KWE 1001 Protagonist Introduction

Kurt Weill Edition, Ser. I, Vol. 1 Der Protagonist INTRODUCTION by Gunther Diehl and Giselher Schubert I. Introduction Gerhart Hauptmann he was the most performed German playwright between the world wars, with some forty premieres of his plays. This volume of the Kurt Weill Edition presents the full score of the one- His success, however, was overshadowed by serious financial problems act opera Der Protagonist, whose libretto was derived, with minimal alter- that led to his property being confiscated in 1918. Court proceedings fol- ation, from Georg Kaiser’s one-act play of the same name. The unusual lowed in 1920 (attended, incidentally, by the young Bertolt Brecht), and subtitle that Weill included on the title page of his holograph full score, Kaiser was sentenced to six months in prison for embezzlement. After his Ein Akt Oper von Georg Kaiser (more usual would have been Oper in einem release he settled in Grünheide, on the eastern border of Berlin, and also Akt), apparently came from Kaiser, who may have wished to identify his kept an apartment in Berlin-Charlottenburg that served as a literary meet- text as a libretto rather than a play.1 Hitherto the full score of this work ing place. In 1933, after the Nazis took power, Kaiser was banned from has been available only as rental material. The extant sources, which are publishing and performing his works; his plays were among the publica- described in detail in the Critical Report, transmit Der Protagonist in a tions burned by the Nazis on 10 May 1933. He managed to escape arrest variety of forms. The present publication, resulting from a comparison of by fleeing to Holland. In August 1938 he settled in Switzerland; he died, all those sources, makes the complete verbal and musical text of the work impoverished, in Arosa on 4 June 1945. His works remained largely for- generally accessible for the first time. gotten after the Second World War. Attempts in the 1980s to revive his Completed in Berlin in March 1925 and given its premiere at the fame through performances of, for instance, his Gas plays (1918–20) did Dresden Staatsoper on 27 March 1926, Der Protagonist occupies a special not lead to any enduring success. He is currently known almost exclu- place in Weill’s oeuvre. It was his first opera, written at age twenty-five, sively as Kurt Weill’s librettist. and belongs to a series of early compositions that systematically explored The collaboration with Kaiser brought about—quite unexpectedly— almost every musical genre: chamber music, choral music, lieder, orches- a huge change in Weill’s life. It was at Kaiser’s home, in the summer of tral works, and ballet. Kim Kowalke summarizes the significance of this 1924, that Weill got to know Lotte Lenja (née Karoline Wilhelmine opera as “the synthesis of the experimentation of its predecessors, which Charlotte Blamauer). He and Lenja moved into Kaiser’s apartment in Weill considered to be studies for operatic composition. It is the climax of Berlin-Charlottenburg in May 1925 and married eight months later, on his early development—an assimilation of the linear polyphony, non- 28 January 1926. Lenya (as she spelled her name after 1937) later gave the tonal materials, pervasive chromaticism, and constructive devices that following account of her first meeting with Weill: “Georg Kaiser had a were so carefully but sometimes unsuccessfully explored in earlier works. passion for music, and one of his best friends was the conductor Fritz No other work is so characteristic of Weill’s early style.”2 Stiedry. I think it was Stiedry who introduced Weill to Kaiser. Kaiser had With the successful premiere of the opera on 27 March 1926 Weill not a weird assortment of paddleboats, sailboats, rowboats, scullboats, and so only achieved a spectacular breakthrough as a composer but also immedi- on. It was on one of those boats that I first met Kurt Weill. He was com- ately rose to prominence among the young composers identified at the ing to discuss Der Protagonist with Kaiser.”5 Weill dedicated Der Protago- time with the renewal of the crisis-ridden genre of opera. During the nist to Lotte Lenja. opera’s genesis Weill also began to theorize about his work. In the essay “Die neue Oper,” written two months before the premiere of Der II. Genesis Protagonist, he formulated criteria for a “new operatic music” and made public his ideas about “the attitude of the creative artist toward the prob- In the essay titled “Bekenntnis zur Oper” (Commitment to Opera) that lems of the musical stage.”3 he contributed to the Blätter der Staatsoper, distributed in connection with The opera marks Weill’s first significant collaboration with another the premiere of Der Protagonist, Weill recounted his early musical devel- artist. Georg Kaiser, twenty-one years Weill’s senior, was born in Magde- opment and his collaboration with Kaiser that led to the opera: burg on 25 November 1879. An outstanding representative of expres- It was only when I sensed that my music contained the tension of scenic sionist drama, he became one of the most important playwrights of the events that I turned to the stage. I wrote the pantomime Zaubernacht for Weimar Republic. His work was also known outside Germany, above all a Russian troupe at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm. The intense con- in the United States. (In a letter dated 23 February 1928 to Universal Edi- centration of Russian theater taught me two things: that the stage has its tion in Vienna Weill emphasized that “Kaiser is very popular in Ameri- own musical form whose laws derive organically from the unfolding of 4 the action, and that something significant can be said onstage only by the ca.”) After completing a business apprenticeship, Kaiser first worked as a simplest, most modest means. A nine-piece orchestra, a female singer, two clerk in Buenos Aires. Health problems forced him to return to Germany, female dancers and a group of children—such were the forces of this where he managed to get by without steady employment. He became danced dream. I felt happy and honored when Georg Kaiser offered to active as an author in 1911, and 1915 saw the first production of one of write the scenario for a full-length ballet for me. We set about working his plays. Unable to serve in the First World War for health reasons, he together. In ten weeks almost three-quarters of the piece was written. The score of the prelude and the first two acts was complete. Then came a flourished as a playwright during that period. With the 1917 production block. We had grown out of the subject matter, the muteness of the char- of Die Bürger von Calais, a play he had written in 1914, he came to be acters bothered us, we had to burst the chains of the pantomime: it had known as the foremost representative of expressionist drama in Germany, to become opera. Georg Kaiser reverted to an earlier piece that he had at exercising a formidable influence on contemporary theater. Along with one point conceived in his mind in terms of opera, the one-act play Der 14 Protagonist. Here we had what we were looking for: an unforced, unin- onist could be conveyed only by an operatic character; the high points of tended dovetailing of opera and pantomime.6 the action could be expressed only by music: the dialogue between broth- er and sister, the clandestinely hasty love scene, the transition to dance, How Weill and Kaiser were introduced and the details of their first and the sudden shift from comedy into tragedy. The two pantomimes meeting are shrouded in mystery. Three different accounts are in circula- afforded an opportunity for lyrical expansion. In order to lend the pro- tion, all equally plausible and mutually complementary.7 By one account, ceedings a musical framework I gave the eight musicians something akin Kaiser attended a performance of the pantomime Zaubernacht (which to the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy: they open the drama and pas- sively accompany it until finally they intervene, giving the impression that Weill mentions in the passage quoted above) at the end of 1922, and it is we are guests of the Duke and have witnessed the exceptional perfor- possible that he and Weill first met on that occasion. The conductor and mance of the Protagonist.13 composer Fritz Stiedry (1883–1968) had drawn his friend Kaiser’s atten- tion to the work, because he knew that the playwright was considering The reasons Weill identifies can be both confirmed and elaborated. incorporating dance scenes into his drama. Weill, for his part, knew Kaiser had already finished his play Der Protagonist by spring of 1920. On Stiedry through his teacher, Ferruccio Busoni. 30 May he evidently sent it to Stiedry along with a note in which he By another account Weill, a young student supporting himself by wrote: “Dear Maestro, I’m including a little one-act play that requires teaching harmony and counterpoint and playing piano in cafés and bars, music. I don’t know whether I can mobilize you for such a slight work. was unable to find an apartment with a piano on which to practice. He But the incentive comes from my abiding wish that we might do some- inquired with Stiedry, who arranged for him to practice in Kaiser’s Char- thing together. One has to start somewhere—the rise of the constellation lottenburg apartment. It is there that Weill could have met Kaiser for the Stiedry-Kaiser. Then something big will emerge from its own heaven.”14 first time.

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