Word: weills
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Radio, seven years ago scorned by most serious musicians, now like an important prima donna has music composed expressly for it. German Kurt Weill wrote the cantata Lindbergh's Flight for radio performance (TIME, April 13). Last week the first radio opera, Malpopita, was given in Berlin?the work of Composer Walter Goehr, a follower of Ultramodernists Franz Schrecker and Arnold Schonberg...
...merit, the German Lindbergh saga is more pretentious, more quaintly imaginative than anything done on the same subject in the U. S. It is the collaboration of two young moderns -Librettist Bert Brecht, called "The German Kipling" because his verse is of the vigorous, ballad type, and Composer Kurt Weill. Composer Weill won notoriety if faint praise last year for his opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a gruesome piece set in an imaginary U. S. Sodom where money is the gluttonish god. Lindbergh's Flight makes the same attempt at realism but there...
Most U. S. school children would probably find the Brecht-Weill opus perplexing. The pattern is complex: Lindbergh's Flight is a cantata for orchestra, chorus and soloists. Lindbergh, represented by a tenor, describes himself, his preparations, his emotions during the flight, in a pompous, swaggering manner quite unlike the popular U. S. idea of him. The chorus exhorts him as he starts, exalts him in a hymnlike way at the finish. During the flight a baritone radios all ships to watch out for him. A bass solo, with the smoothest music in the cantata, urges him to sleep...
Most U. S. school children would be hard-put to get much meaning out of Composer Weill's terse, telegraphic music which echoes the cacaphonies of Schonberg and Hindemith, or to sing for themselves the difficult cross-grained choruses which the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia managed so expertly last week. The words, however, are simple enough for the youngest intelligence. Excerpts from Composer George Antheil's translation, modified slightly for last week's performances...
Berlin first-nighters gathered last week in the Theater am Schiflbauerdarnm for an opening of note. Flimsy programs purchased from elderly ushers announced that they were to witness Happy End, a Comedy of Gang Life in Chicago by Elizabeth Hauptmann with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Bert Brecht, German translator of John Gay's immortal Beggars' Opera. An italicized footnote explained: "the comedy is based on a story by Dorothy Lane which appeared in The J. L. S. Weekly, published at St. Louis...