Program Notes

Honegger: King David
Weill: Kiddush; Das Berliner Requiem; Vom Tod im Wald

In the fall of 1920, Weill returned to Berlin to study with the eminent composer Ferruccio Busoni. Busoni's aesthetic theories, summarized as "the new classicism," profoundly influenced Weill. As Kim Kowalke has written, Busoni "extolled clarity and conciseness of musical form, freedom from literary dependence, . . . avoidance of the tortuously expressive pathos of late Romantic and Expressionist composers, and expansion of musical materials."

Weill's first stage composition to be performed, his ballet-pantomime Die Zaubernacht (1922), drew the attention of the well-established playwright Georg Kaiser; the composer and dramatist soon agreed to work on a project together. The result was the opera Der Protagonist (1926), which created a sensation. Der Protagonist developed a new operatic music which achieved its effect by means of simple, direct style with an emphasis on linear writing and counterpoint, and which began to incorporate popular forms in the way baroque and classical opera composers had used dance forms such as the minuet.

The composer of Der Protagonist soon attracted the interest of the rising poet of socially critical "epic theater," Bertolt Brecht. For his part, Weill admired Brecht's play Mann ist Mann and his collection of poems, satirically titled Die Hauspostille (Domestic Breviary), which included five "Mahagonny-Songs" (Mahagonny was Brecht's name for a mythical boom town where the only capital crime is to be without money). In May 1927, Weill and Brecht worked these into the Mahagonny-Songspiel, a chamber opera. Over the next two years, the collaborators created The Threepenny Opera, the full-length opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and Happy End. The Threepenny Opera is so famous now that nearly everyone knows at least one of its songs ("Mack the Knife").

In 1928, Weill received a commission for a work to be broadcast by the German state radio company. His response was Das Berliner Requiem, a cantata for tenor, baritone, bass, mens' chorus, and wind orchestra--settings of pre-existing poems by Brecht (Weill scored the work for winds partly because of his understanding of the limited sensitivity of the microphones of that time). The Requiem was composed during November and December of 1928, but state censors' concerns about the political and religious nature of Brecht's poems delayed the broadcast performance until 22 May 1929. Weill described Das Berliner Requiem as a study for his opera Mahagonny and an attempt to express "what the urban man of our era has to say about the phenomenon of death."

Weill originally planned to include in Das Berliner Requiem his 1927 setting of Brecht's poem Vom Tod im Wald for bass and ten instruments. However, the elaborate instrumental writing of Vom Tod im Wald contrasted sharply with the style of the other movements Weill wrote for the radio cantata, and the appearance of "the Mississippi" in Brecht's first stanza made the ballad inappropriate for a Berlin requiem. Brecht's poem appears to be a parody of verse from Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed (Brecht wrote other Kipling-inspired verses to invoke British imperialism in The Threepenny Opera). In Kipling's poem ("There were three friends that buried the fourth") three men look on helplessly as one of their comrades dies with courage; in Brecht's, three men look on with indifference as a fourth dies, desperately trying to cling to life. Weill's setting contrasts somber counterpoint for two trombones with passages of driving, virtuosic writing for concerted woodwinds and brass. The sudden moment of sonic "light" in the clarinets after the last stanza's line "Und der Baum war oben voll Licht" ("And the top of the tree was full of light") is as striking as it is quiet.

Das Berliner Requiem was composed partly to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the end of the First World War. In Germany then there was tremendous disagreement about the lessons of the Great War (much as in our country today there is still disagreement about the lessons of the Vietnam War). German militarists felt that in 1918 the Reich had been betrayed by the socialist revolutionaries who toppled Kaiser Wilhelm's government. On the other hand, Bertolt Brecht believed that in the war, countless working-class men and their families had been destroyed for a cause in which they had no vested interest--the imperial and territorial ambitions of the Great Powers.

In the poems Weill used in Das Berliner Requiem, Brecht sharpened his irony by using subtle biblical references (we must remember that God's help was called upon to destroy Germany's enemies in the 1914-18 war). Arnold Simmel has written that "Brecht is a master at making allusions to the things you love, using them to dig deeper and wider the abyss between the good things of life and the things he hates." As one example, the opening and closing choruses ("Lobet die Nacht") paraphrase a Lutheran hymn well known to most Germans. Simmel states that "the phrase 'Kommet zu Hauf' ('Come in crowds') . . . occurs in a Lutheran hymn that a very large fraction of Germans know and recognize. . . . The opening line of that hymn is 'Lobet den Herrn' ('Praise the Lord') and we realize that it is not coincidence that 'Lobet die Nacht' opens this 'Great Hymn of Thanks.'"

The Requiem's second and third numbers ("Ballad of the Drowned Girl" and "Marterl") were meant to commemorate the murder of the socialist antiwar activist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 by a right-wing paramilitary squad, who threw her body into Berlin's Landwehr Canal. Weill's Song-Album for voice and piano (published in 1929) includes a version of "Marterl" which refers to "red Rosa," but in Das Berliner Requiem he substituted Brecht's verse about "Johanna Beck," probably to appease the censors. The fourth and fifth numbers denounce the motive for creating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; Brecht views the soldier not as a hero, but as the murder victim of the state.

The German state which came into being after the election of Hitler would have no room for Kurt Weill, nor did he wish to remain there. He left Germany in March 1933 and, after brief stays in Paris and London, began a career writing for the New York stage in 1936. Many who know little of Weill's German stage music remember him fondly for his shows Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Street Scene, and Lost in the Stars, among others. The work which opens tonight's concert joins the musical and spiritual influences from Weill's childhood in Dessau with the flavor of his songs for Broadway. Kiddush (Prayer of Sanctification) for tenor solo, chorus, and organ was written in 1946 for the Park Avenue Synagogue. Weill dedicated the score to his father Albert, who survived the Second World War and became a citizen of the new state of Israel. Kim Kowalke has called Kiddush an "ingenious and poignant mixture of 'blues' and traditional chant styles."

In September 1920, when Kurt Weill was on his way to Berlin to study with Busoni, Arthur Honegger had just completed the first of his works to enter the standard orchestral repertoire, Pastorale d'été (Summer Pastorale). Though he was a Swiss citizen, Honegger's career was centered in Paris, where he was associated with the group of young composers which Jean Cocteau had given the name Les Six (Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, Georges Auric, and Honegger). Honegger, regarded by many as the most serious member of the group, was at pains to dissociate himself from its most iconoclastic ideas. In a September 1920 interview, it is interesting to see how his ideas diverge from and intersect the ideals of Busoni which so inspired Kurt Weill: "I'm not a devotee of the fair and the music hall, but rather of chamber and orchestral music. . . . I attach a great importance to musical architecture and would never willingly sacrifice it to literary or pictorial requirements."

Though his larger family was based in the Swiss canton of Zurich, Arthur Honegger was born in Le Havre, France, in a colony of Swiss tradesman who served the port city. He spent summers in Zurich studying violin and music theory, and from 1909 to 1911 studied composition with the director of the conservatory there. He then returned to France and studied at the Paris Conservatoire from 1911 to 1918, meanwhile creating a body of works that received performances within the school and eventually outside it as well. In June 1917 his Apollinaire songs were performed at an exhibition of new paintings, and suddenly Honegger found himself in "the world of the cubists and the futurists" (as he described it in a letter to his parents). After this, there was a steady crescendo of artistic projects, most of which he accepted because he needed money. In December 1920, Honegger began work on his most ambitious score to date, a ballet entitled Horace victorieux, but his work on it soon had to be interrupted for a commission from the Swiss playwright René Morax.

In 1903, Morax had founded a popular theater in the Swiss countryside eight miles outside of Lausanne, where he built a semi-outdoor theater, like a vast chalet, with a very large stage. This structure was the site of performances of Morax's historical dramas until the war forced it to shut down in 1914. Morax sought to reopen his theater in the summer of 1921 with his play King David, and asked the conductor Ernest Ansermet to suggest a composer. He suggested Arthur Honegger, who had thus far been snubbed by Swiss concert organizations. Morax had never heard of him, so he asked Stravinsky, who was still living in Morges, Switzerland. Stravinsky said "Honegger." In mid-January 1921, Morax wrote Honegger and asked for a score to be supplied by May.

Though he had not hesitated to accept the commission, Honegger felt challenged in attempting to compose for the forces made available to him--seventeen instruments versus a very large amateur chorus. In early March, after he had already begun composition of King David, Honegger asked the advice of Stravinsky, who said, "It's very simple: go ahead as if you had chosen this ensemble yourself." Honegger forged ahead with composition and finished all of the play's 27 musical numbers in short score by April. Then he spent the next month feverishly orchestrating. He completed the full score by 20 May, and when he arrived in Mézières on the 27th, the play was already in rehearsal. Honegger accepted the responsibility of conducting, but because of the short time before the premiere on 11 June, the rehearsals were very trying. Nevertheless, the performance was a triumph, not least for Honegger's music. Aloys Mooser, the critic for the paper La Suisse in Geneva, noted the "burning, personal lyricism" of Honegger's score and the "striking conviction and seriousness" of its psalms and canticles, and he praised the monumental grandeur of "The Dance Before the Ark" and the final apotheosis ("The Death of David").

The play was in five acts and lasted more than four hours. Because of the success of his music, in late 1922 Honegger made a concert version which retained all his music but substituted, with Morax's permission, narration for the scenes and dialogue. Finally, for a performance in German at Winterthur in December 1923, Honegger arranged the abridged version for large orchestra with soloists and chorus. After this version was performed in Paris in March 1924, King David became a "hit" and was performed by choirs all over the world. For tonight's performance, the original orchestration of the first and second versions will be used: two flutes, one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon; one French horn, two trumpets, trombone; celesta, piano, harmonium; timpani and percussion; and cello and double bass.

Notes by John Shepard with Jonathan Wiener
Copyright 2000 Riverside Choral Society