Jewels, or Would You Buy a Symphony From This Man?

Ferruccio Busoni, Kurt Weill's revered mentor and teacher at the Prussian Academy of the Arts, often found his "serious'' compositions problematical. Anton Webern is reported to have asked in dismay: "Where in Weill can you find anything of our great Austro-German tradition?'' Finally, Arnold Schoenberg is reputed by Virgil Thomson to have stated: "Franz Lehar, yes ... Weill, no. His is the only music in the world in which I can find no quality at all."

Given these assessments by three undeniably formidable 20th-century composers, and knowing Kurt Weill's art as most of us do, from his most famous (or infamous, depending on one's point of view) Berlin­period theater pieces -- The Threepenny Opera and/or The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny -- I ask in all candor: Would you buy a symphony from this man? Before you answer, I'd like to reflect for a moment on the critical reaction to the first public performances of his Second Symphony, magnificently prepared (Weill's assessment) by Bruno Walter. The general consensus was that it was a naive, blundering attempt by a "popular" theater composer to create a "serious" symphony, marked by bad taste, vulgar crudeness, and (most damning of all) a lack of originality.

Weill was admonished to go back to the musical theater where he belonged, and leave "serious" music to the "serious" composers.

Whenever critical notices are uniformly bad or good. I (being of a perverse nature) become suspicious. First, Weill was a serious composer both by training and intent, especially in his theater pieces but also in his serious works, of which there are many. This symphony was actually the third he composed. His other non-musical-theater works include symphonic poems, chamber works, the wonderful Concerto for violin and wind orchestra, two ballets, and several choral pieces, all predating his most well-known theatrical collaborations with Berthold Brecht.

This symphony, incidentally, was composed between The Seven Deadly Sins and Der Kuhhandel, which makes it, unfortunately for all of us, his last foray into the world of absolute music. His problem was, ironically, the enormous success of many of his Berlin­period theater collaborations. He was pigeonholed as a "popular" composer in the minds of both his contemporary public and his critics. American musical criticism of the 1980s strongly resembles European criticism of the 1930s in its drawing of a strong line between "vulgar" popular and elevated “serious" music -- in Weill's case a silly demarcation. A cursory examination of even the simplest strophic song from The Threepenny Opera reveals a masterful control of the ebb and flow of harmonic tension. To enlarge this to the scope of a symphonic paragraph is merely a matter of manipulating scale, which Weill did handily.

What rankled the critics of the time was that passages of the Second Symphony sounded uncomfortably close to the kind of “popular" melodic and harmonic invention Weill displayed in his theater pieces. But then, after all, this was exactly what Haydn did over and over again in his "serious" works, as did Schubert, as did Mahler, as did Berlioz, as did Verdi, as did ... (gee, but weren't those guys all "classical"?). All that I want to say about this symphony (which I have known for a number of years) is that it is a jewel produced by a composer of whom Paul Hindemith once said: "Weill a small composer? No, at his best a perfect one."

Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) came from a musical culture which traditionally draws no line between "popular" and ''serious" music. He, like many of his Latin American colleagues (Manuel Ponce, Silvestre Revueltas, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Carlos Chavez, just to a name a few), incorporated folkloric and occasionally even commercially popular sounds into his serious "art" music. The results are often refreshing, bracing, and infectious.

Unlike Ginastera's more arcane and dissonant works, his highly balletic Variaciones concertantes, composed in 1953, are tuneful, colorful, and eminently engaging. Here Ginastera reminds me of Aaron Copland, a composer of similar breadth of harmonic vocabulary, who at one extreme could produce Connotations, and at the other Appalachian Spring. After the bracing rigors of Kurt Weill's Second Symphony, Ginastera’s wonderful set of orchestral variations on a tuneful, folkloric theme of his own invention provides a tasty dessert.

These two performances by Julius Rudel show not only his fine technical command, but also the scope and depth of his musical range. In every way, first-rate performances of underserved but deserving repertoire.