Berlin’s geographical location made it a sponge for influences from east and west. By 1919, the city was home to 70,000 immigrants fleeing Soviet Russia, more than anywhere else in Europe. And for every émigré fleeing the specter of Marxism, two more ran to the barricades. Berlin housed the largest labor movement in all of Europe, many drawn from the more than 1 million soldiers who had lost their idealism in the trenches. The end of World War I saw fighting break out in Berlin city streets between right-wing Freikorps and Communist militants. The resulting peace was fragile and unstable, plagued by crises. The economy saw mass unemployment and hyper-inflation resulting from the punitive Treaty of Versailles. With the Dawes Plan in 1924, $55 million of American loans began pouring in to stabilize the Reichsmark. Following this injection of free-market capital, German artists began to look west, to jazz and Amerikanismus . At its delirious peak around 1927-8, Berlin was a city full of artists and intellectuals, political radicals and artistic revolutionaries, liberated women and people free to express their nonconforming sexualities and gender orientation. It was a city where outsiders were insiders—and everyone felt like an outsider. But with the market crash of 1929 and ensuing Depression, the Republic hurtled into its tragic endgame. Following the catastrophic 1930 elections, Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. After the Reichstag Fire of February 27, he declared a state of emergency, suspending basic rights such as freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and granting himself the right to place political opponents in “protective custody.” The party was over.
The music in this concert looks to points east and west. It seeks to bring together the vital cultural expressions of Berlin in the 1920s.
Overture
- Kurt Weill, Oil Music (from Konjunktur )
In 1927-8, located at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, the Piscatorbühne was the namesake and brainchild of Erwin Piscator. A committed Communist, Piscator brought modern politics crashing into the theater. Piscator is most famous today as the inventor of epic theater—and for introducing Bertolt Brecht to Kurt Weill. Brecht worked as a dramaturg on Piscator’s productions, while Weill wrote the incidental music for Konjunktur ( Boom/Bust ). A loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 1926 novel, Oil! , Piscator’s production would be followed, 80 years later, by Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood .
- Schönberg, Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21/ nos. 4, 8,19, 21
Born to a Jewish family in Dessau, Weill moved to Berlin in 1918 at the age of 18 to study composition. His initial plan, however, had been to study in Vienna with Arnold Schönberg, who he praised as the “apostle of new music.” Pierrot Lunaire , the Viennese master’s song cycle from 1912, is a clear prototype for Weill’s own works such as The Seven Deadly Sins .
Weimar Cabaret
3. Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill, “Berlin in Lights”
In the autumn of 1928, Berlin Mayor Gustav Böss sponsored a festival with the slogan Licht lockt Leute : “Light Attracts People.” For the event, he reconvened Brecht, and Weill, the star team behind the greatest theatrical success of the era. (Their Threepenny Opera had premiered that August.) The festival’s theme song premiered on October 19 for a special out-door concert in front of the neon-lit KaDeWe, the city’s über-modern department store. As cars and trains whizzed past on the famous Kurfürstendamm, cabaret star Paul Graetz crooned Weill’s foxtrot. One year later, under darkening political clouds, Brecht and Weill would rework the tune into the infamous “Hosanna Rockefeller” of Happy End .
4. Friedrich Holländer, "Oh!" How We Wish That We Were Kids Again"
5. Mischa Spoliansky, "Masculine-Feminine"
In Berlin, the first notable cabaret was the Schall und Rauch (“Sound and Smoke”), founded in 1919 in the basement of the Grosses Schauspielhaus. Immortalized by Christopher Isherwood and the musical Cabaret , venues such as this provided a home for a new genre of popular song, equal parts political satire and sexual suggestion. Felix Holländer would go on to compose the score for The Blue Angel (1930), the film that launched Marlene Dietrich to international stardom. Holländer also discovered Mischa Spoliansky after hearing him play piano in a coffeehouse. Spoliansky’s queer anthems still sound strikingly modern. Along with “Masculine-Feminine,” he dedicated “The Lavender Song” to Magnus Hirschfeld, the groundbreaking sexologist. As Jews, Holländer and Spoliansky were forced to flee the Nazi regime. Holländer moved to Hollywood and Spoliansky to London, where he worked with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Zoltan Korda. Both would work with Marlene until the end of their lives.
Brecht/Weill Classics
6. Weill, Threepenny Suite
7. Weill/Brecht, "Pirate Jenny (from Threepenny Opera )
Die Dreigroschenoper ( The Threepenny Opera ) premiered August 31, 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. It was more than the sum of its parts. Weill’s score calls for a Dixieland jazz band, with 7 musicians covering 23 different parts (including banjo). The idiosyncratic text combines Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation of The Beggar’s Opera with a 1920s setting, anti-capitalist sentiments and an inimitable sense of swagger. The result was opera brought low, the avant-garde turned democratic. The show was a massive hit. It played for more than 400 performances, and its hit songs such as the “Moritat von Mackie Meser” (Mack the Knife) were still playing in dance halls when the Nazis banned it.
Threepenny also featured Lotte Lenya in her breakout role of Pirate Jenny. In his Chronicles, Bob Dylan writes of seeing Lenya perform her signature song in Greenwich Village of the 1950s. “This is a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase come at you from a ten-foot drop,” Dylan writes, “like the Picasso painting Guernica .”
8. Brecht/Eisler, "Abortion is Illegal (The Ballad of §218)"
Section 218 of the penal code in Germany outlawed abortions and called for imprisoning women and their accomplices. Though the law dated back to the Prussian Reich, it remained on the books during the Weimar Republic and it was notorious among those supporting the growing women’s rights movement. Beginning in the late 1920s, Brecht would begin to write explicitly Marxist plays and songs of protest with the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler. Unlike Weill, Eisler had studied with Schönberg. After the Nazis stripped him of his citizenship, he was a stateless person from 1933 to 1938 before managing to get a visa to the United States.
Eisler’s career in the United States was ruined by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Facing the blacklist, imminent arrest, and deportation, he decided to go into exile for a second time. At LaGuardia Airport in 1948, he read the following statement: “I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.” Eisler settled in East Germany, where he would compose the national anthem for the German Democratic Republic.
Jazz Set/Weill in America
9. Kurt Weill, "Bilbao Song" (Gil Evans)
10. Kurt Weill, "Speak Low" (Chet Baker)
11. Kurt Weill, "My Ship" (Miles Davis)
Weill would emigrate to America during the war and have a highly successful career as a composer of Broadway musicals. All the same, his songs for 1941’s Lady in the Dark (with Ira Gershwin) and 1943’s One Touch of Venus (with Ogden Nash and SJ Perelman) have a bittersweet, out-of-time feeling, imbued with the experience of exile. Beginning in the 1950s, Weill’s music would be interpreted by a new generation of American jazz artists such as Gil Evans, Chet Baker, and Miles Davis. In many respects, this represents a journey coming full circle. In 1925, the Black American musician Sam Wooding arrived in Berlin as the bandleader for Chocolate Kiddies , a revue featuring the songs of Duke Ellington. Wooding’s orchestra was the first Black American jazz band in Europe, arriving six months before Josephine Baker’s famous La Revue nègre opened in Paris. Shortly after seeing Wooding’s orchestra, Weill’s own writing underwent a profound change. “Jazz,” he writes, “is composed of a complexity of rhythm, of a harmonic care, of a tonal and modulatory wealth that most of our light orchestras simply cannot bring about.” In spring 1926, a Berliner named Alfred Lion would write of seeing Sam Wooding at the Berlin Admiralspalast. By 1939, the German-Jewish Lion had emigrated to New York and founded Blue Note Records, one of the most important record labels in jazz history.
The Soviets
11. Shostakovich, The New Babylon , "Part II: Paris" (10:05) with Film projection
We end this survey with a final glance eastward to Soviet culture. At a time when transcontinental artistic exchange was still in its infancy, silent film was a key point of connection. In 1926, Piscator obtained the only negative of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for international distribution. The film featured a now-iconic score by Edmund Meisel, Piscator’s frequent collaborator, which helped it become a sensation in the west. (It had been suppressed in the Soviet Union after a successful premiere in Moscow in 1925.) In 1927, Meisel composed the score for Walter Ruttman’s experimental film, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City . Excerpts of Ruttman’s film were shown at the beginning of this concert.
