Kurt Julian Weill

Kurt Weill was a German-born American composer who collaborated with Bertolt Brecht and other prominent writers and directors to create a new kind of musical theatre that combined social criticism, political satire, and artistic innovation. He was influenced by various musical styles, such as classical, jazz, cabaret, folk, and popular music, and he aimed to write music that served a socially useful purpose. Weill was born in Dessau, Germany, in 1900, into a religious Jewish family. His father was a cantor and his mother was a pianist. He showed an early talent for music and composed his first song at the age of 12. He studied at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik with Engelbert Humperdinck and later with Ferruccio Busoni. He also attended philosophy lectures by Max Dessoir and Ernst Cassirer. Weill began his career as a conductor and composer for various theatres in Germany. He met Bertolt Brecht in 1927 and they formed a fruitful partnership that lasted until Brecht's death in 1956. Their first collaboration was The Threepenny Opera (1928), based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which became an international sensation and featured the famous song "Mack the Knife". They also worked together on other works, such as The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), The Seven Deadly Sins (1933), The Lindbergh Flight (1929), Happy End (1929), and The Mother (1932). Weill's music was denounced by the Nazis as "degenerate" and he had to flee Germany in 1933. He first moved to Paris, where he wrote The Seven Deadly Sins for his wife Lotte Lenya, a singer and actress who starred in many of his works. He then moved to the United States in 1935, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1943. He adapted to the American musical scene and wrote several successful Broadway shows, such as Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Lady in the Dark (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), Street Scene (1947), Love Life (1948), and Lost in the Stars (1949). He also composed music for films, such as You and Me (1938), Where Do We Go from Here? (1945), and The Eternal Road (1944). Weill died of a heart attack in New York in 1950, at the age of 50. He left behind a rich and diverse musical legacy that influenced many composers and musicians of later generations. He is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the 20th century.