Theatre Register

Kurt Weill

Shows · Kurt Weill

Composer 1900–1950

Kurt Julian Weill (; German: [vaɪl]; March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he wrote his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which includes the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933, arriving in the United States two years later. Settling in New York, he m…

Also credited on9 works

Knickerbocker Holiday
Lady in the Dark
One Touch of Venus
Street Scene
Love Life
Lost in the Stars
The Threepenny Opera
The Eternal Road
The Firebrand of Florence

These come off the person record, which names a work and not a production. So we can say this name is attached to the work and we cannot say which staging, or in what capacity. For a composer or a writer that is the whole career we hold; there is no cast list to find them in.

In the literature8 passages

  • In fact, Kurt Weill is probably the first name to come to mind when you think of Berlin musical theatre, but he was by no means the first out of the starting gate. In fact, many people probably know the song “Glow-Worm ” without realising that it came from a 1902 production of Lysistrata , with music by Paul Lincke (1866-1946). Richard St…ebooks/Atkey, Mel/Million Miles from Broadway_ Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London, A - Mel Atkey.txt
  • The Berlin of Max Reinhardt and of Kurt Weill (1900-50) is the child that was aborted. Reinhardt ’s Deutsches Theater was nationalised by Hitler in 1933 and eventually became the state theatre of the German Democratic Republic. Reinhardt and Weill , both Jews, became refugees of the Nazis. They had made two failed attempts to collaborate…ebooks/Atkey, Mel/Million Miles from Broadway_ Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London, A - Mel Atkey.txt
  • [90] Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage , Limelight Editions, New York, 2002, p. 18.ebooks/Atkey, Mel/Million Miles from Broadway_ Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London, A - Mel Atkey.txt
  • [176] Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage , Limelight Editions, New York, 2003, p. 352.ebooks/Atkey, Mel/Million Miles from Broadway_ Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London, A - Mel Atkey.txt
  • Somewhere along the line we lost Mozart ’s (and Leonard Bernstein ’s and Kurt Weill ’s) notion of elevating the public’s taste. (Not that this approach was always successful – following a performance of Othello at London’s Old Vic in the early nineteenth century, the great actor Edmund Keane snarled at the audience: “I have played in ever…ebooks/Atkey, Mel/Million Miles from Broadway_ Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London, A - Mel Atkey.txt
  • On the other hand, Engel criticised Cabaret for trying too hard to sound like Weimar-era Berlin. “I cannot understand why so much of Cabaret sounded like Kurt Weill … In the end, this sort of thing must fail since at best it is only an imitation.” Yet Vincent Patterson , the American director who mounted a revival of Cabaret in Berlin in…ebooks/Atkey, Mel/Million Miles from Broadway_ Musical Theatre Beyond New York and London, A - Mel Atkey.txt

Passages naming this person, found by keyword across 178 books. A keyword match is not a biography, and a common name will pull in the wrong one.

What this page does not know

  • What this person played. No cast list we hold records a character against a performer.
  • Any staging. This name appears in no production cast list we hold — 1,877 of 7,139 people are in that position, most of them writers, composers and designers rather than performers.
  • Which of the credits above the roles on this record — composer — apply to. The roles sit on the person and never on a credit, so a director who also acted looks the same here as one who did not.

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