POPULAR ADAPTATIONS OF WEILL’S MUSIC FOR STAGE AND SCREEN, 1927–1950 by Charles Hamm Kurt Weill did not, strictly speaking, compose popular songs. Granted, a surplus cash to purchase musical instruments and instruction in music. More handful of individual pieces extracted from his compositions for European and more people enjoyed both the leisure time and cultural motivation to musical stages had modest commercial success in live and recorded perform- engage in recreational music making and dancing. Musical literacy had earlier ance; a somewhat larger number of songs written for the American theater en- been limited to professional musicians and the moneyed and educated classes, joyed short-term success in the commodity forms of sheet music and but the introduction of musical instruction into elementary and secondary ed- phonograph records; a still larger number of songs from both arenas have ucation and the proliferation of local and regional amateur bands, choral posthumously become standards or “evergreens,” performed throughout the groups, and musical societies throughout Europe and North America brought world and recorded for generations unborn at the time they were written. a dramatic increase in the number of people competent to read musical no- But virtually all of his songs were originally intended for performance in the tation. The music industry tapped into this new market by publishing pieces theater. Of the 118 pieces included in the two-volume Kurt Weill Songs: A designed specifically for amateurs who lacked the technical and interpretive Centennial Anthology, only four—“Berlin im Licht-Song,” “Complainte de la skills to do justice to the classical repertory but nevertheless wanted to play Seine,” “Je ne t’aime pas,” “The Song of the Free”—were not written for dra- and sing for their own pleasure and that of their family and friends. matic presentation on stage or in film.1 Weill obviously needed a dramatic This new repertory, in the form of songs with keyboard accompaniment context to create a song; otherwise he simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, write one. and compositions for keyboard or small instrumental ensembles, targeted the “I need poetry to set my imagination into motion; and my imagination is bourgeois household. Marketed at first as individual pieces of sheet music, this not a bird, it’s an airplane,” he told his brother Hans already in 1919.2 A few growing repertory also appeared in small collections of such pieces published months later he announced to his sister that his life’s work would probably as albums (or folios) and sometimes even in larger and more expensive hard- turn out to be the musical theater, where “music best expresses what cannot cover anthologies. Much nineteenth-century popular vocal music consisted of be said in mere words.”3 But it doesn’t follow that all of his songs make mu- pieces written in a style generally similar in melodic and harmonic content to sical and dramatic sense only in the context of the stage works for which they classical music of the era, but shaped into shorter, simpler formal structures, were written. Quite the contrary; many songs, including such standards as with fewer technical and expressive demands on the performer. Such “high- “September Song,” “Speak Low,” “Surabaya-Johnny,” and above all “Mack class ballads,” or “parlor songs,” as they were often called—works by Franz the Knife,” have been sung, played, and heard by millions of people with little Abt, Henry Bishop, Virginia Gabriel, Ciro Pinsuti, Franz Kücken, Arthur or no knowledge of the stage works for which they were written. Sullivan, Karl Eckert, Henry Russell, and hundreds of other songwriters— Weill made it his business to become familiar with the popular musics of were published and performed throughout Europe and North America. In his day from the early 1920s until his death in 1950, and virtually all of his addition to being sung and played in the homes of middle-class amateurs, works for the musical stage written after 1925 evince to some degree his ac- they were sometimes written for or interpolated into works for the popular quaintance with popular styles and genres. It is, however, not easy to define musical theater. Publishers also addressed simplified arrangements of arias “popular music”; the term has been used over the years as a label for many dif- and songs from operas and operettas to the same amateurs who bought these ferent musical styles and genres, and the literature on the subject has ranged parlor songs.5 And there were collections of “folk” tunes arranged for voice from positivist historical narrative and analysis of musical styles to ideologi- and keyboard in the tonal and triadic style of early nineteenth-century cally charged arguments over cultural meaning. In September 1983, for ex- classical music; typical of these were C. F. Peters’ often reprinted Volks- und ample, at the second biennial meeting of the International Association for Studentenlieder für Pianoforte, containing 120 German songs in simple the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), an entire week of discussion addressed arrangements by Victor Felix; Chansons Anciennes Harmonisées, published in the question “What is popular music?” without reaching any consensus about Paris by Les Editions Ouvrières; Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies; and the songs a definition.4 of Robert Burns. Such terms as musique populaire and musica popolare were probably first Another sub-genre of popular music evolved in cabarets and other inti- applied to the orally disseminated music of the “people,” that is, peasant mate venues, where patrons could enjoy food and drink as well as entertain- classes and urban poor, but by the late nineteenth century this repertory had ment. Though most often associated with Paris (where the famous Chat Noir come to be known as “folk” or “traditional” music. At about the same time a opened in 1881) and Berlin, cabarets could in fact be found all over Western quite different repertory, created and performed in an urban setting and mar- and Eastern Europe and in major cities of North America.6 The environment keted as a commodity for the bourgeoisie and the upwardly mobile working for which such songs were written shaped their style and substance. In the classes, took over the label of “popular music.” Social and economic changes words of Klaus Wachsmann, “Cabaret provided an atmosphere in which in- in the nineteenth century brought a steady increase in the number of house- novation could flourish. [It was] a place where painters, poets, composers holds in Europe, North America, and the European colonies with enough and performing musicians could not only meet one another but confront the public, the bourgeoise; and an element of provocative artistic statement was the essence of cabaret during its heyday.”7 Cabaret songs, sometimes the work In response to several preliminary drafts of this essay, my coeditors, Kim H. Kowalke and of classically trained composers, tended to be more sophisticated and more Elmar Juchem, offered numerous suggestions and additions that have been incorporated into this final version. I would like to acknowledge and thank them for their invaluable “modern” in musical style than were the popular songs performed in beer gar- assistance. dens, music halls, vaudeville, and the Victorian parlor. 40 Popular keyboard music of the time derived at least in part from classical nent, possibly in cases of extreme greatness even eternal . [Performers] are models. Henri Herz, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Theodor Kullak, and other merely the medium, the necessarily imperfect medium, through which the 12 classically trained musicians wrote short character pieces, etudes, nocturnes, work has to pass. and sets of variations for amateur performance, as well as keyboard arrange- By contrast, popular music usually circulated in arrangements made by ments of excerpts from operas and other classical works. Another subset of the musicians other than the composer, hired for that purpose by publishing nineteenth-century popular repertory consisted of instrumental music to ac- houses. Once a piece of popular music had entered the public realm (some- company social dancing, either arranged for small groups of instruments or times initially in performance rather than in print), the relationship of per- published as a single melodic line to be played by violin (fiddle), flute, trum- formers to the printed score was much more flexible than in the case of pet, bagpipes, or any other available melodic instrument. With such an assort- classical music. Though it was possible for a piece of popular sheet music to ment of genre, style, and medium, popular music of the nineteenth century be sung or played precisely as the staff arranger had written it down, it was can be defined less aptly by its musical style than by its function of serving the much more in the nature of the genre for the performer to adjust the tempo, bourgeoisie’s needs for music to be performed in the home, as theatrical en- dynamics, melody, harmony, instrumentation, and even structure to bring tertainment, or for social dancing. the piece more within his or her range of technical expertise and expression. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth (and per- An anonymous contributor to the Albany State Register, writing in 1852 of haps even the twenty-first), a class-based distinction between classical and Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” testified to the radically different popular art held that the former was, by definition, intellectually, morally, modes of performance to which a popular song might be subjected: and socially superior. “Democrats as we must be in government,” wrote Philip H. Goepp in 1897, “there is no doubt that the bursts of popular will through- Pianos and guitars groan with it, night and day; sentimental young ladies sing out the nineteenth century have had a sinister effect on art.