A Refreshingly Slim Biography.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 03, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 040301np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Kim Kowalke Discusses the Life and Times of Kurt Weill
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's FRESH AIR, we celebrate the life and music of composer Kurt Weill. This year marks the centenary of his birth, and today is the 50th anniversary of his death. Weill is most famous for his musical "The Threepenny Opera," which included the songs "Mack the Knife" and "Pirate Jenny." We'll talk with Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music and co-editor of a collection of letters between Weill and Lotte Lenya, who was his wife and the greatest interpreter of his music.

The music of Kurt Weill, coming up on FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This year is the centennial of the birth of the German-born composer Kurt Weill. Today marks the 50th anniversary of Weill's death. Our program today is devoted to his life and music.

Weill is best known for "The Threepenny Opera," his collaboration with writer and lyricist Bertolt Brecht, which gave us the song "Mack the Knife." Let's hear it, sung in German by Brecht.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "MAECKIE MESSER," "DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER," KURT WEILL, BERTOLT BRECHT)

GROSS: Kurt Weill emigrated to America after Hitler came to power. In the U.S., Weill wrote such songs as "The September Song," "My Ship," and "Speak Low."

My guest is Kim Kowalke, the president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for music. He edited a collection of letters between Weill and Lotte Lenya, his wife and his greatest interpreter. Kowalke also wrote the preface to the new book "Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents."

Kowalke says that Weill could have had a career writing opera, but he preferred to create an alternative to the opera he grew up with.

KIM KOWALKE, PRESIDENT, KURT WEILL FOUNDATION FOR MUSIC: Well, he thought that musical theater should be part of a living theater tradition, and he said that the Metropolitan Opera is fine for a museum for the great operas of the past, but he didn't think that would be good place for new opera.

And I think the same was -- he grew tired of the subsidized opera system in Germany as well and started writing for the commercial theater and for radio and for schools and other venues.

And I think he did that because he really believed that he was trying to communicate in the theater was not about the beauty of voice. He, like Sondheim, thinks that people usually go to the opera to hear the singer and not the pieced, and Weill was very interested in communicating both the theater of the occasion but also always a point, a message, a theme, always dealing with issues that he thought were of utmost importance to the audience that would be seeing the piece.

GROSS: What was the cultural life in Germany like when he was starting out professionally in his 20s in the 1920s?

KOWALKE: After about 1925, it was an incredibly exciting time in Berlin. Up to that point, of course, Germany was still trying to dig out from the rubble of the First World War, and the inflation was such that it was a very tough time for anyone living in Germany.

But from about 1925 until the crash in 1929, which had its worldwide repercussions, it really was a golden age for the arts in Berlin. It became the cultural capital of Europe. And in one single season in Germany there were 67 new operas premiered. Compare that to 62 years at the Metropolitan Opera, up until 1947, when there were 18 new works by American composers premiered. So that you see in just one year, the sort of activity that was there and the opportunities for a young composer who was prodigiously talented.

GROSS: How did Weill and Brecht start working together?

KOWALKE: We're not really sure when they first met. Sometimes people say that they ran into each other in 1921 or '22 in Berlin. We know for sure that in 1927, Weill reviewed a radio performance of Brecht's play "A Man's a Man." And he contacted Brecht and said that he wanted to use five poems from a collection of poetry that Brecht had just published, and these poems were called "The Mahagonny Songs." And Weill had a commission for a famous music festival in Baden-Baden to contribute a chamber opera. And that was their first collaboration.

Actually Brecht didn't have to do anything except contribute a small additional poem for the finale. Weill simply took the five preexisting poems and strung them together into what's called "The Mahagonny Songspiel."

GROSS: What are some of the political and theatrical ideas that Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht shared?

KOWALKE: Oh, I think one was an absolute obsession and fascination with anything American. The Germans called it "Amerikanismus." And America was a mirror in which they saw German culture on the one hand, and also a looking glass where they almost saw a nightmare of what they imagined the terrors of capitalism could become.

So on the one hand, it was this untainted wilderness, the last stop for genuine adventure in the world, and on the other a boxing ring where the capitalist protagonists will spare nothing to knock each other out.

GROSS: They didn't see eye to eye on everything. They had a lot of financial disputes. What were the problems they had financially?

KOWALKE: Well, financially, Brecht was a real businessman, even though he said that he was anticapitalist, that only was in the abstract, certainly not in the personal. An example is "The Threepenny Opera," where today I think it's not controversial to say that the piece would never be done without Weill's score, but Weill received 25 percent of the royalties, and Brecht got 75 percentage of the royalties, even though he didn't really write any of the play, and not most of the lyrics. The play, of course, is John Gay's "Beggars' Opera," and it was translated into German by his assistant, Elizabeth Hauptmann (ph).

And Brecht took most of the lyrics from either Vione (ph) or Kipling in German translation, and even got sued for it. And the translator, who won the case, opened a vineyard outside of Vienna that was called the Dreigroschen Vineyard, because he bought it with the royalties from the -- that he got from the plagiarism case.

GROSS: So I imagine Kurt Weill was never very happy about that.

KOWALKE: He wasn't very happy about that. But actually he doesn't talk so much about that, at least not at the time. I think he was just happy to have someone of the stature of Brecht to work with in the theater.

What really broke them apart was not even the political changes, where Brecht became a committed Marxist and Weill didn't, but rather it was there right from the beginning. It was this contest between the priority of music or words in their collaboration.

Weill told a friend in 1929, "Music has more power than words. Brecht knows it, and he knows that I know it. But we don't talk about it, because if we did, we could never work together again."

And so their collaboration lasted just four years, and really broke apart because Brecht didn't want to be a librettist to an opera composer.

GROSS: Interesting. Let's hear another song that came out of their collaboration. This is "The Alabama Song," which was used in "The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny," but I think it came from the 1927 "Mahagonny Songspiel" that they were collaborating on at the very beginning of their work together.

We're going to hear a 1930 recording featuring Lotte Lenya with the Three Admirals. Anything you can tell us about this recording?

KOWALKE: Well, this was done at about the time of the premier of "Mahagonny," the opera version. It premiered in Leipzig. But Lenya was not in the production because "Mahagonny" was written for the opera house, and Lenya had a wonderful, distinctive voice, but she was never an opera singer. And the role of Jenny was really not written for her.

But by then, she had become such a fixture in Berlin theater life and had become fairly well known because of playing the role of Jenny in "The Threepenny Opera" that she was a recording star, and so she was able to do "The Alabama Song."

GROSS: The harmonies are so interesting in this recording.

KOWALKE: "The Alabama Song," of course, is derived from countless American popular songs of the day that had "Alabama" in the title and also the notion of a moon over Alabama or moon of Alabama. And it's really interesting that this recording uses a male trio to back her up. Usually it was a quartet. And Lenya and Weill were great fans of an American quartet called the Revelers, who then went on to become the inspiration and model for the Canadian Harmonists.

And the Revelers recorded a number of songs. Lenya and Weill owned their recordings. And I think that that's what you hear in so much of Weill's music at this point is the filtering of American popular idioms through a German classical mentality.

GROSS: Well, let's hear this 1930 recording of "Moon of Alabama." Lotte Lenya is the lead singer, but she's not the person who starts the recording off. It starts with the male tenor from the trio that's accompanying her. And then you'll hear her singing the chorus, the "O moon of Alabama" part.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "THE ALABAMA SONG," LOTTE LENYA AND THE THREE ADMIRALS)

GROSS: That's Lotte Lenya from a 1930 recording. Lotte Lenya was Kurt Weill's wife, and, I mean, many people think of her as his greatest interpreter as well. You reprint a letter from Kurt Weill to Lotte Lenya in which he talks about her voice. Would you read an excerpt of that for us?

KOWALKE: "When I feel this longing for you, I think most of all of the sound of your voice, which I love like a very force of nature, like an element. For me, all of you is contained within this sound, everything else is only a part of you. And when I envelop myself in your voice, then you are with me in every way. I know every nuance, every vibration of your voice, and I can hear exactly what you would say if you were with me right now and how you would say it.

"But suddenly the sound is again entirely alien and new to me, and then it is the greatest joy to realize how affectionately this voice caresses me."

GROSS: That's from 1926, about six months after Weill and Lenya were married.

The (inaudible)...

KOWALKE: Could I comment a little bit about the voice at this point?

GROSS: Absolutely, yes.

KOWALKE: When we think of Lenya's voice and Weill's music, we usually think of the sound that we became accustomed to when she made the very famous recordings from the late 1950s and early '60s. But by then she was 60, 62 years old. The recording that we just heard is when she was 32 years old, and one critic described it as being "high, sweet, light, cool, like a sickle moon, dangerous."

And I think that's what we need to keep in mind when Weill talks about Lenya's voice being a force of nature. It was that songbird voice rather than the gravely, barking, too many cigarettes after midnight voice.

GROSS: I love that voice too, though, really. (laughs)

KOWALKE: It's wonderful too.

GROSS: Today is the 50th anniversary of Kurt Weill's death. My guest is Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.

Let's talk about what life was like for Kurt Weill when Hitler came to power. First of all, Weill was from one of the oldest Jewish families in Germany. He came from a long line of rabbis. His father was a cantor. Did he identify as Jewish very much himself? Did he practice?

KOWALKE: He stopped practicing in 1923 or so. I like to think of it as, he stopped being religious, but he never gave up religiosity, the notion of what stands beneath the practice of the religion. And he keeps coming back to his Jewish heritage. He comes back to it at the time of leaving Germany when he was hired by Max Reinhardt to write the music for the play that became "The Eternal Road," this big pageant of Jewish history, which opened in New York finally in 1937.

He wrote a Kiddush in 1947. He dedicated that to his father. There are many times where I hear Jewish accents, dialects, within his music. And so I don't think it ever really leaves him, it's always there in the subconscious. And so that I would say although he stopped perhaps being a religious Jew, he was also Jewish, and, of course, couldn't be anything else, coming from the family situation he came from with a rabbi -- or a cantor for a father and rabbis on both side of the family for centuries.

GROSS: What was the Nazi reaction to his work?

KOWALKE: Well, he was right up there at the top of their list, but not their list of favorites. The -- he was on the Antartete (ph) Musik list, the list of degenerate composers. And I think he probably was very close to the top of it, close enough to the top that in March of 1933, just, oh, six weeks after Hitler became chancellor, that he was warned by a friend that the Gestapo was going to go to his house and to search his house and perhaps arrest him.

And so he left overnight with only what he could carry in one suitcase, and he was only allowed to take out of the country 500 marks. And he went to Paris, and he never returned.

GROSS: So in 1933, taking only what he could carry, he moved to France, and then a couple of years after that, he decided to go to the United States, where he became a citizen and lived for the rest of his life.

Why did he want to come to the United States?

KOWALKE: If we believe Weill himself, he said that when he came here in 1935, he felt as if he were coming home, that anyone who thirsted for freedom and liberty and democracy anywhere in the world was already an American before they arrived. I find that a really interesting statement by a German emigre. And I think he really meant it.

He came here because he had a commission from Max Reinhardt on "The Eternal Road," and he came really just for a brief period of four months to supervise the rehearsals. But the production kept getting postponed. He had to stay a little bit longer. And after a year, he just decided that he would stay, because he had already been successful in the Group Theater with a play called "Johnny Johnson" while he was waiting for "The Eternal Road" to open. Early in 1937, he had two plays running on Broadway at the same time.

And I think that he discovered when he got here that the very type of musical theater that he was trying to work toward in Europe, namely, the hybrid type that wasn't part of the subsidized opera house but that existed in the commercial theater using the best of actors and singers in whatever combination the play demanded could be best done on Broadway.

The first piece he saw in New York in 1935 was "Porgy and Bess," and he said, "It's great country where something like this can be written and performed."

GROSS: Kim Kowalke is president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. He contributed to the new book "Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents." He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

This is Lotte Lenya singing the Weill-Brecht song, "Surabaya Johnny."

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "SURABAYA JOHNNY," LOTTE LENYA)

(BREAK)

GROSS: Coming up, Kurt Weill in America. We continue our conversation with Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. Today is the 50th anniversary of Weill's death.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This year is the centenary of the birth of Kurt Weill. Today is the 50th anniversary of his death. My guest is Kim Kowalke, the president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.

It wasn't until the mid-'50s, several years after Weill's death, that his most famous work, "The Threepenny Opera," was translated into English and performed in America. Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya, was one of the stars. Here she is, from the cast recording.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "PIRATE JENNY," LOTTE LENYA)

GROSS: When we left off with Kim Kowalke, we were talking about how Kurt Weill left Germany and emigrated to America.

In America, he became very fluent in English, and he certainly learned how to write for the American theater. Are there things you think he had to learn about America or about the way theater worked in America before he could really get moving?

KOWALKE: I think it took him a little bit of time to figure out the American audience, especially the Broadway audience, and he did it quite gradually. He first worked with the Group Theater, which was a left-wing group of actors and playwrights, which really accounted for the Method school of acting in this country. And he felt right at home there, because it wasn't much different from working in the Brecht collective in Berlin.

And then he worked in the Federal Theater Project, and then it wasn't until 1938 that he really started working with what we might call commercial Broadway producers. And the breakthrough piece for him was "Lady in the Dark" in 1941, where he worked with genuine Broadway professionals, not left-wing playwrights, not political playwrights, not playwrights for the straight theater, but Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart, Sam Harris, Gertie Lawrence.

You couldn't get more mainstream Broadway than that, and it was a huge hit. And that established him as somebody who could pretty much do whatever he wanted after that point.

GROSS: Well, let's listen to an excerpt of a broadcast that Kurt Weill was interviewed on in 1941. And this was during the period when "Lady in the Dark" was a hit on Broadway. The program is called "I Am an American," and it was presented by the Department of Justice and NBC Radio, and the program invited distinguished naturalized citizens to talk about their new citizenship. The host was the assistant director of immigration and naturalization at Ellis Island.

The interview sounds like it was all very scripted. I'm figuring that Kurt Weill wrote his own part, but they both sound like they're reading their parts. Do you know anything about whether they were?

KOWALKE: It certainly was scripted, and we have a copy of the script in the archive. But much of it had to be written by Weill or at least was a preinterview that was then transcribed and edited, because so many of the statements about his interest in American history and that every piece he had written since coming to America was about American themes. This is -- this could only have been Weill's own words and his own thoughts.

GROSS: Well, here's an excerpt of that interview.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

HOST: How long have you been an American, Mr. Weill?

KURT WEILL: I decided to become a citizen the day on which I arrived here six years ago. I remember very well the feeling I had as the ship moved down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers. All about us were exclaiming in amazement at the strange sights. But my wife and I had the sensation that we were coming home.

HOST: And yet you'd never been here before?

WEILL: Never. I had lived and worked in Germany and later in France, but I never felt as much at home in my native land as I had from the first moment in the United States.

I think it is this kinship of the spirit which brings America its new citizens from all lands. Those who come here seeking the freedom, justice, opportunity, and human dignity they miss in their own countries are already Americans before they come.

As far as I'm concerned, I know that I always was enormously attracted by America.

HOST: How would you explain that?

WEILL: You know, Berlin in the years after the First World War was in spirit the most American city in Europe. We liked everything we knew about this country. We read Jack London, Hemingway, Dreiser, Dos Passos. We admired Hollywood pictures, and American jazz had a great influence on our music.

America was a very romantic country for us. One of my most successful operas, "The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny" was about an American city. We even wrote two songs in English for this opera.

Strangely enough, when I arrived in this country, I found that our description of this country was quite accurate in many ways.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: That's Kurt Weill from a 1941 radio broadcast of the program "I Am an American." We'll hear more about Weill after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. Weill died 50 years ago today.

How do you think Kurt Weill's songwriting changed when he started writing for the American theater?

KOWALKE: Well, certainly he had to learn a new set of conventions. The types of songs that he wrote in Germany, especially with Brecht lyrics, tended to be strophic in structure, and that means that there would be three or four stanzas, and he would try to vary the accompaniment as each of the stanzas was repeated. And they tended to tell stories.

When he got here, the convention was the 32-bar song form, which was the standard for both popular songs and also for theater songs. And we have in the archive a number of attempts, sketches, drafts, and revisions where Weill was trying to master this notion of this bridge section or transition section, the B section of a song.

And the song "My Ship," from "Lady in the Dark," is one of those where he had a terrible time getting the bridge. At one point, because "Lady in the Dark" was written right as the "Wizard of Oz" came out in the movies, the bridge section of "My Ship" at one point went, (singing) Ya dah da-da da-da da-da, ya dah da-da da-da da-da, ya dah da-da da-da da-da -- right out of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

GROSS: That's funny.

I thought this might be a good place to listen to one of Kurt Weill's best-known American songs, and that's "The September Song." And we'll hear Lotte Lenya's recording of it from the 1950s.

Say something about this song and its importance in his career.

KOWALKE: "September Song" was a song that he wrote for "Knickerbocker Holiday," and it was a virtuoso compositional feat in that he had to write it for Walter Huston. And he wired Walter Huston, "What is your range? I'm going to write a song for you." And Walter Huston responded, "I have no range."

And so Weill wrote this song for an actor who said that he couldn't sing, and an older actor looking back on his youth with some nostalgia. It didn't become a hit right away. It wasn't until the mid-'40s when Bing Crosby and a number of others recorded the song that it became a hit parade song, and then became an American standard, and is now probably one of the two or three most often performed and memorable songs that he wrote.

GROSS: Well, let's hear Lotte Lenya singing "The September Song."

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "THE SEPTEMBER SONG," LOTTE LENYA)

GROSS: That's Lotte Lenya, "The September Song," music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Maxwell Anderson.

My guest is Kim Kowalke, and he's president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. He's a professor of musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Kurt Weill not only worked in the American theater, he did some work in Hollywood too, and you have edited or co-edited a book of letters between Weill and Lenya.

There's a really interesting letter that Weill wrote to Lenya on February 13 of 1937 after attending a party at George Gershwin's house. (laughs) I'd like you to read an excerpt of this for us.

KOWALKE: "I found out that the only thing to do is to keep to yourself here. I eat out all by myself every night, walk around a bit, go to a movie, and read my newspapers. This is always the best way for me to cope in such a setting, and it's the only thing that impresses them here, because they all just hate to be alone.

"The Gershwin party was Hollywood at its worst. There was a bar with Javanese hula-hula girls, another one with American whores, and one jazz and one Russian orchestra, both of which couldn't play because Gershwin insisted on playing his own compositions again, although everybody except me already had an entire Gershwin concert behind them.

"The whole Gershwin clan was very cool toward me, but Mr. Smollens (ph) was overwhelmingly cordial. Nilly (ph), Miriam Lubitch (ph), Mr. and Mrs. Paley, Dick Gertz (ph), and so forth and so on. I was glad that I was well dressed. And toward the end, I went into the street with the whole Gershwin family just as they brought up my slick Max.

"You should have seen their eyes pop out. They made it worth the trouble. By the way, here George Gershwin comes off as even more of a nebbish."

GROSS: I thought that was a very funny letter. I was surprised to hear his description of George Gershwin. Did he feel the same way about Ira, who was his collaborator?

KOWALKE: No, Ira became a very close friend, and he thought that Ira was the most talented collaborator that he had after Brecht. And he thought he was a little bit lazy and didn't like to work, and they had trouble working together because Ira was used to working very differently with George. With George, the melody would always come first, and then Ira would patch in the lyrics. And Weill never could write a composition without having the words first.

GROSS: Really?

KOWALKE: He said -- Yes. He said that he needed the text, that his musical imagination was a airplane, not a bird, that it needed to be driven by the text. And so when Ira and Kurt started to work together, at first Ira would say, "Send me eight bars of music," and Kurt would say, "No, send me the first part of the lyric." They finally ended up having to work in the same room, because they -- neither one could work the way the other was used to.

GROSS: I was amazed to read that when Kurt Weill died of a heart attack in 1950, and his estate was assessed for probate, only "September Song" and his folk opera "Down in the Valley" were assigned monetary value. "Threepenny Opera" didn't even appear on the list of his assets.

KOWALKE: From an American point of view, and the appraiser was an American publisher, of course that's perfectly understandable. "Down in the Valley" was sweeping the country as the most often performed American folk opera. I think it got 4,000 performances in the first five years after he wrote it in 1948. And there were a few songs like "September Song" and "Speak Low" that were still played on the radio.

But at that time, the idea that "The Threepenny Opera" or "Mack the Knife" would become a worldwide sensation four or five years later was not even hinted at. No one suspected that that would be the case.

And also, there was no tradition in the American theater of revivals, so that once your show closed, once "Lady in the Dark" was closed, that property was considered a closed book. So that you can see why an appraiser would say, Well, the only popular songs are a couple, and "Down in the Valley" may have a shelf life.

GROSS: After Kurt Weill died in 1950, Lotte Lenya took on the task of reviving his work, not only seeing to it that it was performed in theaters, but she recorded his work. It was really a mission for her.

You have reprinted a letter that she wrote shortly -- just a few weeks after Kurt Weill's death in which she discussed the importance to her of reviving his music. Would you read that for us?

KOWALKE: "It's been five weeks now since Kurt passed away, and I haven't been able to take one step forward. The only thing that keeps me going at all is his music, and the only desire I still retain, everything I have learned through him in these 25 years, is to fight for this music, to keep it alive, to do everything within my power for it. Only a few recognize his importance, especially here, where only a part of his work is known. And I believe that I'll find my life's mission in making this music known.

"Everything is still very hazy, and I don't know yet where to begin. Again and again, I'm reminded of the last lines in `Der Silbersee,' `Whoever must go on will be carried by the Silver Lake.' I hope that I'm choosing the right path by going on living for him so he won't be forgotten too quickly within a time that has no time to remember what happened yesterday."

GROSS: What do you think is the most important thing Lenya did during her lifetime to revive her late husband's work?

KOWALKE: I think that Weill's works would never have been recorded if Lenya hadn't become a star again through the performance of "The Threepenny Opera" at the Theater de Lys in 1955. That production ran over 2,600 performances to make it the longest-running musical in the history of the American theater up to that point. And it spawned all of the popular interest in "Mack the Knife" from Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin and Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.

And so there were ripples that went out from this in every direction, not just on the popular side but also people started -- record companies started saying, Well, I wonder what else he wrote in Germany? And Lenya would raise her hand and say, Well, there was "Mahagonny," or there was "Happy End," or there was "The Seven Deadly Sins." And she recorded all of those.

And so this forgotten part of Weill's career that she talks about in the letter, that's really what she restored to the repertory.

GROSS: I'd like to close our remembrance of Kurt Weill with Kurt Weill singing himself, and we're going to hear the song "That's Him" from "One Touch of Venus." The lyric is by Ogden Nash.

I love hearing him sing. There's just a couple of recordings I know of in which he sings, but he has this little and very sweet voice. And I'm wondering if you think his voice tells you anything about the man.

KOWALKE: I think he was a very gentle soul. Everyone who knew him talks about him being a terrific collaborator. He would compromise, he would share his ideas unselfishly. He was generous to people. And I think that he had a pretty good sense of who he was. When Boris Godolvsky asked him on an opera -- on "Opera News on the Air" broadcast in 1949, "What makes Weill Weill?" Weill responded by saying, "Well, for better or worse, when my music involves the theme of human suffering, the real Kurt Weill comes out."

And that's what I hear in his voice, a passionate concern for his fellow man, a vulnerable person himself who, against great odds, persevered to become one of the essential forces in music and theater in our century.

GROSS: Well, I should say the song we're about to hear isn't a song about suffering. (laughs)

KOWALKE: (laughs)

GROSS: But it's wonderful. And I thank you so much for talking with us.

KOWALKE: You're most welcome, my pleasure.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "THAT'S HIM," KURT WEILL)

GROSS: That's Kurt Weill performing. He died 50 years ago today. We spoke with Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Kim Kowalke
High: This year marks the centennial of the birth of German-born Kurt Weill, considered one of the 20th century's most influential composers. Monday, April 3, is the 50th anniversary of his death. He and lyricist Bertolt Brecht revolutionized musical theater with a blend of cabaret and classical traditions resulting in "The Threepenny Opera," "Seven Deadly Sins" and others. In 1933 Weill, a Jew, fled Berlin and in 1935 came to America where he began working in American theater. Kim Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, discusses the composer's work. Mr. Kowalke also edited a book of letters between Weill and his wife, Lotte Lenya, and a book of essays on Weill.
Spec: Entertainment; Art; Music Industry

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Kim Kowalke Discusses the Life and Times of Kurt Weill

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 03, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 040302NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: New Biography on Joan of Arc Delivers Brevity and Insight
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:52

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: There have been over 20,000 books already written about Joan of Arc, and now there's another one. Mary Gordon's slim new biography of the saint appears in the Penguin Lives series. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BOOK CRITIC: These days, biographies are growing ever more bloated and bizarre. Just think of Edmund Morris's recent bionovel on Ronald Reagan. So it's especially cheering that someone at Penguin Books had the great idea to resurrect a quainter tradition of biography, not so much a forced march over every mountain and into every mud hole of someone's life, but as a short, personal meditation written by an insightful admirer on a great man or woman.

Just the list of the already published and forthcoming biographies in the Penguin Lives series is fun to read. It's like a printout from some inspired matchmaking service. There's Jane Smiley writing on Dickens, Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse, Janet Malcolm on Chekov, Peter Gay on Mozart, Jonathan Spence on Mao, and Bobbie Anne (ph) Mason on Elvis.

The latest life in the series is the one I really couldn't wait to read, Mary Gordon writing on Joan of Arc. Simply looking at the cover illustration of an armored Joan astride her charger reawakened action-packed daydreams, as well as what were probably nascent sexual fantasies from my Catholic girlhood.

And what a smart choice Gordon is to write on Joan! As her novels, like "Final Payments," demonstrate, Gordon is a writer who gets the Catholic sensibility from the inside out. She suggests that Joan should not have been canonized by the church as the patroness of France but rather as the patroness of the vivid life, prized not for military victories but for the gift of passionate action taken against ridiculous odds for the grace of holding nothing back.

I like that idea of Joan as the patron saint of the vivid life, and if so, she certainly watched over the writing of this ardent and at times even funny biography.

Gordon opens her lightly footnoted meditation on Joan in the present. She's sitting in the market square in Rouen, France, where Joan was burned at the stake over five centuries ago. It's a seedy place where teen delinquents congregate. Suddenly, two girls begin fighting, punching each other, drawing blood. After the police break them up, Gordon reflects on the shock of seeing girls fighting.

"Girls are not supposed to be violent," she says, "but girls are not supposed to be warriors whose metier is, after all, violence. It is precisely the disjunction between our expectations of what girls should do and the shape of Joan of Arc's life that has been for half a millennium a source of fascination."

An obvious enough point, perhaps, but Gordon the novelist, through her rendering of the ugly physicality of the tough girls' fistfight makes that point profound again.

A 17-year-old illiterate peasant girl leading a retinue of some 4,000 men into battle? How did such a thing happen?

Gordon's tone of honest, intelligent wonderment doesn't solve Joan but rather involves the reader again in the strangeness of her identity and story. The well-known outlines of that story are clearly set down here, how Joan persuaded the future king of France to give her an army, how she turned around the battle of Orleans in a week, achieving what professional soldiers had failed to do in six months, how she was deserted by her army when her fortunes turned, sold to the English, put on trial by church inquisitors, and finally burned.

What distinguishes Gordon's account are the places where she stops to marvel at the reality of what Joan braved. Gordon describes the bruises on Joan's body after the first night she slept in her heavy armor. And what about that get-up? Simply utilitarian, suggestive of cross-dressing? Gordon's reading of Joan's armor is more subtle and spiritual.

The section, though, of Gordon's biography that I think will really stay with me is her contemplation of the horror of Joan's death. I didn't know, or I'd forgotten, that Joan was so afraid of dying that she confessed to lying about her visions in order to save herself. Then two days after that confession, she steeled herself and returned to her original testimony.

Joan wept when she saw the pile where she would be burned. Afterwards, her corpse was displayed to crowds, who wanted to check out whether this military phenom really was female. Gordon says, "The display of Joan's charred body to gawking passers-by in Rouen ranks high in the annals of brutal exposure. It is impossible to imagine a male hero for whom such display would be required as a proof of any kind of authenticity."

A lot of contemporary biographies place us readers in the situation of those medieval voyeurs, ogling the carcass of the defenseless subject. What's so great about Gordon's meditation on Joan is that somehow, as it stresses her humanness, her bad temper and her sassy tongue, it only deepens her mystery.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Joan of Arc" by Mary Gordon.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced by Naomi Person, Phyllis Myers, and Amy Salit. Roberta Shorrock directed the show.

I'm Terry Gross.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, Maureen Corrigan
Guest:
High: Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new biography about Joan of Arc.
Spec: Art; Women; France; War; Profiles

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End-Story: New Biography on Joan of Arc Delivers Brevity and Insight
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