Born: Mar 2, 1900
Died: Apr 3, 1950
Genres: Class
Styles: Modern Composition
Instruments: Composer

A German composer. Searching for music and words that would directly affect and address their contemporaries, Weill and Bertolt Brecht had a big hit with the Mahagonny-Songspiel (1927) in Berlin (it was expanded to a full stagework in 1930). Representing the surrounding society on stage and mirroring it back on itself, Brecht and Weill invented what has been called the "educational opera." Others in the genre: Happy End, Der Jasager ("The Yes-man"), Der Lindberghflug ("The Lindbergh Flight"), and The Ballad of Magna Carta (with the famous line "Resistance unto tyrants is obedience to God"). The music was based on the style of the cabaret-theater (an old format for political satire) and developed to a richness never heard before, with modern harmonies, progressions having more to do with the freedom of bebop decades later than the normal song of the Bierhalle, and wonderful melodies ("Alabama Song," "M"ckie Messer" ("Mack the Knife"), and many others) connected by scene-developing music of a refined imagination. Weill eventually had to flee Germany when the Nazis burned his music and attacked his publishing house. Amazingly, he managed to become one of the most popular composers on the Broadway stage (Street Scene; Lady in the Dark; Knickerbocker Holiday; Love Life), but he always kept up his love for music that fulfilled a responsibility by addressing the real world (Lost in the Stars, based on Alon Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, about racial conflict in South Africa), paving the way for a kind of American "verismo" in musical theater, such as Bernstein's West Side Story. For a full understanding of Weill's musical vision, it is important to hear one of his extended instrumental works.

- Blue Gene Tyranny (All Music Guide)