Bernstein mentioned Kurt Weill on only a few occasions, and yet his career as a composer for the stage followed a similar path. In particular, he created works that transcend the boundaries between opera and commercial theatre, tackling socio-political topics while writing melodies that reached the mainstream. This chapter traces the influence of Weill on Bernstein, who encountered Die Dreigroschenoper as a college student and would go on to conduct the premiere of Marc Blitzstein’s English adaptation, The Threepenny Opera, in 1952. The specific aesthetic traits which Bernstein absorbed from Weill’s scores are illustrated through comparative analyses of numbers from Trouble in Tahiti, Candide and West Side Story with, respectively, Lady in the Dark, Die Dreigroschenoper and Street Scene. Motivic, harmonic and structural elements of intertextuality reveal that Weill’s formal experimentation tilled the soil for works of music theatre that could be both indigenous and worldly, sophisticated and accessible.

“I have written some harsh things in the past about Kurt Weill and his music,” wrote Blitzstein in a review of Johnny Johnson that appeared in the fall of 1936. “I wish now to write a few good things. He hasn't changed, I have.” Blitzstein found in Johnny a “fresher and more appealing” alternative to the “smart-striving social-climbing Broadway songs” with which he associated American music theater. If he considered the message in Johnny “softvoiced” or “velvet propaganda,” he acknowledged that “Weill has practically added a new form to the musical theatre. It is not opera, although it partakes of the ‘number’ form of Mozart. And it is decidedly not revue-form.”

In July of that year, Blitzstein had attended a lecture Weill gave in Trumbull, Connecticut, for the Group Theatre, the New York-based leftwing collective that premiered Johnny, his first American stage work. “I feel that I can here at last continue what I have built up in Europe,” said Weill, “that I can bring to you my experiences and be certain that you will use them in the right way, and that your experiences will be helpful to me in my efforts toward the goal which I have set for me since the beginning of my career: the creation of a musical theatre for our time.”

From July 29 to September 2, Blitzstein composed his first full-length stage work, The Cradle Will Rock, at what he later described as “white heat” to process the loss his wife, Eva Goldbeck, who had died of anorexia in May. He had already conceived and performed, however, what would become Cradle's main number, “Nickel under the Foot,” for Brecht during a gathering at the home of the music writer Minna Lederman in December of 1935. According to Lederman, Brecht walked up to the piano and encouraged Blitzstein to write “a whole play about all forms of prostitution—the press, the clergy and so on.”

Blitzstein had also begun to cultivate a relationship with Lenya. In December 1935, he heard her sing “Seeräuberjenny” in concert. Struck by her “magnetism and raw lovely voice,” he noted that “her stylized gestures seem strange because of her natural warmth; but in the strangeness lies the slight enigma which is her charm.”

“It is the miracle of the man's gift that it all hangs together,” wrote Blitzstein in a 1958 review of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, “becomes natural, even inevitable.” Blitzstein, according to his own account, first encountered Aufstieg through a piano score in 1930. In November of 1936 he met with Weill and Brecht to try to arrange a Broadway performance in New York. Six years later, Weill wrote to Lenya, “it seems those pansies will never forget that I turned them down with Mahagonny!” After Weill died, Blitzstein remained on the case, writing but never completing three different drafts of an adaptation called The Rise and Fall of Magnet City from 1957 to 1962.

Weill described the score of Aufstieg as “a series of 21 closed forms” or “a stringing together of situations” which “yield a dramatic form only in the musically fixed, dynamic sequence.” In adapting the Songspiel into a fullscale opera, he maintained the genre of Song as a building block or musical unit while weaving numbers into a macro-structure that could “sustain an entire evening.” The resulting form, despite the “astringent dissonance” noted by Blitzstein, holds together eclectic material through classical principles, subverting tradition while renewing it for the future in a Busonian vein.

With Street Scene, Weill further developed this aesthetic principle. If the surreal story about the fictional city of Mahagonny becomes a realist tale at a Manhattan tenement, he cast an even wider net, showing that he could toss off a number in any style and still create a unified whole. Hinton notes that “Street Scene is not only an opera about the city; like Mahagonny, it was conceived for the city.” Downes, while noting “the extraordinary evolution” of the composer “from the sophistications of the (professed) avant-garde” in the Mahagonny-Songspiel to “plain, direct, emotional expression” in his January 1947 review, also pointed to a certain continuity with Street Scene, which he called “the most important step toward significantly American opera”: “we are given to wonder whether it is not the very artist coming here from a European social and cultural background who will be quickest to perceive in its full significance an aspect of American life; and feel it as those who always have been in its vicinity might not.”

Following West Side Story, Bernstein would join forces with Sondheim and Robbins for an experimental work that deepens the connection of his music theater aesthetic to Weill. It was Robbins who had the idea of reinventing one of Brecht's Lehrstücke, or didactic plays, for performance on Broadway after directing and co-producing (to financial loss) Mother Courage and Her Children together with Cheryl Crawford in 1963. He landed upon The Exception and the Rule (Die Ausnahme und die Regel, as translated by Eric Bentley), a work with an unusual performance history. The play was first performed in the Hebrew language at a kibbutz in 1938 with music by Nissim Nissimov and subsequently set to music by Paul Dessau a decade later. A 1965 off-Broadway production featured incidental music by Stefan Wolpe.

Sondheim had declined the opportunity to write the book, music and lyrics for The Measures Taken on the basis of what he later recalled as “Brechtophobia” but saw more potential in Exception. After writing two songs, however, he decided that his “heart wasn't in them” and suggested Bernstein as a collaborator for both music and lyrics. When Bernstein declined, Robbins invited the lyricist Jerry Leiber. But he would be replaced by the playwright John Guare, enticing Sondheim to rejoin after he learned of his plans to set the play within a television studio: “The Brecht play would be chopped up into scenes that would be interrupted by the conflicts among the cast in the studio and thus not be so relentlessly Brechtian,” explains Sondheim.

The original Exception explores the erosion of human values in a capitalist rat race. The oil merchant Karl Langman hires a Guide and a Coolie, or porter, to help him cross an uninhabited desert and reach the fictional city of Urga. After firing the Guide, he and the Coolie lose their way. When the Coolie offers Langman (the Merchant) a sip of water, he believes he is about to strike him and fatally shoots him. Langman claims in trial that he acted in pre-emptive defense and is acquitted by the court. As the Guide admonishes in the final scene, “Try to do a generous deed/You’ll be the loser./Fear for the man who shows/A friendly nature!”

Robbins reinvented the story as a commentary on tensions between Caucasians and African-Americans, casting the Merchant as not just a ruthless businessman who is above the law but a racist.

“Saw Lady in the Dark tonight, & loved it … ,” Bernstein wrote to Copland in December of 1940. “It is, as you say, slick—over-slick—but I’m no critic, being an analysand(!).” Weill's “musical play in two acts” adopted an experimental form that was novel for Broadway at the time. Lady in the Dark was also the first musical drama based on psychoanalysis, influencing not just a range of Broadway shows about psychotherapy but, through the Paramount film version, American cinema. The score absorbs elements from Zeitoper, operetta and musical comedy, veering with at times filmic cuts between dream sequences and the everyday life of the female protagonist, the magazine editor Liza Elliott, as she struggles to reconcile her professional and private personas in therapy sessions with Dr. Brooks.

Liza's three dreams are structured by dance rhythms (rhumba for the “Glamour Dream,” bolero for the “Wedding Dream” and march for the “Circus Dream”) that create formal cohesiveness while also commenting ironically on the drama. In what Bernstein may have perceived as “slick,” Weill also manages to create transitions through the sparsest of instrumentation. Both Copland and Bruno Walter were reportedly astonished at the shifts from realistic scenes to dreams upon discovering that a single clarinet underscores Liza when she hums the tune from the song “My Ship” at the opening of the “Glamour Dream.”

Over the course of therapy, Liza hums fragments until she recalls the number in its entirety. As mcclung writes, song itself becomes a meta-dramatic thread: “when Liza is finally able to remember a childhood song and the traumatic events tied to it, her psychosis comes to light, and her complicated love life straightens itself out.” The recovered memory coincides with a path to emotional stability and her realization that she does not want to marry the magazine publisher Kendall Nesbitt, with whom she has been having an affair, or the movie star Randy Curtis, but rather the advertising manager Charley Johnson.

Weill labored to adapt his style to the idiom of Broadway. With “My Ship” providing a germ for the entire score, mcclung considers Lady in the Dark the first work in which the composer “made popular American song form his primary vehicle for vocal composition.” The number evolved from a highly chromatic “valse lente” to a rocking duple-meter rhythm, going through five different drafts until Weill was satisfied.

“There is a general bubbling and rejoicing and brotherliness among composers that would have been unthinkable ten years ago,” declared Bernstein in his 1976 Norton Lectures. “It's like the beginning of a new period of fresh air and fun, such as we discerned earlier in the century.” He pointed to Berio's Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra—whose third movement is a palimpsest overwriting the Scherzo of Mahler's Second Symphony with snippets of everyone from Beethoven to Boulez—as an example of “neo-neoclassicism.” Also citing works by Reich, Stockhausen, Britten, Shostakovich and more, he asked rhetorically, “why not, since these recent pieces are so often full of quotes and allusions?”

In what may have been a self-serving gesture, Bernstein's historical narrative did not include an Oedipal struggle. Rather, he celebrated “brotherliness” or dialogue among composers as a healthy means of moving forward: “We are in a position where one style can feed the other, where one technique enriches the other, thus enriching all of music.” He had taken this principle to the extreme in his 1971 Mass, juxtaposing rock music with dodecaphony, Catholic liturgy with a modern libretto. If the New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg called the theater piece for singers, players and dancers “the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and Marshmallow sauce,” the work made an important statement about overcoming the ideological divide between modernism and the popular sphere.

Tracing the impact of Weill's aesthetic on Bernstein's musical philosophy does not end with this study. Both Mass and Weill's Der Weg der Verheißung (first performed in English adaptation as The Eternal Road) are quasi-religious, didactic pageants deploying large choruses and a mix of sung and spoken roles. Weill's “biblical drama” is an oratorio about the fate of the Jewish people but also stands as a more universal allegory about human cruelty, veering from allusions to Bach Passions to stage music of an unabashedly popular style. Bernstein—who may well have experienced The Eternal Road given his close friendship with Mendy Wager, son of the impresario who presided over the premiere performances at the Manhattan Opera House in 1937—took this principle a step further in Mass, creating a collective ritual in which music leads the way to a sense of personal faith.

“If I can write one, real moving American opera that any American can understand (and one that is, notwithstanding, a serious musical work),” wrote Bernstein in January of 1948, “I shall be a happy man.” With Candide and West Side Story, he was closer to his goal. His most successful and best-known stage works, they opened within a year of each other and were conceived in a similar creative spirit. The composer had an internal struggle about how to find the right formula. In a fictive conversation between his “irrepressible demon” (“Id”) and his ego (“L.B.”), published a month before the premiere of Candide, he exposes an unconscious battle about introducing European convention to the Broadway stage:

In the end, Bernstein reassures himself that that he is setting a “specific precedent” in the history of American theater by creating a “particular mixture of styles and elements:”

A month previously, in a talk on national television, he had more confidently declared American “musical comedy” as a form that occupies a “middle ground between variety show and opera.” He cited Rodgers and Hammerstein as precedents for having blended “the best elements of opera, operetta, revue, vaudeville, and all the rest” into “something quite original.” Bernstein concluded that although operetta played a role in educating audiences about musical complexity—paving the road to the “more ambitious musical comedies we have today”—the eclectic product that is American musical theater, “borrowing this from opera, that from revue, the other from operetta, something else from vaudeville,” had managed to create a new, indigenous form: “opera but in our own way.”

The notion of influence is a necessary consideration in assessing an artist’s originality and place in history. A composer's aesthetic value, whether he writes for the present or posterity, exists in relation to his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Recent scholarship has transcended the theory that Weill's American period (1936–50) represents a complete departure from the musico-dramaturgical principles he championed in Weimar Germany. Weill research has yet to trace, however, the compositional reception of his music theater aesthetic. As a composer who straddled the worlds of opera and popular theater, Weill leaves behind a legacy which is all themore difficult to catalogue given the bifurcation of musical life since the twentieth century.

Tracing influence in compositions of the modern era is further complicated by an ambivalent relationship between the past and present. Their apparent irreconcilability demands new structural solutions not available in previous aesthetic models. As Bernstein himself illustrated in his 1976 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, composers produce with a certain insecurity vis-à-vis tradition:

This unease is tantamount to the anxiety of influence that Harold Bloom believed to be symptomatic of the post-Enlightenment age. For Joseph N. Straus, who has offered one of the most useful applications of Bloom's theory to twentieth-century music, “artistic ambivalence is worked out through a conflict between old and new elements, and through an attempt by the new elements to subsume and revise the old ones.”

A post-Enlightenment poem, according to Bloom's theory, is not a selfcontained whole but exists in relation to its precursor: “There are no texts, but only relationships between texts. These relationships depend on a critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another.” Straus transfers this view to modern music: “In their combination of stylistically and structurally disparate elements, many twentieth-century works are truly relational events as much as they are self-contained organic entities.”

While Die Dreigroschenoper and Candide are parodies of eighteenth-century works that draw inspiration from the lightness and transparency of classical form, Street Scene and West Side Story take a cue from the brooding world of late Romanticism. Combining the emotional depth of opera and the immediacy of American musical theater, both works explore thwarted love stories amid social tensions in mid-twentieth-century New York City. The similarity in wording that introduces the respective texts cannot be a coincidence. In the libretto to Weill's “American Opera” (which was billed as a “Dramatic Musical”) “the action takes place on a sidewalk in New York City,” with act 1 set on an evening in June and act 2 the following day. In the book to Bernstein's score, “the action takes place on the West Side of New York City during the last days of summer.”

Weill's male protagonist, Sam, is a Jewish-American hopelessly in love with Rose, a young woman of Irish-Catholic heritage who also dreams of running away with Sam. The tragedy that takes the foreground, however, is the troubled relationship between Rose's parents: Mrs. Maurrant is murdered by her own husband for having an affair. West Side Story tells of a romance amid warring Puerto Rican and Caucasian-American factions (the Sharks and the Jets) but was originally conceived as East Side Story, “a modern version of Romeo and Juliet” in which Juliet would be of Jewish origin and Romeo an Italian- American from Greenwich Village. This indicates the work, in the Bloomian sense, as a tessera in which Bernstein completes the fragmented love story laid out in Street Scene. The unfulfilled longing between Rose and Sam becomes a full-blown tragedy of Shakespearean proportions in the romance of Maria and Tony, who is killed by Chino, one of the Sharks.

As Kowalke has noted, the four protagonists embroiled in the doublelove stories of Street Scene are the only ones to receive overtly operatic numbers. 4 In a similar vein, the slow, confessional numbers of Tony and Maria in West Side Story evoke the emotional world of this tradition, in contrast with the catchy “I Feel Pretty” or “America” (the show's lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, wrote that these numbers “served to remind the audience that this was entertainment, not a sociological treatise”).

When Kurt Weill died of cardiac arrest on April 3, 1950, in New York, his ambitions for American opera were not yet fulfilled. He had begun collaborating with Maxwell Anderson on a musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and had dreams of turning Herman Melville's Moby Dick into an opera. He had also jotted down interest in setting Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath and other American classics. His opera Street Scene had been declared “Broadway's First Real Opera” upon its 1947 premiere but did not run for more than 148 performances. The 1948 “folk opera” Down in the Valley had made the most impact during his lifetime, receiving 250 performances by 1950 and becoming the first American television opera—or at least one of the first music theater works to be produced for television—when it was broadcast nationally by NBC (National Broadcasting Company) in January of that year.

Shortly before his death, Weill indicated in letters to his parents that he was on the brink of an exciting new period in his career. Recounting a critic's observation that “Kurt Weill will be known to later generations as the founder of American opera,” he wrote in July of 1949, “you can imagine what this means to me … since this recognition of my endeavors now allows me to work once more in the field of opera.” Two months later, he reported: “It almost looks as if I could reap some kind of harvest after twenty-five years of heavy, indefatiguable work—not in a financial but in an idealistic sense.”

Weill's ambitions for music theater fell outside the norms of the commercial industry. The only composers to attend his funeral were Marc Blitzstein and Arthur Schwartz (the playwright Maxwell Anderson, Weill's collaborator on Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars, was chosen to give a speech).