PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Kurt Weill Born March 2, 1900, Dessau, Germany. Died April 3, 1950, New York City.

Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, Op. 12

Weill composed this concerto in April and May of 1924 and it was first performed on June 11, 1925, in Paris. The score calls for solo violin and an orchestra consisting of two flutes and piccolo, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, timpani, xylophone, triangle, cymbals, snare drum, bass drum, and double basses. Performance time is approximately thirty minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s only previous performances of Weill’s Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra were given on subscription concerts at Orchestra Hall on March 25 and 26, 1965, with Steven Staryk as soloist and Irwin Hoffman conducting.

There are several Kurt Weills. There is the German Weill and the American Weill, the European and the émigré, the classically trained student of Ferruccio Busoni and the Broadway tunesmith, the avant-garde composer of symphonies and the writer of “Mack the Knife.”

To a large degree, the different faces of Weill revolve around the early years of World War II, when the German-born son of a cantor fled his homeland, first to France and then to the United States—it is a dividing line in his life and career characterized by his abrupt decision to begin pronouncing his name with a W, not a V, once he settled in the States. Unlike Arnold Schoenberg, who legally changed the spelling of his name from Schönberg when he became an American citizen, but then asked that his remains be returned to Europe after his death, Weill turned his back on his roots. “I never felt the oneness with my native country that I do with the United States,” he said. “The moment I landed here I felt as though I’d come home.” (Weill and Schoenberg—with whom Weill actually had once wanted to study—saw many things differently; Schoenberg said that Weill’s “is the only music in the world in which I find no quality at all.”)

This concerto is early Weill—pronounced with a V—composed during the Berlin years he later tried to erase from his memory. It was the first of his instrumental works to become popular, and much later it played a role in the reevaluation of his neglected European, nontheatrical scores—the pieces that to a large extent Weill himself had let the music world forget.

Weill was interested in music from an early age, and he was quickly recognized as a wunderkind. In his youth he played organ in the synagogue by day, piano in the beer hall at night—a musical split personality that was reflected again and again throughout his career and even in the provocative, impossible-to- pigeonhole music he wrote. (He was one of the earliest composers to ignore the differences between serious and light music: “There is only good music and bad music,” he said.) As a teenager, Weill studied the piano and coached singers at the Dessau Opera. He wrote his first symphony at the age of twenty- one (it wasn’t performed until after his death), when he had just begun to study with Busoni.

This concerto for violin and wind orchestra was composed in the spring of 1924, the year he met the soprano (and later gravelly voiced alto) Lotte Lenya, who would soon become his wife and his most famous interpreter. She was working as a nanny for Germany’s leading dramatist, Georg Kaiser, who sent her to pick up Weill at the train station—she would have no trouble recognizing him, Kaiser said: “All composers look the same.”

The concerto was written for the violinist Joseph Szigeti, whose virtuosity Weill admired, although in the end it was first performed by Marcel Darrieux. The scoring, for an orchestra of winds with prominent percussion, suggests the brilliant, biting sonorities of Weill’s theater music. The concerto is a kind of barometer of Weill’s unique personal language, with evidence of the rigorous Busoni training; the influence of the music of the day, particularly in the Stravinsky-like clarity (this was the period of his crystalline Octet and Concerto for piano and winds); and even in its hints of the Broadway scores to come.

The solo violin is a constant presence in the first movement, but although its part is highly demanding in the grand concerto tradition, there is a wonderfully integrated, chamber music quality to the whole. The heart of the concerto is the unusual second movement, with its three interlinked sections—a macabre nocturne, with a chilling xylophone solo; a cadenza for the violin, with occasional contributions from the winds; and a rhythmic serenade. The finale is at once a serious wrap-up and an outright showstopper. The faces of the later American Weill—with a W—were already beginning to show.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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