Mainly Opera and Ballet
This opera emerged from an earlier Singspiel, and was created by Kurt Weill and Bertoldt Brecht, who wrote the unsettling libretto exposing a dark side to capitalism, where anything goes as long as you can pay. It was produced in 1930 before Hitler came to power, an event that compelled Weill and his wife the …
Premiered in February 1933, Kurt Weill’s Silbersee gives an insight into the Germany in which Hitler had just come to power. It is a story of guilt, remorse, anger, resentment, and ultimately redemption, superbly brought to life in James Conway’s theatrically sensitive production — see my review in The Article.
This is not an easy work to stage, emerging as it does from two slightly incompatible attitudes, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, as to its eventual form. Its genesis lay in a series of songs — the Mahagonny Gesänge — published by Brecht in April 1927, which inspired Weill to fulfil a commission he …
Kurt Weill is the composer of two operatic works that I like very much — The Threepenny Opera (Berlin, 1928) and Street Scene (New York, 1947) — along with lots of glorious songs from other stage works. I was delighted to hear many of those songs in this drama created by Kate Flatt and Peter Rowe, with …
