Word: weill
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Best & Worst. One work that so far has been denied posterity is Weill's Huckleberry Finn, a "folk opera" that the composer and his neighbor, Playwright Maxwell Anderson, were working on in New City, N.Y., when Weill died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The five songs Weill completed for Huckleberry were locked away and all but forgotten for 14 years. Finally, Lys Symonette, Weill's former secretary and rehearsal pianist, and Broadway Conductor Milton Rosenstock resurrected the musical remains of Huckleberry, with the idea of molding it into a half-hour TV show. Several...
...give a damn about posterity," declared Composer Kurt Weill. "I write for today." Nonetheless, since Weill's death in 1950, his catchy, sophisticated music (September Song, Mack the Knife, Alabama Song) has inspired a fiercely devoted following in the U.S. and abroad and prompted a spate of memorial record albums and revivals, most memorably the phenomenal off-Broadway production (2,707 performances) of his Threepenny Opera...
...heard to best advantage in River Chanty, a heave-ho work song with chorus that evokes the lure and lore of ol' man river. The score's low-water mark is struck in a rankly commercial number entitled Apple Jack, a shallow echo of some of Weill's earlier work. "Weill's best melodies are like glue," exclaims Rosenstock. "If you listen to them, they stick." The most adhesive refrain in Huckleberry is called This Time Next Year and expresses Jim's dream of freedom. Sung by Thomas Carey, a Negro baritone from New York...
...given her, soon was haunting Denver's folk dens. "Folk music became my contact with other human beings," she says, "a way of saying what I think is happening inside their souls. What's happening in the music now is what happened in the Germany of Weill and Brecht-this outcry, this fury, this screaming 'It's exciting! It's exciting!' '' Like the song that she has established as her trademark, she is a "Maid of Constant Sorrow" who has "seen trials all of my days." She has suffered bouts of infantile...
LADY IN THE DARK (RCA Victor). A reissue of Kurt Weill's songs from the classic musical psychodrama of 1941. The orchestral arrangements sound dated, and even in her prime (eleven years before her death) Gertrude Lawrence had the usual uncertain wobble in her voice, but her Saga of Jenny is nevertheless galvanic, and My Ship still haunting...