|
FEATURE:
Weill And Brecht Meet Charles Lindbergh
|
By Steve Schwartz
In 1940, before the premiere of his Ballad of Magna Carta, Kurt Weill said
to a reporter for the New York Sun, "As for myself, I write for today. I
don't give a damn about posterity." In 1929, the buzz over Charles
Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight over the Atlantic hadn't even begun to die
down, and Weill and Bertolt Brecht conceived of music for the radio
celebrating heroism, with Lindbergh as the exemplar:
[Kurt Weill's "The Lindbergh Flight," "The Ballad of Magna Carta" ;
Weill & Hindemith- "Der Lindberghflug" (first version; excerpts):
Cologne Radio Choir, Cologne Radio Orchestra/Jan Latham-Koenig
Soloists, Pro Musica Koeln/Jan Latham-Koenig;
Berlin Radio Choir and Orchestra/Hermann Scherchen (1930 recording)
Capriccio 60012-1]
Weill had worked in radio since at least 1925 and written several previous scores (at least one
of which has been lost), his greatest in this genre probably the "Berliner
Requiem." The radio fascinated several major composers of this century and
seemed to hold out the promise of a new kind of art, as well as a new kind
of audience, outside the traditional concert venue. The "new art" never
really panned out. Just about every work written expressly for radio (with
the exception of John Cage's Music for 13 Radios and 26 Players) owes its
life to live performances.
Radio operas like Menotti's "The Old Maid and the Thief" keep
their hold in the repertory not on radio, but with stage performances and CD
recordings. Weill's own "Down in the Valley," conceived originally for the
radio, has been performed as a stage opera mainly by amateur and student
groups and with Weill's help. He converted it and doubled its length. The
new radio audience, as we know, turned out to be interested in other kinds
of music.
"The Lindbergh Flight" was also scheduled for the Baden-Baden music festival run by Paul
Hindemith, and the festival theme that year was "collaborative works." Since
the festival had commissioned Weill and Brecht's "Happy End," the two invited
Hindemith to compose some of the numbers. This version premiered in a
broadcast by the Southwest German Radio Orchestra under the direction of
Hermann Scherchen. Weill, however, did not want the joint score considered
definitive and supplied new music to the Hindemith sections fairly quickly.
This new version also premiered in 1929, this time at the Kroll Opera. Weill
and Brecht sent a presentation copy of the score to Lindbergh "with great
admiration."
The relationship between Weill and Brecht--like many great collaborations -
heaved and ho'd and finally broke down. Brecht, in my opinion, behaved badly
--he put his genius before anybody else's. His business dealings with
publishers in at least one case cut Weill out altogether from any royalties,
and consequently many of Weill and Brecht's works are mired in a swamp of
contracts, counter-contracts, and litigation. Brecht habitually acted
unilaterally for both of them. He tried several times to get Weill to work
for free, treating the composer as less than an employee, while he himself
worked for fee and anything else he could get. For a Marxist, Brecht pursued
money rather avidly. "Geld macht sinnlich" indeed.
In 1950, during the last weeks of Weill's life, in fact, Brecht decided to revise "Der Lindberghflug," typically without telling the composer. He removed all reference to Lindbergh by name and inserted a section explaining why he did so. I don't fault him for the revision. Brecht became angry over Lindbergh's isolationist stance in the 1930s and over the flier's advocacy of civilian and city bombing. Weill would likely have agreed. As A. Scott Berg's recent biography makes clear, Lindbergh changed in the popular imagination from young god to tragic hero to demon within the space of about fifteen years. Obviously, "Der Lindberghflug" has a complicated history. Latham-Koenig performs the all-Kurt-Weill score with the Brecht textual revisions. The CD also includes a performance by Scherchen of parts of the first version--the Weill-Hindemith score.
Aesthetically, the historical difficulties behind the work don't matter a
jot. This is a major piece, in a vein similar to Weill and Brecht's "Der Jasager" school opera. Weill found his artistic voice at a very young age. Most of the music on which his present reputation rests
appeared before he was thirty, and he died in 1950, at fifty years old.
Because Schoenberg, Adorno, and Webern had written Weill out of serious
consideration of modern music and because Weill made money in Germany with
"The Threepenny Opera" and in the United States composing for Broadway, some may find it hard to appreciate Weill's genius and the extent of
his achievement. He was notably innovative, particularly in
the theater and the relation of music to dramatic text.
\
Many major works remain unrecorded. Some of his catalogue has even disappeared. It's ironic that Schoenberg found himself at odds with
Weill, because musically the two shared a lot--notably, a musical
inheritance from Mahler. I would say that Weill absorbed more Mahler than
Schoenberg did, particularly in his musical imagery and his juxtaposition of
"high" and "vulgar." The two do share even more direct links, especially
in their harmonic language. Weill once stated that no one could really
understand his violin concerto who didn't know something of Schoenberg. His serious criticism always gave the older man pride of place in modern
music, despite his disagreements over whether art music should appeal to a
broad audience. Furthermore, in 1928, Schoenberg himself nominated Weill for
membership in the Prussian Academy of Arts. For details, see Alan Chapman's
"Crossing the Cusp: The Schoenberg Connection" (A New Orpheus: Essays on
Kurt Weill. Kim Kowalke, ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
1986.)
Weill of course differs from Schoenberg in his use of popular dances and
musical idioms, adherence to extended classical forms as opposed to
Wagnerian "organic" ones, and a kind of Stravinskian irony as opposed to
expressionist psychology, in his stage works. The neoclassicism, however, is
Weill's and not Stravinsky's. Although "jazz" or cabaret music found itself
in the works of many composers from the 1920s on, Weill invented his own: it
sounds nothing like Stravinsky, Milhaud, Copland, or Gershwin, to take four
very different composers.
Creating an idiom or a unique voice may not count for everything, but you don't sneeze at it, either. At a point when many composers were trying to put a new spin on Wagnerian extensions, Weill turned the Singspiel and the operetta to more serious aims, while retaining a "popular touch." To some extent, Brecht's notions of epic theater pushed him in this direction. Often a character in a Weill theater piece sings music at expressive odds with the text. In "Der Dreigroschenoper," for example, Polly Peachum sings a romantic aria--almost a lullaby--after Macheath has cynically left his young new wife for good. Because the music comments not on a character's emotions but on a situation and from a distance, we get something more complex, for the irony has to play off the character's (unexpressed) psychology as well.
In this regard, several scholars have argued the influence of Weill on Berg's Lulu (Berg never publicly denounced Weill and even owned some scores of Weill's music), particularly in light of the music of Act III. The text of "Der Lindberghflug" deals in heroic archetypes--again, from a distance. It doesn't depend, except for initial stimulus, on the true character of Charles Augustus Lindbergh himself.
Brecht's text bristles with "double-takes" for the listener, while retaining
intelligibility for a radio audience--lots of repetitions of short phrases,
for example, so that if you missed something the first time, you'd get it
the second or third. Fortunately, this technique suits down to the ground a
composer, who relies on repetitions to build musical structures. One section
transfigures the traditional "arming of the hero" into a chorus of praise to
the airplane. For me, the most interesting part of the libretto shows a
typical Brechtian paradox. It turns out that the greatest danger to the
pilot comes not from fog, ice, and ocean, but from sleep--seductive and
sentimental--just as resisting force of arms is easier than resisting ease
and comfort.
Hindemith's sections are wonderful music, even though he probably wrote them
between breakfast and lunch, but it's precisely the Brechtian duality and
topsy-turvydom that they miss. Hindemith's music in general doesn't express
irony very well. It's straightforward in its affect, though not necessarily
simple. Weill had solid reasons, other than ego and money, to replace
Hindemith's music with his own. Irony flourishes in Weill's music. The
flier's account of his plane, a kind of dance-band march, conveys
seriousness of purpose, a kind of jauntiness, and a sense of unease all at
once. One can contrast the two composers most profitably in the section,
"Sleep."
For Hindemith, sleep is a pure danger, to which the flier responds
as he has to everything else, heroically. For Weill, Sleep sings a sensuous
lullaby (if you can imagine it), in a duet between Sleep and the flier.
Sleep offers sweet dreams, to which the flier replies, "I'm not tired," in a
very weary musical line - moving by semitones, it travels no farther than a
whole step - which takes on some of the shape of Sleep's music as well. By
these simple devices, Weill shows the power of sleep on the flier. In all,
"Der Lindberghflug" comes across as a complex meditation on heroism, at a time when most of the world wanted heroism pure and simple. The work, like
Lindbergh himself, contained depths.
Weill's "The Ballad of Magna Carta" by no means rises to this level. Indeed, it could serve as ammunition for those who see in Weill's American career a sad spectacle of unrelieved decline. The difference, I'm convinced, stems from
the relative weakness of artists vis-a-vis producers in the American
theater. In Europe, it still is not uncommon to find an artist in the role
of producer. On the other hand, our theater was not filled with the likes of
Hemingway, Stein, Stevens, Cummings, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner--the
hard-core, Modernist, "difficult" artists. Continental theater had Cocteau,
Anouilh, Brecht, Kaiser, Chekhov, Strindberg, and so on. Excepting O'Neill,
Wilder, and Williams, our theater life has been dominated by competent, even
brilliant entertainers like Simon, Kaufman, Hart, and Barry.
American radio was even more commercial. What passed for Art in movies, theater, and radio was a sappy apostrophe to the Eternal Verities, with an over-reliance on the Cosmic Fantasy genre. Most of this stuff has been blessedly forgotten, and, please, don't anyone try to revive it. It's doing quite well on its own as "The Preacher's Wife," "Meet Joe Black," and the latest Robin Williams weepie. In Thirties and Forties radio, its foremost practitioners were Norman Corwin and Earl Robinson, who used a particularly annoying fake-folk rhetoric which nevertheless proved enormously popular at the time. The sentiments are blameless, but the expression of it has become laughable.
No sentiment is really earned. It takes a great performer - like Paul Robeson in Robinson's "Ballad for Americans"--to bring junk like this off. In the Forties, it was turned to explain to the radio audience "Why We Fight." Weill and Anderson's "Ballad of Magna Carta" is no worse than any of the rest, but it's not good enough to transcend its original propaganda function. If it comes over as smug and patronizing, well ... that was the style, as quaint as an ormolu ostrich with a clock in its tummy. Apparently, Weill and Anderson planned this as the first of a series. Thank God they never got around to
successors. The performances here are good enough to tell us how enormously
bad the piece is. Trust me, Weill wrote better than this while he lived in
the United States.
I find the entire Weill-Brecht collaboration an especially fruitful one
which, moreover, helped create the modern theater. Scherchen's account of
the original "Lindberghflug" is terrific, despite the static-full 1930s
broadcast quality. Furthermore, the announcement of the various sections in
German, French, and English interests me in that it shows how small a place
Europe is and how varied the audience for essentially a local broadcast.
Latham-Koenig comes up with a crisp reading of the revision in decent,
though not state-of-the-art, stereo sound. A fabulous work, decently played.
(Steve Schwartz lives in New Orleans and claims no omniscience about music)
©1999 Steve Schwartz, all rights reserved
|