His most famous pieces, of course, are the stage works he wrote in collaboration with the playwright Bertolt Brecht during Germany’s short-lived Weimar Republic. The era has become synonymous with political instability, inflation and decadence, and the Brecht-Weill collaborations such as Die Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny seem to us now to exude a febrile brilliance and seedy allure of the cabaret demi-monde.

Yet that is a partial view, shaped by hindsight and owing as much to Christopher Isherwood and Kander and Ebb as it does to Brecht and Weill. The republic was, after all, the first — and until a decade ago, the only — genuine democracy in a united Germany, and alongside the insecurity, there was a great flourishing of idealism and creativity both in the arts and in science. This Weimar renaissance, as it has come to be known, was abruptly curtailed by accession to power of the Nazi Party — yet ironically, by forcing so many leading German thinkers into emigration, the Nazis ensured that the very ideas they wished to stamp out became part of mainstream global culture.

Prominent among those emigres was Kurt Julian Weill, born in 1900 in Dessau - an industrial town in eastern Germany that later became home to the Bauhaus. His father, Albert Weill, a synagogue cantor and a collector, editor and occasional composer of Jewish liturgical music, gave him his first music lessons. By his early teens he’d earned the nickname "the attic composer" on account of his habit of shutting himself away in his attic room to compose.

But — although the young musician would jam the windows closed to block out the sound of passing marching bands — he could not avoid the effects of the First World War. On reaching draft age, however, Weill managed to avoid conscription by swallowing enough aspirins to induce palpitations immediately before his medical.

He supported himself through his studies by conducting synagogue choirs and giving harmony lessons - one of his subsequent pupils was the great Chilean concert pianist Claudio Arrau. At the Hochschule, Weill studied at first under Engelbert Humperdinck, but his initial enthusiasm at being taught by the distinguished composer of Hänsel und Gretel soon wore off; the old master, content to rest on his laurels, proved a lacklustre and indifferent tutor.

Modernism
Weill needed something more bracing. Steeped in the great Austro-German tradition of art music, he came to creative maturity at a unique moment of crisis in its development — one that mirrored the wider crisis in European society that he saw acted out on the streets of Berlin. The late Romanticism of Wagner and Mahler had stretched the idiom to its limits: vast orchestras were needed to produce the requisite power and lushness of tone colour, while the harmonic vocabulary had been extended to the point where the tonal system itself stood on the verge of dissolution. Something had to give, and the composers of the second and third decades of the 20th century stood at a parting of the ways.

For Schoenberg, this meant abandoning the tonal system altogether; for Stravinsky, a return to the "objectivity" and clarity of harmony and form of the 18th century. There was one thing, however, that Stravinsky and Schoenberg had in common: the abandonment of the massive orchestra of the late 19th century in favour of smaller ensembles. The kind of chamber groups employed by Schoenberg in Pierrot Lunaire and by Stravinsky in The Soldier's Tale fitted well with Weill’s small-scale, populist aesthetic.

In 1919 Weill wrote for advice to Schoenberg, who sent him "a very nice card offering to help", but financial difficulties then forced him to leave the Hochschule and spend a couple of seasons coaching and conducting at provincial opera houses. It was, perhaps, a blessing in disguise: through this work, he later said, "I learned everything I know about the stage." On his return to Berlin in 1920 he was able to enroll in the master class of the Austro-Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni at the Academy of Arts. This "most modern of modernists", was, in Weill’s opinion, the perfect antidote to "the herd of old Teutonic, behind-the-times, idiotic goats" at the Hochschule.

Now a somewhat neglected figure, Busoni was enormously influential in his day, and his career embodies the changes that Western music was undergoing at the time. He had begun his career as a fiery Romantic pianist in the tradition of Liszt, composing one of the longest and most grandiloquent piano concertos ever, but subsequently came to value the economy and formal clarity of 18th-century music, and introduced his students to the works of Debussy and Stravinsky. "Opera," he remarked, "should be a kind of sung pantomime," an idea he put into effect in his own, unfinished Doktor Faust, and which uncannily prefigures the stage works his pupil would soon be writing.

By this time, Weill was already producing original and distinctive work, including a string quartet, Op 8, and his First Symphony. His Recordare, Op 11, demonstrates his choral mastery, while the hallmarks of his characteristic idiom are already present in his Violin Concerto Op 12 (1924). In place of the full orchestra, he uses a wind ensemble (as did Stravinsky in his Piano Concerto of the same year); the pungent harmonies, underlined by dotted ostinati, anticipate the characteristic motifs of Die Dreigroschenoper.

Lotte Lenya
Busoni's early death in 1924 came as a great personal blow to Weill; as well as a teacher, the older composer had become a mentor and friend. Around this time, however, Weill formed two important new relationships that were to carry him into the next phase of his life and career. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Georg Kaiser, already one of Germany’s most successful playwrights, and together they embarked on a collaborative venture, Der Protagonist. "His Majesty" Kaiser and his wife lived in some style on a lake at Grünheide, outside Berlin. To reach his house, it was necessary to take a boat from the station, so Kaiser sent a young actress who was staying with the family as a domestic helper to meet the composer. Her name was Lotte Lenya.

"I saw a little man with one of those typical musician’s hats and thick glasses," she recalled later. "A blue suit and a little blue tie. Five feet, three and a half inches tall — an inch taller than I — with his hairline already receding."

Lenya soon became Weill’s lover and and his muse, the foremost interpretor of his female roles. They married in 1926, and their relationship - though often turbulent - would last for the rest of Weill’s life. Indeed, it is largely due to Lenya’s efforts that his European-period works - dismissed after his death by the appraisors of his estate as of "no present value at all as they carry very limited appeal" - occupy their current place in the repertoire.

Bertolt Brecht
In 1927, Weill set to music the Mahagonny poems of Bertolt Brecht, who was to become his most famous collaborator. The ebullient, leather-jacketed, cigar-chomping printer's son from Augsburg was already an acclaimed poet and playwright. A convinced Marxist, he proclaimed the need for "plumpes Denken" (crass thinking) — radical simplification for desperate times. The Mahagonny Songspiel contained some of their most famous collaborations, including "Alabama Song". The arrangements were sparse to the point of minimalism, the melodies almost childlike in their simplicity, but the dissonances and lurching key changes gave the music an eerie, unsettling edge.

Encouraged by the success of the Songspiel , the pair embarked on Die Dreigroschenoper, a radical updating of Gay and Pepusch's Threepenny Opera that had taken London by storm 200 years earlier. This hard-hitting low-life tale of gansterism and prostitution burst on to the Berlin stage stage on 31 August 1928, with Lenya in the role of Jenny, and ran for 350 performances. The text (by Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann) dripped cynicism and gallows humour: "How do people live? By being rotten/By cheating, stealing, stabbing in the back… Grub first, the ethics follow that."

All this was underscored by relentless, spiky rhythms and pungent harmonies, with powerful set piece numbers such as "The Ballad of Pirate Jenny" and "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" (which went on to became one of the most covered songs in the jazz repertoire, a massive hit for Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.) Scored for a dance-hall band with saxophones, harmonium, banjo and even Hawaiian guitar (many of the musicians were indeed recruited from cabarets and dance halls), the music blended jazz with baroque counterpoint and Lutheran chorales in a crisp, Stravinskian neoclassicism. (Stravinsky himself was enthusiastic about the piece, and told Weill that it was "best known and most talked about contemporary German work of art".)

Weill was also quick to grasp the importance of the new medium of radio, and writing for it helped to refine and clarify his style. "What is essential," he remarked, "is not so much highly refined orchestration as clarity and transparency in the compositional texture" to cut through the poor broadcast quality of the period. The Berliner Requiem was commissioned for Frankfurt Radio in 1928 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Armistice, with texts by Brecht. In the event, this comfortless secular requiem for the victims not only of the war but also of the Freikorps, was not premiered until May 1929, due to political objections to one number, "Grabschrift", a grim elegy for the murdered socialist Rosa Luxemburg.

Weill’s subsequent collaboration with Brecht, Happy End (1929), was less successful, although many of its numbers, including "Bilbao Song", the "Sailors’ Tango" and the bittersweet "Surabaya Johnny" have earned a permanent place in the repertoire. By now, however, the creative partnership was becoming strained as a result of Brecht’s attempts to subordinate the music to his dramatic and political theories; the pair fell out in 1931, while expanding the Mahagonny Songspiel into a full-length stage work, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Weill then turned to another collaborator, the stage designer Caspar Neher, for the libretto of his three-act epic opera, Die Bürgschaft (1931), and was reunited with Georg Kaiser for the enigmatic play with music Der Silbersee (The Silverlake, 1932). The latter was premiered simultaneously in Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt on 18 February 1933, a measure of the public acclaim Weill and Kaiser had achieved. The Leipzig production was designed by Caspar Neher and directed by Detlef Sierk, who later resurfaced in America as Douglas Sirk, director of such Hollywood epics as Written on the Wind.

Kaiser’s allegory was a timely one, dealing with unemployment, poverty and social responsibility. Severin, an unemployed man who lives in a shanty on the edge of the Silverlake, is shot and crippled by a policeman, Olim, after robbing a food store. Haunted by his conscience, Olim decides to use a surprise lottery win to help his victim. Severin, however, is so consumed by the lust for revenge that Olim dare not confess who he is. The two men’s eventual reconciliation is delayed by the machinations of aristocratic Frau von Luber, and assisted by her impoverished niece Fennimore, who represents the voice of idealism.

Lushly scored for full orchestra, it contains some of Weill’s most powerful and affecting music, with echoes of The Magic Flute alongside numbers that recall the harsh, jazzy idiom of the Threepenny Opera — the savage foxtrot of the "Banana Dance" and the ominous "Ballad of Caesar’s Death", an unequivocal warning to tyrants to beware the Ides of March.

The political climate, however, was deteriorating rapidly. On 30 January, Hitler had become Chancellor; on 27 February the Reichstag fire — blamed on the Communists though almost certainly the work of the Nazis — led to the suspension of civil liberties. Riots disrupted several performances, and a planned production in Berlin had to be withdrawn. (The work has only recently re-entered the repertoire).

Emigration
In March 1933, just hours before the Gestapo came in search of him, Weill fled Germany for Paris with Caspar and Erika Neher, taking little more than the clothes he stood up in and the sketches of his Second Symphony. Paris in 1933 was crammed with refugees from the Nazis, among them the novelist Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Arthur Koestler, Walter Benjamin and many others, crowded into hotels and seedy digs. In this hectic atmosphere, Weill was reunited with Brecht, and they began work on The Seven Deadly Sins, a "sung ballet" or "immorality play" for George Balanchine's company. It was a fraught time for everyone involved: relations between the writer and the composer were still explosive, and Weill and Lenya were in the throes of divorce proceedings (Lenya had embarked on a relationship with the singer Otto Pasetti, and Weill with Erika Neher).

The Seven Deadly Sins pushed Brecht and Weill’s ideas of dissociation to the limit, with two performers - a singer and a dancer - playing the ingenue Anna as she makes her way across a fantastic United States of the German imagination, not unlike that of Kafka's picaresque fable Amerika. On a musical level, it is one of Weill’s most satisfying works, a dark and brooding score developed with relentless singlemindedness from a few haunting snatches of melody heard at the outset.

Coming home
That imaginary country was one that Weill would soon come to know well in reality. In September 1935 Weill sailed for New York to work on a biblical epic, The Eternal Road. With him was Lotte Lenya; the couple remarried in 1937 and received US citizenship in 1943. Feeling as if he had "come home", Weill was able quickly to adapt his style to the requirements of Broadway, where his first all-American work, Johnny Johnson, opened in November 1936. "What are you trying to do?" Lorenz Hart reputedly asked after he’s seen the show, "Trying to put people like me out of business?"

To many listeners, the contrast between Weill’s European and American works seems startling. It’s certainly true that Weill’s American scores are more romantic and harmonically less abrasive than his earlier work but, at a distance of half a century, what seems remarkable is not so much the difference between these two phases of Weill’s career but the consistency of purpose that unites them. "I have never acknowledged the difference between 'serious' music and 'light' music," Weill once said. "There is only good music and bad music." His aim was always to make music that was direct and accessible while maintaining the highest standards of craftsmanship.

As in Germany, he found his lyricists among the leading writers of the day: Ira Gershwin (in his first collaboration since the death of his brother George), Ogden Nash, Oscar Hammerstein, Langston Hughes and Maxwell Anderson. And he continued to address social and political topics. His next Broadway show, Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), with words by Anderson, dealt with the resistance of the people of New Amsterdam to the tyrannical Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant in the early 17th century. It also contained one of Weill’s most enduringly popular tunes, the wistful "September Song".

Other Broadways hits followed: Lady in the Dark (1941); One Touch of Venus (1943); and, in 1947, his greatest American success, Street Scene . This "American opera", with lyrics by the Harlem poet Langston Hughes, broke new ground in its realistic presentation of ghetto life on the musical stage; without its example, West Side Story and much else would be inconceivable.

True to his ideals of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Weill also wrote a folk opera, Down in then Valley, that was performed in schools and community centres throughout the United States, and a number of songs in support of the American war effort, including the satirical "Schickelgruber" (with lyrics by Howard Dietz), "Buddy on the Nightshift" (with Oscar Hammerstein) and - with Brecht again - the savage "Ballad of the Nazi Soldier's Wife" ("Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?"). Intended for broadcast to Germany, the song chronicled the progress of the Nazi war machine through the gifts sent to the proud wife at home by her man at the front: furs from Oslo, a silk dress from Paris etc, until finally, from Russia, she receives her widow's veil.

Like many (but by no means all) German Jews of his generation, Kurt Weill was more preoccupied by social issues than religious ones. And, as with many of his contemporaries, his experience of Nazi antisemitism prompted a reaffirmation of his faith. In his later years he produced a number of works on traditional Jewish themes — folk song arrangements, an orchestral scoring of the national anthem of the new state of Israel, and the liturgical setting Kiddush (1946), incorporating a prominent part for synagogue cantor and dedicated to his father (Weill’s parents were by then living in Palestine).

Lost in the Stars
Kurt Weill’s last completed work was Lost in the Stars, a powerful adaptation, with Maxwell Anderson, of Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel Cry The Beloved Country. It was still running on Broadway when, in March 1950, shortly after his 50th birthday, Kurt Weill had a coronary and was taken to hospital, where he died two weeks later.

"I wish, of course," said Maxwell Anderson in his graveside eulogy, "that he had been lucky enough to have had a little more time for his work. I could wish the times in which he lived had been less troubled. But these things were as they were — and Kurt managed to make thousands of beautiful things during the short and troubled time he had…"

Berliner Requiem, Vom Tod im Wald, Violinkonzert
Conductor: Philippe Herreweghe
Performer: Alexandre Laiter, Peter Kooy, et al.
Orchestra: Paris Chapelle Royale Chorus, Musique Oblique Ensemble
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1000002000889562
Weill's early Violin Concerto blends the pungent wind ensemble, spiky harmonies and jagged rhythms he would use in his later works with the freshness and wit of early Shostakovitch. The requiem, written to lyrics by Brecht just weeks after The Threepenny Opera, it mourns the dead of WWI and the revolution that followed with bitter sarcasm.

Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill
Performer: Lotte Lenya, Jack Gilford, Louis Armstrong et al.
Ensemble: Chorus, Orchestra, et al.
Sony Classics - #60647 / June 29, 1999
Audio CD / ADD / Number of Discs: 1
Lenya — Weill's wife and inspiration — was the original voice of many of his songs: harsh, bittersweet and world-weary. This compilation of Fifties recordings includes English-language Broadway classics such as "September Song", "The Saga of Jenny" and "Speak Low" alongside "Song of a German Mother" and a tremendous version of "Mack the Knife"with Louis Armstrong.

Der Silbersee/Markus Stenz, London Sinfonietta
Conductor: Markus Stenz
Performer: Stephen Alder, Graham Clark et al.
Ensemble: London Sinfonietta Chorus, London Sinfonietta
Bmg/Rca Victor - #63447 / August 10, 1999
Audio CD / DDD / Number of Discs: 2
barcode 090266344727
This is a rarity — forced to close by the Nazis during its initial run in 1933, it is only now regaining its place in the repertoire. Georg Kaiser’s tale of a conscience-stricken cop who uses a surprise lottery win to help a robber he has shot evokes some of Weill’s most powerful and affecting music, with echoes of The Magic Flute alongside numbers that recall the harsh, jazzy idiom of the Threepenny Opera .

Speak Low: The Seven Deadly Sins; Songs
Anne Sophie von Otter, Bengt Forsberg, piano: John Eliot Gardiner - North German Radio Symphony Orchestra
CD 439 894-2
barcode 028943989428
A marvellously polished account of Brecht and Weill's last major collaboration, the "sung ballet" "The Seven Deadly Sins" - interpreted in Brecht's cynical fashion as lapses not from morality but from bourgeois self-interest. The selection of songs — both with piano and orcherstral accompaniment — juxtaposes German-era classic such as "Surabaya Johnny" with American numbers such as the delightful "Buddy on the Night Shift" and "Speak Low".

Speak Low: the Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya,
edited and translated by Lys Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke
Hamish Hamilton/University of California Press

Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents
David Farneth (Introduction), Luciano Berio, Kim H. Kowalke
Thames and Hudson; ISBN: 050097487X