May 12, 2007
LoveMusik Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 PM EST A new musical, LoveMusik, chronicles the intertwined lives and careers of the composer Kurt Weill and the actress Lotte Lenya, who were first Germans and then Americans, part of that vast gift Adolf Hitler made to the United States of America when he forced a lot of fiercely talented Europeans across an ocean and almost all of them stayed. The musical is based on a published collection of Weill’s and Lenya’s letters to one another over a quarter century, Speak Low, edited by the music historian Kim Kowalke, which has been turned into a musical by Alfred Uhry, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, at the request of the director Harold Prince. I am not sure how good LoveMusik is—few if any of the very beautiful Weill songs in its score are sung in anything like their entirety, the play seems too long and by its end mawkish—but in places I found it wonderfully affecting. It begins in Weimar Berlin, with the first encounter of its principals, an occasion on which Lenya seduced Weill in a rowboat, and ends with an irritable and nervous Lenya putting on stage makeup, waiting to reprise what was arguably her greatest achievement with Weill and Bertolt Brecht, the 1927 production of The Threepenny Opera. She thinks she is running the risk of ridicule by reviving the role, and her director agrees, but they will prove to be mistaken, of which more below. Weill had other great operas, some of then with the same collaborator and singer—The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Happy End—and a string of successes in America, where he died at the age of 50—but Threepenny Opera remains, I think, the most accessible and probably the most famous work from his period as a European composer. Weill remade himself into an American composer in exile (although did not think of it as exile; he was, in his view, very much an American) by assiduously studying American popular music, and he wrote for both our stage and our screen. Some of what he did in America has passionate admirers, and their admiration is not foolish; I have seen delightful revivals of some of the American musicals—One Touch of Venus and Lady In the Dark—but the Weimar period saw Weill’s most brilliant work. Neither that work nor the Berlin years generally become the focus of LoveMusik, which rather recounts Weill’s and Lenya’s complicated collective life (they were twice married, in 1926 and 1937, divorced in 1933, and both marriages had their difficulties). But the play does end with what I find a moving reference to the most influential recreation of The Threepenny Opera for an American audience, the 1954 production at the Theatre de Lys. That is the production the actress Donna Murphy is preparing for as LoveMusik closes, and she is wearing the costume her character Jenny wore in the photograph taken for the album cover of the recording of that famous production. It took me a minute to realize that, my visual memory only cueing when the orchestra began the raucous, thrilling overture to The Threepenny Opera, and the play ended. Walking out onto a New York sidewalk, I reflected that while Weill and Lenya were Americans, one thing immigrant Americans do is add to the great, fabulously rich intermixture of our culture. Weill and Lenya let Americans take possession of one of the most harshly brilliant periods of modern European culture; the memory (and reworking) of Weimar is now as much ours as it is anyone’s, a mass legacy probably in significant part inherited via the effect of that 1954 play revived in Greenwich Village. American culture is so easily exported that people annoyed by its ubiquity somehow imply that the business is done at the point of a gun, or the moral equivalent thereof, which is of course ridiculous—although it is true, as LoveMusik reminds us, that a fair amount of the culture we’ve imported arrived at the point of a gun.
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