The Kurt Weill Album

Kurt Weill’s life was shaped by the cataclysmic forces that engulfed his homeland in the early 1930s. A landmark recording from Joana Mallwitz and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin casts fresh light on the German composer’s two symphonies, making a compelling case for works that deserve to be much better known. Their album also includes the “sung ballet” Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins), a biting social satire created soon after Adolf Hitler’s seizure of dictatorial power. Weill’s Second Symphony crossed Mallwitz’s repertoire radar shortly before she began work as chief conductor of the Konzerthausorchester in 2023. “I knew Weill from his Dreigroschenoper and theatre works, but had no idea about the symphonies,” she tells Apple Music Classical. “I wondered why so few people knew them. I always joke that everyone says they love the Second Symphony but nobody knows it! It’s so much fun to play because it’s a piece where the orchestra can shine.” The music of Kurt Weill resonates strongly with Mallwitz’s Berlin orchestra. Founded in East Berlin in the early 1950s, the Konzerthausorchester was the German Democratic Republic’s answer to the West Berlin-based Berliner Philharmoniker. Weill, born in Dessau in eastern Germany and raised in its Jewish quarter, came to Berlin at the age of 18 to study at the Hochschule für Musik, and returned two years later for lessons with Ferruccio Busoni. “Where better to celebrate Weill’s music,” asks the conductor, “than at the birthplace of these two symphonies?” Weill began composing his Second Symphony in January 1933, the month in which Hitler became Germany’s chancellor. He wrote Die sieben Todsünden soon after as a refugee in Paris. It tells of a Louisiana family who send their daughter to the big city to make her fortune as a dancer. Bertolt Brecht’s libretto divides Anna into two distinct egos: Anna I warns her sister to avoid the deadly sins of sloth, pride, anger, gluttony, lust, avarice and envy while making them sound like virtues; Anna II generally nods in agreement. Katharine Mehrling, a star of the Berlin stage, brings Anna I to fiery fox-trotting life in Mallwitz’s recording. Nazi nonentities were quick to denounce Weill for his “degenerate” art. The composer’s reputation was trashed in the pages of official publications and his works were banned within Hitler’s Reich. “Weill’s name was put on the list of books and music to be burned,” observes Joana Mallwitz. “It was taboo!” The First Symphony’s full score, she adds, was somehow saved from the Nazi bonfire of cancelled art. “It found its way to a friend of a friend and ended up at an Italian convent, where the nuns hid it.” The one-movement work, composed in 1921, was rediscovered after Lotte Lenya, Weill’s widow and pioneering interpreter, placed a newspaper advertisement calling for information about the composer’s lost manuscripts. Somebody had destroyed the work’s titlepage, on which Weill had inscribed “Der Aufbruch eines Volkes zu Gott” (“A People’s Awakening to God”), a quotation from Johannes R. Becher’s expressionist-pacifist play Arbeiter, Bauern, Soldaten (Workers, Farmers, Soldiers). The symphony reflects the play’s awareness of humankind’s destructive urges and struggle to secure social justice. “I feel so strongly that Weill was drawn to this idea of peace and humanity,” says Mallwitz. “In every note you hear this young composer who has so many ideas. If you don’t grasp the big idea in it, which for me is the belief in peace and humanity, if you don’t find that angle which holds the piece together, it tends to break apart. I felt with all my colleagues in the orchestra a deep emotional connection to this music. We sweated blood and shed tears in our recording sessions to make it perfect. Everyone was so motivated and so proud in the end. Many players came to me and said, this is our piece now—this is us!”