usually in the opera house. (Weill, who was bowled over by seeing ''Porgy and Bess'' shortly after arriving in America, wanted to create American operas that existed, as Gershwin's does, on the boundaries between the operatic and musical stages.)

Still, Hirsch argues that Weill's artistry remained high and his influence was profound: ''No other Broadway composer except Stephen Sondheim has been to so deep and true a degree a collaborative dramatist, and no other Broadway composer except Leonard Bernstein (with a leaner catalogue) has so successfully closed the distance between the concert hall and the musical theatre.'' (Um, well, what about George Gershwin?)

Today, Weill's reputation rests not on the shows but on the songs he wrote for them. We may have forgotten ''Knickerbocker Holiday,'' but almost everyone knows at least one number from it: ''September Song,'' probably in one of the three near-definitive renditions of it by Frank Sinatra.


Frank Sinatra

The most famous interpreter of Weill's songs was his wife, Lotte Lenya. Hirsch reports that Lenya was once asked how her husband's music should be sung. '' 'The way I sing it,' she snapped.'' But wonderful as Lenya's performances are -- her vibrato sets up a buzz in the brain -- Weill's songs have been persuasively performed by an impressive variety of artists, from opera singers such as Teresa Stratas and Dawn Upshaw to non-singers like Walter Huston and Gertrude Lawrence, the star of ''Lady in the Dark,'' whom Hirsch describes as ''the poorest singer who ever became a major musical-theatre star.''


Lotte Lenya in Die Dreigroschenoper

If you have doubts about Weill's gift as a composer of songs, listen to performances like the young Tony Bennett's ecstatic 1956 recording of ''Lost in the Stars.'' Or Lena Horne singing with a voice made of velvet about sails made of silk in ''My Ship.'' Or the wonderful melding of Carmen McRae's slight astringency of tone with the seductive vocal line of ''Speak Low.'' And Judy Garland, whose forte was heartbreak, never found a better vehicle for showing it off than ''It Never Was You.''

As the title suggests, the book is very much about Weill's life in the theater; Hirsch is particularly good about putting Weill's theatrical career in context -- he tells us what else was playing on Broadway alongside Weill's shows. But the composer's life apart from his work doesn't command much of Hirsch's attention. In part, this may be because Weill didn't have a particularly colorful private life. But he was surrounded with people -- Brecht, Anderson, Hart, Lawrence, Lerner, Elia Kazan and others -- who were colorful enough that the book never entirely bogs down into ''and then he wrote'' cataloging.

Weill's relationship with Lenya, his one and only wife, could be fractious -- each had extramarital affairs. But they were devoted to each other in their fashion, so much so that Hirsch's book goes on well beyond Weill's death to document Lenya's efforts to keep his music alive until her own death in 1981.

Hirsch has picked up the torch from her, and I think he's succeeded. If you're like me, his book will send you in search of forgotten and previously unheard performances.