Famed German/American composer Kurt Weill was born this day in 1900. He’s best remembered for Threepenny Opera and other collaborations with playwright Bertolt Brecht.
A clip from the excellent September Songs tribute, shot in the early 90s:
September Songs includes some great interpretations from Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, William S. Burroughs and others, but this scene in particular slays me. Charlie Haden’s bass is just dripping with feel. The couple depicting Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya are dancing to a sublime old recording of “Speak Low” sung by Weill himself.
C.F. Wick, Berlin, Theater des Westens, 1987
Weimar culture flat out refuses to die. There’s still a freshness and an urgency to the stuff that keeps generation after generation coming back. So many of us cut our teeth on either Liza and Joel or Alan in Cabaret and that damned Doors’ cover of “Alabama Song.” Without Brecht and Weill, there could be no Rocky Horror Picture Show. I must’ve played “Pirate Jenny” with the band Barbez a thousand times, and even after all these years, the sight of my friend Amanda battering her Kurzweil keyboard (altered to read KURTWEILL) still makes me grin from ear to ear. We have yet to tire of the cabaret. Why should we, with its immortal pledge to sexual freedom, inclusion, and playful rebellion? I think so long as there are perverts and revolutionaries in the world with a taste for whiskey and melodrama, Weill’s music, and its filthy little children, will have relevance.
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:58 am
Thank you, Mer, “Speak Low” was the perfect thing for this morning.
I think so long as there are perverts and revolutionaries in the world with a taste for whiskey and melodrama, Weill’s music, and its filthy little children, will have relevance.
A-bloody-men. Especially for a period so short and volatile, it has remained a powerful influence. Like most things of such vitality, it also ended far too soon. Part of me wonders if there’s not a lesson in that too, not in the oft-heard tripe about “Weimar Decadence,” but in the fact that so many of the artists and free thinkers failed to see the hell that was coming until far too late.
Cabaret, of course, made this point quite well. (And created the Most Chilling Moment in a Musical Ever in the process.)
But the perverts and revolutionaries got the last laugh. Their work has long outlived their time — proof that good ideas, too, never die.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
That clip of “Speak low” is really wonderful. If you haven’t heard Nina Simone’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny” you should, its probably my favorite version of that song (I love Nina Simone, she was amazing).
March 2nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Nina was wonderful. Unfortunately the only YooToob clip I could find of her singing Pirate Jenny is a a later one, and well… she’s sort of phoning it in.
Ampers, have you heard of The Architecture of Doom by any chance? I know I brought it up somewhere on CH a while back…. can’t remember the context, though. Anyway, it’s one of the more profound and unsettling explanation attempts for the Nazi world view I’ve ever heard. Check it out, if you haven’t.
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Divine. Ironically enough, Dresden Dolls were my way into this period/movement, as I’d only really come across it’s effects within random bits o’ film stuff und rare mentions in whatever lit I was consuming. They smacked me a bit, und made me take notice. Arriving late’s better than never at all.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Interesting that you mention The Architecture Of Doom theory in this context, Mer - bizarrely, I first encountered it when writing my MA Philosophy dissertation on a very different subject. The title was Problems For Our Definitions Of, And Rights To, Suicide, and I was attempting to posit an almost aesthetic angle to the ‘wiping clean of the slate’, as suicide is sometimes seen - The Architecture Of Doom stuff emerged as an oddly apt metaphor, for lots of reasons.
In a more on-topic observation, I wonder to what extent Weimar culture finding such an enduring foothold in the underground is precisely owing to Hitler and the Nazis treating elements of it with a revulsion so overblown, it was almost Brechtian in its melodrama. PR stunts like the Entartete Kunst exhibition surely helped secure a lasting interest in and appetite for a set of cultural mores which would quite probably have faded naturally in time, like most others seem to in the cyclical, ever-shifting loop of tastes and trends. However, tell somebody they can’t do something because it’s naughty, and…well…
In a sense, the party’s short-term solutions were incredibly naive if they honestly believed they were laying down cultural foundations for a long-term Third Reich future. They were laying foundations, but not quite as they would’ve hoped, heh.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:50 am
@Mer…”…I know I brought it up somewhere on CH a while back…. can’t remember the context, though…”
I’d made a mention of it in the excellent Karlheinz Stockhausen entry you made. It was in response to his infamous 9/11 comment…seems like that documentary has chameleon like skin for fitting many a topic…
“There’s still a freshness and an urgency to the stuff that keeps generation after generation coming back”
It’s more than the romanticism cynics like to dismiss it as or even just those of a modern age trying to recapture the old…it was such a great melding of art, politics, and possibilities…a bit of hope and naiveté and an open field for all to play. Nearly all of it revolving around nightlife…really only the 60’s had anything close to that.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:03 am
@Mark…”…I wonder to what extent Weimar culture finding such an enduring foothold in the underground is precisely owing to Hitler and the Nazis treating elements of it with a revulsion so overblown, it was almost Brechtian in its melodrama…”
People always like something the powers that be hate. With the Nazi’s though you have a interesting battle in that the core of the SA probably could have found a home in that culture if not for the abysmal treatment of so many WW I vets…something the US government was equally poor at that resulted in a near attempted coup and a whole slew of growth in organized crime syndicates.
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:42 am
Yes you did bring it up, right! And then I blabbered back at you about it. Oy, I swear, sometimes it’s like I have early onset Alzheimers…
It’s more than the romanticism cynics like to dismiss it as or even just those of a modern age trying to recapture the old…it was such a great melding of art, politics, and possibilities
Indeed. I think it’s particularly fascinating example of extremes. The Weimar babies were such a lively and irreverent group, basically embracing the obscenity and squalor of post WWI Germany, and elevating it. Meanwhile the Nazi aesthetic marched to the opposite end of the spectrum with their bombastic reinterpretations of Greco-Roman ideals.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Mer: No, I hadn’t. I will definitely have to check that out — the leashing together of art and politics is fascinating. John Cusack’s Max hit some similar notes. While imperfect, it’s an interesting “what if?” and one of the few non-docs to focus on the connection between art and Nazism.
World War I and its fallout have been ignored in a lot of popular history (compare to the attention paid to WWII). This is unfortunate, as both the Russian Civil War and the Freikorps, just to name two oft-ignored parts of the era, ended up having a huge impact. I think for a lot of soldiers (including in the US), the war never ended, the battle lines just changed. Naturally, everyone went mad after, they just had different ways of doing it.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:31 am
@ampersandpilcrow … MAX took a lot from the above mentioned documentary while keeping the many What If? scenarios alluded to for years as its backbone. I quite enjoyed the film despite some flaws in how they handled a few characters. It’s a great example of having too many things going on with no real direction…didn’t help having the actor who played Hitler ham up some key scenes…many are totally oblivious to the way Hitler was portrayed to the German people even at a young age within the party as opposed to how the outside nations saw him.
WWI was ignored pretty much as soon as it ended. People just wanted to forget it ever happened. Few even today understand how devastating it was and how it fundamentally changed Europe. Much is made how it set up WWII but little is said about how it nearly wiped out the Monarchs of every major nation and how it sparked revolutions across the world. All while the world suffered from one of the worst epidemics of flu that killed more than the war itself. Death was less an abstract idea in that age than it was a close friend. Crazy time period later drowned in the roaring 20’s until everyone woke up with a mean hangover in the great depression.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Tequila: Oh, I liked Max quite a bit, but it did seem to be going too many places at once and didn’t turn out to be the tour de force that I thought it could have been. On Noah Taylor’s performance as Hitler I’m a little more torn. He completely chewed the scenery towards the end, but in some of the earlier scenes, he got the fanatical, lonely sadsack side of the young Hitler just right.
Few even today understand how devastating it was and how it fundamentally changed Europe.
Or the world for that matter, as it set Russia on the path to become communist and the US on the path to becoming a world power. It also proved the death knell of the old imperial powers abroad. After WWI it wasn’t a matter of if their empires would end, but when. I regret that it has been so forgotten — there’s still a lot to learn from that era and its fallout.