The Eternal Kurt Weill: His Road from Jewish to American Music and Back

6 sessions, Wednesdays February 21, 28; March 14, 21; April 11, 25 Tuition: Free Registration is closed. Sign up for YIVO's email list to receive announcements of upcoming classes. For inquiries about this course, contact: Ben Kaplan Director of Education (212) 294-6153

Instructor: Neil Levin, Anne E. Leibowitz Visiting Professor-in-Residence in Music

Much of Kurt Weill’s theatrical, operatic, film, and concert music is widely familiar. It continues to fascinate in its sui generis juxtapositions of styles and often seeming artistic contradictions. Less known, however, are consciously incorporated musical reflections of his pride in Jewish heritage, his Jewish persona, his early exposure to cantorial and other synagogue melos, his related inner conflicts, and his ultimate dedication to Jewish causes. This course will explore general European as well as Jewish/Judaic influences on his aggregate oeuvre. It will consider exemplary, religiously impartial, as well as deliberately Jewishly-related works in their political, historical, cultural, and social contexts, while highlighting his evocations of Hebrew poetry, traditional liturgical melodies and chants, and Jewish folk motifs.

Weill’s monumental Jewish historical-biblical stage creation, The Eternal Road, will be examined in depth, along with his two subsequent but little-recognized Jewish pageants and various other Jewishly-influenced pieces. These will also be considered in comparison with his better known, universally-themed works such as The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Der Protagonist, The Three-Penny Opera, Street Scene, and his stunning violin concerto—along with some of his American musical theatre and film scores. Use will be made of his personal and professional correspondence, key documents, and biographical and critical sources. Class sessions will be richly illustrated with recordings—many of them still archival and otherwise unavailable to the public; and there will be ample opportunity for class discussion.

Dr. Neil W. Levin is a leading musicological and historical scholar and authority on the music of Jewish experience and connection in both its secular-cultural and sacred-liturgical realms. He is the Artistic Director and Editor in Chief of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music and emeritus professor of Jewish music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Dr. Levin holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University and a PHD in Jewish music from the Jewish Theological Seminary. For many years, Dr. Levin was Editor of the scholarly journal, Musica Judaica, and in addition to two books, he has published more than 300 articles, essays, and monographs on numerous aspects of Jewishly-related music and its various historical, literary, and cultural contexts. He is YIVO’s Anne E. Leibowitz Visiting Professor-in-Residence in Music.