are already in hell. The city is in flames. Amid the turmoil four groups of demonstrators proclaim their beliefs, but nothing can help a dead man. Personalities | Kurt Weill | Modern Era | Opera ...
the coronation. He begs their forgiveness. At the last moment Brown appears as a mounted messenger bearing a royal pardon, a peerage and an annual pension. Personalities | Kurt Weill | Modern Era | Opera ...
(Koort Vil) 1900–50 German/American composer Weill was influenced by his teacher Busoni, by Stravinsky and by the ideal of Zeitoper (opera on contemporary subjects and themes). In his early, successful stage pieces, including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him ...
a reworking of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, with its cast of thieves, pimps and prostitutes, perfectly captured the decadence of pre-Second World War Berlin and also brought Weill international fame. He and Brecht quickly fell out, however, due to Weill’s dominance, and the successful run of Der Silbersee (‘The Silver Lake’, 1933), for which Weill ...
The banjo is a plucked stringed instrument with a circular body and fretted neck. Its roots lie in the French and British colonies of Africa, where instruments made from a hollowed-out gourd covered with animal skin, bamboo neck and catgut strings were popular. Particularly associated with celebrations and dancing, these instruments went by various names including banza and ...
First performed as an incomplete work on 2 June 1937 in Zurich, this opera boasts a Berg libretto that is based on two Frank Wedekind tragedies: Erdgeist (‘Earth Spirit’, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (‘Pandora’s Box’, 1904). Following the composer’s death, controversy arose as to the fate of the incomplete third act. Berg’s widow asked Schoenberg, Webern ...
and their precision both exhilarating and beautiful. Recommended Recording: Variations, op. 30, Vienna PO (cond) Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon) Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Kurt Weill | Modern Era | Classical ...
the content of his plays and libretti came not directly from his own pen, but from his collective of writers). It was in Berlin that he met composer Kurt Weill and their association produced Die Dreigroschenoper, based on John Gay’s (1685–1732) The Beggar’s Opera; Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny; and Der Jasager. By now a Communist, Brecht ...
(Hints Kärl Groo-bâr) b. 1943 Austrian composer Gruber studied with Alfred Uhl (1909–92) and Hanns Jelinek (1901–69). He began by working in a serial idiom but soon, along with his composer colleagues Kurt Schwertsik and Otto M. Zykan, devised a more eclectic musical language (under the designation ‘MOB and tone art’ – Tonart being German for tonality), drawing in ...
at the Met during a performance of ‘Urna fatale’ from La forza del destino, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Introduction | Modern Era | Opera Personalities | Kurt Weill | Modern Era | Opera Houses & Companies | The Birth of the Metropolitan Opera | Turn of the Century | Opera ...
with the pioneer of microtonal music, Alois Hába. In his own music their influence is joined by those of Mahler, Zemlinsky (with whom he studied conducting), Debussy and Weill, among others. His powerful opera Der Sturz des Antichrists (‘The Rise of Antichrist’, 1935) was not performed due to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and in 1942 Ullmann ...
I transformed such pessimism into more bitter and objective satire. Typical were Bertolt Brecht’s Expressionist drama Baal and anti-Wagnerian ‘epic’ plays with music, such as his collaboration with Kurt Weill (1900–50), Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (‘Rise and Fall of the city of Mahagonny’, 1930), in which he exploited a number of ‘distancing effects’, or ‘alienation’, to avoid the ...
– among the earliest examples were Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inspired Jonny spielt auf (‘Johnny Strikes Up’, 1926) and the ground-breaking Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and his collective of writers, and Kurt Weill (1900–50) collaboration, Die Dreigroschenoper (‘The Threepenny Opera’, 1928). Yet these great artistic and political talents were also suppressed, prompting them to leave for new frontiers. New Sounds and ...
archetypal medium of the Neue Sachlichkeit was the Zeitoper (‘everyday opera’), which treated modern social and cultural issues in a mixture of operatic and popular idioms. Royal Palace (1927) by Weill was one of the genre’s early successes and Weill went on to explore with Brecht a more politically engaged type of music theatre, notably in Rise and Fall of ...
the opera house. Besides Britten, significant predecessors included Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918), a work conceived in terms of portability; and the ‘epic theatre’ of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1900–50). Diverse in form and content, such works are often labelled ‘music theatre’. Among the characteristics implied by the term are smallness of scale, though not of imagination; ...
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