Kurt Weill

German composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) is most remembered for his works for the stage, especially The Threepenny Opera (1928), in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), but he also produced a prodigious amount of art songs and concert and chamber music during the first decade of his career. Despite his popularity with the German public, Weill became a target of the Nazis during the early 1930s, and the Jewish socialist and his famous wife, the Austrian chanteuse and actress Lotte Lenya (1898-1981), were forced to flee Germany in 1933. They moved to New York City in 1935, and he eventually became an American citizen. Weill immersed himself in American popular song and Broadway musicals hoping to develop a style that synthesized European opera with American musical theater, perhaps building on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), but definitely setting the groundwork for future achievements, like Bernstein's West Side Story (1957) and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (1979). Weill's efforts were officially rewarded in 1947 when Street Scene earned him the first-ever Tony Award for Best Original Score.

Premiering in 1949, the year before his early death, Weill's last work for the stage was Lost in the Stars, with book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959), and based on the novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) by Alan Paton (1903-1988). With South African apartheid as a backdrop, the sad, but ultimately hopeful tale relates the story of "Stephen Kumalo," a black Anglican priest, as he searches for his son, only finally to find him awaiting trail for murder. Before father and son are reunited, Father Stephen has a meeting with his son's pregnant girlfriend, "Irina," who relates her anxiety in Trouble Man.