In 1979, Kim Kowalke concluded his landmark study Kurt Weill in Europe by noting that a “large and fascinating collection of compositions—his American works—awaits investigation. An accurate appraisal of Weill's legacy cannot be undertaken until this aspect of his diverse output receives critical attention.”Footnote ¹ Kowalke's book came at a crucial moment in Weill historiography, just as the notion that there are “two Weills,” one European and one American, and that the former is more significant than the latter, began to coalesce in scholarship, culminating in David Drew's entry in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Drew's description of Weill as “one of history's great ‘might-have-beens’” has dogged scholarship on the composer for over thirty years, and Kowalke's call for a fuller view of Weill fell largely by the wayside (with a few notable exceptions).Footnote ² But no longer. Two major new works on Weill take different paths to dispelling the “two Weills” reading. Stephen Hinton's Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform is the first book to approach all of Weill's works for the stage holistically, and the first to devote equal attention to both halves of the composer's career. It is a majestic study, the result of a career-long immersion in the composer's works. Tim Carter's new edition of Johnny Johnson, Weill's first U.S. creation, won the American Musicological Society's Claude V. Palisca Award in 2013. It is a study of the composer's emigration writ small, a project as thorough and as necessary as Hinton's book.

Hinton's book begins with two chapters that prove crucial for the rest of his analysis. In the first chapter, he summarizes the problems in current scholarship on Weill's career and biography and introduces the concepts of “inner-directed” and “other-directed” types, drawing upon sociologist David Riesman's influential book, The Lonely Crowd (1950). Hinton contends that Weill is the latter, someone whose career reflects the guidance of his contemporaries, both direct acquaintances and larger cultural movements, and whose artistic goals evolve with that guidance (23). These ideas become particularly important for Hinton's discussion of Weill's U.S. years. This chapter is followed by a discussion of the influence of Weill's teacher Ferruccio Busoni. Busoni's teachings, and particularly the theoretical construction of an Urmusik, stayed with Weill throughout his life. Busoni's Urmusik is the “primordial state from which all subsequent music derives” as well as an “evolutionary goal” (46). Weill's notion of an Urform adapts the idea for music theatre; he devoted his career to creating what he called a “modern classical art” (53), inspired in part by Busoni's “New Classicality,” which the teacher believed would lead to “strong and beautiful forms” (quoted on p. 44). Like Busoni's Urmusik, Weill's Urform signals both a return to and a striving for the realization of an ideal-type. However, the terms are not identical. Hinton notes that Weill's notion is more practical than Busoni's; the composer was interested in “which kinds of theatre allow music—and where” (51).

Although it proceeds roughly chronologically, the guiding force of the book is genre, with chapter titles like “Songspiel,” “Musical Plays,” and “American Opera.” These titles highlight the main thrust of the project: untangling Weill's unique and sometimes enigmatic genre designations and investigating their formal principles. Hinton poses the key question concerning Weill's stage works in his preface: “How many of [Weill's works] are ‘real’ operas?” (xii). This question—and its implied corollary “How many are ‘real’ musicals?”—guides the book, although no satisfactory answer ever emerges. Nor should it; a composer who employed labels for his works that range from the conventional (“One-Act Opera” for Der Protagonist, Der Zar lässt sich photographieren, and Royal Palace), to the whimsical (Der Silbersee is “Ein Wintermärchen,” and Love Life is a “Vaudeville”), to the entirely new (Der Jasager and Der Lindbergflug are “Lehrstücke,” and a slew of pieces fall into “Epic Opera”) cannot be fruitfully described in terms of single genres.

Hinton identifies a number of aspects of Weill's works that run through his entire career. His observation that irony, incongruity, and mediation are more consistent features of the composer's output than stylistic or idiomatic compositional approach goes a long way toward mending the rift between the European and American halves of Weill's career (33). Hinton makes clear that mediation is central to Weill's understanding of music theatre; in addition to the abundance of narrators and framing devices in Weill's stage works, Hinton points out their “richness of topical allusion” (33), whether through direct quotation (both of his own music and that of others) or stylistic appropriation. The most prominent reference is particularly surprising: Richard Wagner, long considered Weill's arch-nemesis. Yet Hinton's careful tracing of the various Wagnerian quotations, allusions, and constructions through works as disparate as Die Bürgschaft (157), The Eternal Road (251), the films You and Me (338), One Touch of Venus (317), and Street Scene (382) reveals that Weill's relationship with Wagner is much more complex than previous scholarship would suggest. Indeed, Hinton places Wagner alongside Brecht, Busoni, and Mozart as one of the key influences on Weill's musical thought (37), painting him as a “quasi-Oedipal” figure (xi).

Instead of trying to pin down Weill generically, Hinton instead contextualizes the various labels. The first works are not difficult to pick apart, as reflected by the grouping of Weill's four earliest collaborations with George Kaiser and Iwan Goll into a single chapter (“One-Act Operas”). Hinton makes clear, however, that even this early in his career, Weill was experimenting with generic hybridity: Der Protagonist (1926) also falls into the categories of “literature opera” or “artist opera” (76), and the cantata Der neue Orpheus (1927) “is connected on several levels with the one-act opera” (78). The following three chapters cover the Brecht collaborations, although Caspar Neher's libretto for Die Bürgschaft (1932) is included in “Epic Opera,” and the final Kaiser collaboration, Die Silbersee (1933), is grouped with Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) and Happy End (1929) as a “Play with Music.” “Lehrstücke” is the only chapter entirely devoted to Brecht.

Throughout the Brecht chapters, Hinton contributes to the ongoing project of separating Weill's and Brecht's related, but ultimately incompatible, visions of operatic reform, both of them designated “Epic Opera.” Brecht's version of “Epic Opera” has received greater scholarly attention, and it is often assumed that he and Weill generally agreed on what the term meant.Footnote ³ However, as Hinton points out, Brecht's most complete description of the concept was published after, and in response to, Weill's more aesthetically (rather than politically) derived model. Indeed, Weill's explication of the concept was more complete than that of Brecht, whose “basic understanding of opera derives from a facile and uncharitable concept of Wagnerian music-drama” (144). Hinton similarly deconstructs the concept of a Lehrstück, calling attention to the term's roots in seventeenth-century Lutheran catechistic practices (178). Doing so allows him to situate Der Jasager (1930) and Der Lindberghflug (1939) within Brecht's characteristically parodic religious sensibilities. These sensibilities are clearer in pieces such as Das Berliner Requiem (1929) (a work which, as a cantata, sadly does not fall within the scope of this book) and the chorales in Die Dreigroschenoper.

The most intriguing chapter for me is “Stages of Exile.” Located in the middle of the book, the chapter does not focus on a particular genre; rather, it expands on the idea of an “other-directed” composer laid out in the beginning. Hinton also problematizes the term “exile” as it applies to Weill, noting that the term generally applies to forced emigration even though Weill's U.S. years were, for the most part, voluntary. Still, Hinton allows that the concept of “exile” offers “a useful, even necessary key toward and understanding and appreciation of these interim works. Each work requires that the constellation of politics and aesthetics [. . .] be assessed anew” (198). The chapter covers four works—Die sieben Todsünden (1933), Marie Galante (1934), Der Kuhhandel/Kingdom for a Cow (1934), and Der Weg der Verheissung/The Eternal Road (1937)—but it is the last two that prove most illuminating about Weill's transition across the Atlantic. Hinton untangles the varying demands of different theatres, audiences, and collaborators, convincingly demonstrating that Weill attempted to remain faithful to the deeper concepts of each production (satirical operetta and Bachian oratorio), albeit with limited success.

The last four chapters deal with Weill's nine U.S. stage works and his film work. Weill's genre designations, no less puzzling in the United States, include “Musical Plays,” which covers Weill's most mainstream Broadway works Johnny Johnson (1936), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Lady in the Dark (1941), and One Touch of Venus (1943), and “American Opera” for Firebrand of Florence (1944), Street Scene (1947), and Down in the Valley (1948). In the end, Hinton can find no overarching theme for Weill's final two works, Love Life (1948) and Lost in the Stars (1949) (the latter a “musical tragedy”). There is also a chapter on Weill's film work, including the original scores for You and Me (1938) and Where Do We Go From Here? (1945), as well as the movie versions of Die Dreigroschenoper (1931), Knickerbocker Holiday (1944), Lady in the Dark (1944), and One Touch of Venus (1948). In a coda, Hinton traces the history of Weill's reception after his death, including the development of the “two Weills.”

This second half of the book is Hinton's most important contribution to scholarship on Weill; he is the first English-language scholar to approach seriously the composer's U.S. oeuvre. Beyond Elmar Juchem's work in German on Weill's collaboration with Maxwell Anderson, virtually nothing has been written about the composer's first (albeit moderate) success in the United States, Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us “September Song.”Footnote ⁴ Hinton provides an invaluable account of the shifting politics of the libretto and the efforts at topicality made by Weill and Anderson. This book also offers the first serious approach to Down in the Valley, which was Weill's most performed work during his lifetime, deftly connecting it to the Lehrstücke of Weill's German period. Most important, Hinton devotes significant attention to Love Life, a musical frequently acknowledged in passing as the first “concept” musical, but rarely credited for just how innovative it was in 1948. Weill and librettist Alan Jay Lerner's use of theatrical time and convention in Love Life seems sui generis, but Hinton draws original and revealing connections between the show and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which Weill considered turning into a musical several times through his career.

Whereas Hinton's book is impressive in its breadth, Tim Carter's new edition of Johnny Johnson is remarkable in its depth. It is the ninth volume in the Kurt Weill Edition (KWE), published under the auspices of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, and is the second of the composer's U.S. works to appear in the series.Footnote ⁵ The show concerns the exploits of the title character as he is drawn into World War I, then committed to an insane asylum for advocating peace, and finally ends up a peddler selling toys to children. It has not been revived since 1937, and Carter's edition is the first full score to be published, aside from performance rentals, which are not available to the public. In light of the myriad cuts and changes that were made for the premiere production by the left-wing experimental Group Theatre in 1936, Carter opted to base his edition on the 1937 Los Angeles production by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).

The edition is in two parts: the score itself, which includes an introduction as well as optional and alternative numbers, and a separate critical report. The critical report consists of minor interventions such as the reconciling of articulation markings among the different instruments and minor pitch adjustments for individual notes. However, when two of the sources differ in the extreme, Carter notes the divergence in the score itself. For example, no. 29, “The Dance of the Generals,” contains a note indicating that the 1940 version of the piano-vocal score has an exchange of dialogue placed over underscoring, which would require that a section of music be repeated until the conversation finishes, but the edition suggests that the same line occurs over a pause in the music, signaled by a fermata (255).

In a sense, although this edition is complete, it is not the last word on Johnny Johnson. Carter's decision to focus on the Los Angeles production, rather than the premiere, highlights one of the most difficult issues involved in creating critical editions of musicals. Given the nature of the business, Broadway musicals are constantly in a state of flux. Even after opening night, shows are still being nipped, tucked, and amended for changing casts, tours, and revivals, making it difficult to decide which version is “authoritative.” Issues of collaboration can muddy the waters even further if the composer and librettist disagree on which text is final, as is the case with Johnny Johnson. Weill's involvement with the piece ended, for the most part, with the publication of the piano-vocal score in 1940, but librettist Paul Green continued to revise the text, producing new versions in 1956 and 1971, after Weill had died. Because this volume is part of the KWE, Weill's wishes (as much as we can know of them) are privileged over Green's, but, should a complete Paul Green edition emerge, we are likely to end up with a very different Johnny Johnson.

Still, this edition can be considered an authoritative account of Johnny Johnson as it appeared on 27 May 1937. As Weill's first work to be conceived and written entirely for U.S. audiences, Johnny Johnson represents one of the crucial missing links between the two halves of Weill's career. Carter's introductory notes are extensive (thirty-six pages on large folios in two columns) and painstaking. His accounts of the trials and tribulations involved with mounting an experimental production on Broadway during the heart of the Great Depression run counter to the idea that Weill easily adapted to U.S. theatrical life or that “[n]o ventriloquist could rival the alacrity with which Weill assimilated the lexicon of American voices,” as Joseph Horowitz has said.Footnote ⁶ Carter's introduction also goes a long way toward illustrating Weill's responses to the exigencies of production that Hinton often alludes to, particularly in his “Stages of Exile” chapter, but rarely describes in detail for understandable reasons of space. The introduction will also be valuable for those studying Broadway during the 1930s, an era that is sadly under-represented in musical theatre scholarship.

Along with detailed accounts of Weill's early movements within the United States, Carter's contextualization of Johnny Johnson within the milieu of the 1930s reveals numerous parallels with ideas and aesthetics from his German career. Carter notes the clear presence of Weill's Brechtian style, French cabaret, and Gilbert and Sullivan, along with more American styles like glees, cowboy songs, and hymns (25–26). Beyond stylistic connections to Weill's European oeuvre, Carter shows that in Johnny Johnson the composer continued the search for Urformen and solutions to “form-problems,” which he began in Europe (26).

Like Hinton, Carter also investigates the question of genre. He chronicles the confusion over the play's categorization not just from the production end, but from the reception end as well. Billed at various times as “The Biography of a Kindly Man,” “Biography of a Common Man,” “a legend,” and a “Play with Music,” initial reviewers nonetheless often resorted to “musical play,” a designation that become famous seven years later with the opening of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (Weill would also use “musical play” to describe Lady in the Dark in 1941) (25). The bewilderment of Johnny Johnson’s initial critics reinforces the idea that Weill initially had trouble communicating his theatrical intentions to audiences, rather than easily absorbing U.S. musical language. The changing designations also indicate he was still pushing formal boundaries in the United States. Carter shows that Johnny Johnson is a deeply experimental work, and he does not shy away from criticizing moments where the results are not satisfactory, calling the various iterations of Captain Valentine's song “an experiment gone wrong” (26). Still, the notion that Weill's U.S. works could be experiments, even failed experiments, is relatively new in Weill scholarship.

This edition allows for several alternative performance versions of Johnny Johnson, including two versions of “Aggie's Song” (cut from the Group Theatre production and most likely cut from the FTP's) and a copy of “Farewell, Goodbye,” a song that was completed but also removed. Carter's critical report provides a comprehensive account of what cuts were made when, along with a number of alternative readings and possibilities. In fact, the report is so extensive that I have reservations about this edition's usability for performers. Scholars hoping to get an idea of Weill's (and his collaborator's) working process will find a treasure trove, but performance suggestions can be hard to find. For example, buried at the end of four pages describing the various source problems of no. 15, is the suggestion that “[i]f a production wishes to follow Weill's original intentions, then no. 15 [the Interlude after Act 1, Scene 5] should be replaced by [“Farewell, Good-bye”], although there is no evidence that this was ever performed as such” (critical report, 54). It might have been better if the editorial interventions and source problems were separated from performance possibilities. I found a few errors, in which editorial interventions chronicled in the notes did not appear in the final score, but none was egregious. The series of plates are well chosen, illustrating both prominent problems in the score and Weill's personal compositional quirks.

One hopes that Carter's edition of Johnny Johnson will inspire productions of this curious and fascinating episode in Broadway history, and Hinton's book is sure to spark more conversation on the composer's U.S. career in general. Both make significant contributions toward better understanding Weill's peculiar place in the historiography of Broadway and U.S. music more generally, and they open up a number of new avenues for future study.