Kurt Weill's America

Kurt Weill's America PDF Author: Naomi Graber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190906588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
When German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill arrived in the United States in 1935, he found a nation nothing like he imagined. This book tells the full story of Weill as outsider-turned-insider, showing how he was keenly attuned to the difficult relationship America had with her immigrants but was slower to grasp the subtleties of race relations.

Kurt Weill's America

Kurt Weill's America PDF Author: Naomi Graber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190906588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
When German-Jewish composer Kurt Weill arrived in the United States in 1935, he found a nation nothing like he imagined. This book tells the full story of Weill as outsider-turned-insider, showing how he was keenly attuned to the difficult relationship America had with her immigrants but was slower to grasp the subtleties of race relations.

Kurt Weill on Stage

Kurt Weill on Stage PDF Author: Foster Hirsch
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879109905
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
(Limelight). His best-known song is "Mack the Knife," with words by Bertolt Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera , first performed in Weimar Berlin in 1928. Five years later, Kurt Weill fled the Nazis to come to America, where he soon emerged as one of the most admired composers of the Broadway musical stage. His shows included: Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Street Scene and Lost in the Stars . His songs: "My Ship," "September Song," "Speak Low" and "It Never Was You." This biography concentrates on Weill's career in the United States, but its aim is to explore the truth in the comment made by Weill's wife, the unforgettable Lotte Lenya: "There is no American Weill, there is no German Weill. There is no difference between them. There is only Weill."

Speak Low (When You Speak Love)

Speak Low (When You Speak Love) PDF Author: Kurt Weill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520212404
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
Selected letters trace the relationship of the composer and actress, who were married for twenty-four years

Weill's Musical Theater

Weill's Musical Theater PDF Author: Stephen Hinton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271777
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
“This book, the first scholarly consideration of Weill’s complete output of stage works, is without doubt the most important critical study of the composer’s oeuvre to date in any language. Hinton’s scholarship is superior and his insights original and illuminating. The product of several decades of engagement with Weill’s works, their sources and reception, as well as the secondary literature, the book is a stunning achievement. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it will take its place as one of the cornerstones of Weill studies.”—Kim H. Kowalke, University of Rochester and President, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music “In Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, Stephen Hinton reminds us that Kurt Weill was always a revolutionary. The composer’s insistent dedication to a provocative, constantly evolving lyric theater that spoke directly to audiences meant that Weill remained as controversial as he was popular. The celebrity that endeared him to Broadway made him anathema in Berlin. Some sixty years after Weill’s death, Hinton is finally able to demonstrate the consistent brilliance, theatrical power, and coherence of a composer who revolutionized every genre he touched (or used) and whose collaborators read as a who’s who of twentieth-century theater.” —David Savran, author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class "Stephen Hinton presents us with an image of Weill that is at once monumental yet still alive. A truly Protean figure, Weill is not an easy man to grasp in his totality; Brecht once wrote that a man thrown into water will have to develop webbed feet, and as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Weill had to become a cultural amphibian. But in Weill's Musical Theater we see the composer from every angle: through the gaze of countless critics and reviewers, through Weill's own eyes, and finally through the filter of Hinton's judicious, focused prose. This account will stand."—Daniel Albright, author of Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

The Days Grow Short

The Days Grow Short PDF Author: Ronald Sanders
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781879505063
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Offers coverage of Weill's life that is informed by a knowledge of the shifting cultural and political climates in which he worked.

Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera

Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera PDF Author: Stephen Hinton
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521338882
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This is a book on the best known of the Weill-Brecht collaborations which explores the extent and significance of the composer's contribution. After a detailed reconstruction of the work's genesis and continued revision over three decades, Stephen Hinton examines the spin-offs on which Weill and Brecht participated: the instrumental suite, the film, the lawsuit, the novel, and the musical and textual revisions of songs. In a survey of the stage history, Hinton pays particular attention to pioneering productions in Germany and Great Britain. Kim Kowalke provides an exhaustive account of the history of The Threepenny Opera in America, Geoffrey Abbott addresses questions concerning authentic performance practice, and David Drew analyses large-scale motivic relationships in the music. Among the earliest writings on the work reprinted here, those by Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin appear for the first time in English translation. The book contains numerous illustrations, a discography, and music examples.

Bertolt Brecht in America

Bertolt Brecht in America PDF Author: James K. Lyon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140085590X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
This colorful account of Bertolt Brecht's move from Germany to America during the Hitler era explores his activities as a Hollywood writer, a playwright determined to conquer Broadway, a political commentator and activist, a social observer, and an exile in an alien land. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Knickerbocker Holiday

Knickerbocker Holiday PDF Author: Maxwell Anderson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258287412
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description


The Partnership

The Partnership PDF Author: Pamela Katz
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307744167
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
This fascinating portrait of two of the most brilliant theater artists of the twentieth century—and the women who made their work possible—is set against the explosive years of the Weimar Republic. Among the most outsized personalities of the sizzling, decadent period between the Great War and the Nazis’ rise to power were the renegade poet Bertolt Brecht and the avant-garde composer Kurt Weill. These two young geniuses and the three women vital to their work—actresses Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigel and writer Elisabeth Hauptmann—joined talents to create the theatrical masterworks The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, only to split in rancor as their culture cracked open and their differences became irreconcilable. The Partnership is the first book to tell the full story of one of the most important creative collaborations of the last century, and the first to give full credit to the women who contributed their enormous gifts. Theirs is a thrilling story of artistic daring entwined with sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic’s most fevered years, a time when art and politics and society were inextricably mixed.

Dvorák's Prophecy

Dvorák's Prophecy PDF Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393881245
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”