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Weill and Brecht on the Clarinet?


Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya & Bertolt Brecht (Wikipedia Commons & Creative Commons 4.0, respectively)

Earlier this spring, I was pleased to have a short piano work of mine performed by my good friend David Kirkendall as part of a solo artist recital featuring Stacy Smith, clarinet. My piece was part of a brief intermission feature, presented by David so that Stacy could rest his chops between pieces of a demanding program.


Afterwards, Stacy and I had a chance to get to chat a bit. Both of us are interested in performing more actively here in Cincinnati; in all the years that I have functioned as a professional composer, I have never written for solo clarinet. This seemed to be the right time to improve on this shortcoming.


Several weeks later, we met for coffee and got to know each other professionally. We agreed to embark on a project that would ask me to write a new piece for his instrument. Stacy recommended scores and recordings for me to study, always a helpful first step. As a composer, I was well aware of the technical and timbral capabilities of the clarinet, but a more detailed study was certainly in order.


But before I could settle on a defined plan for this new composition, another idea presented itself. Sometimes, a re-working of an older piece can provide intriguing new opportunities. The challenge: can you take a work written for one instrument and transfer it to another? I didn’t want this idea to be the new collaboration for Stacy and myself, but perhaps a “warm-up” project that would provide some experience in writing for the clarinet.


In 2014, I wrote a piece for tenor saxophone and piano called Happy Endings, a commission for my dear friend Gail Levinksy, who premiered the work at the national conference of the North American Saxophone Association. This four-movement work was a tribute to composer Kurt Weill, whose music and philosophies have had an important influence on my own development as a composer.


I was particularly interested in commemorating Weill’s Berlin period of the 1920s, where he forged a successful if sometimes stormy partnership with the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. Their work together during this decade produced such classics as The Threepenny Opera, Happy End, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, works that have fascinated me for years. In each of the four movements in Happy Endings, I worked to create a musical landscape that captures the flavor of this amazing time in Germany, one that came crashing down with Hitler’s rise to power.


At first, two of the movements from the original suite seemed to have strong possibilities for a transcription to clarinet. Stacy particularly liked my Torch Song, the third movement in the set. This work was inspired by Weill/Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in particular. Macheath, the play’s protagonist, is a despicable creature, a man who murders, rapes and pillages with the help of his gang. He strings along multiple lovers at the same time, when he is not sampling the prostitutes of a local bordello. His attitude towards love is jaded, to be sure; the women he takes advantage of are aware of his shortcomings but unable to stop seeing him. Stacy found this movement to be much to his liking, which inspired me to create a clarinet version for him to play.


In tribute to Weill, a brief melodic idea from the Threepenny’s Love Song, presented in the opening bars is used to propel a larger movement:


Later, the use of a tango style reflects on the song, The Ballad of Immoral Earnings, where Macheath and

the prostitute Jenny reflect somewhat cynically on their troubled relationship. The clarinet’s first couple

bars below are a transformation of the Weill-like melodic strain that began the piece:


Happy Ending’s final movement was the next one to be transferred to clarinet. There is a famous saying

that good composers borrow while great composers steal! In 1728, English composer John Gay stole a

traditional English folk song as the basis for one of the new songs in his production, The Beggar’s Opera.

Bertolt Brecht stole the story of this opera outright and made it the basis for his Threepenny Opera in

1927. Kurt Weill completed the larceny by stealing that same English folk song that Gay lifted as part of

his score. In both cases the composers assigned the tune to a song that is performed by a character named

Peachum, the sorry leader of an organization of street beggars.


I have always aspired to be a great composer. Therefore it seemed logical that I should also rip off this

same material! Public domain laws enable me to do this, so everyone is safe…..


The Beggar’s Scherzo uses this folk tune in its entirety as the basis for a lively and earthy scherzo. A

somewhat ornamented run-through of the tune in the scherzo’s first section is countered by a later

development section that takes the tune in some different directions.


The other two movements in the original suite didn’t seem well suited for a clarinet, or so I thought at one point. But by this time, my comfort level with the clarinet was increasing considerably. I gave the two remaining movements another look and decided to work with them too, thereby preserving the four-movement plan of the original project.


The Song of Human Frailty and Woe is the most caustic movement in the project; this is the movement that opens the suite and most clearly demonstrates the Brechtian influence on Weill’s work. Brecht had a strong social consciousness that went along Marxist lines. His language could be stark and unforgiving as he pounded out his worldly cynicism. It was up to Weill to counter this language with humanistic music that would strike a proper balance with Brecht’s volatile imagery.


This movement was largely inspired by The Rise and Fall of The City of Mahagonny, Brecht and Weill’s most sizeable operatic effort. My piece features motives and fragments that relate back to one of the opera’s most famous pieces, The Alabama Song. Sung by Jenny and her fellow prostitutes, the song reflects this group’s desperation; only hard liquor is there to console them. Over the years, the song has been recorded by a number of artists, from Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife) to Jim Morrison and the Doors.


In this excerpt from the movement, the clarinet plays with a prominent motive from The Alabama Song in mm. 78-83, and later at mm. 87-92:

Novelty Song, the second movement from the original suite is an example of the sentimental Weill, one that could sound naïve and simple and yet still be effective. Brecht and Weill’s Happy End, a sort of follow-up to The Threepenny Opera, is a musical comedy that presages the much more famous Guys and Dolls two decades later. The setup is the same, with gangsters and Salvation Army members at odds with each other. One of the play’s most famous songs is a tune called The Bilbao Song; two members of the cast reminisce about the good times that are long gone by. Do they remember the details vividly, including the lyrics to a favorite song? Well, a little, maybe…….


In this case, my salute is one that is recalls style as opposed to specific motives. The excerpt below features rolled chords from the piano that gently accompany a more sentimental tune that might in line with Kurt Weill melodies from the period.

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht were certainly a curious pair. Brecht was a left-leaning Marxist artist,

whose productions explored many aspects of the social climate of his time. Weill was the son of a Jewish

cantor, classically trained, whose forays into twentieth century music were in line with the era until he

discovered music theater and a potentially larger audience. His warm and at times naïve musical style

made Brecht’s controversial and hard-nosed lyrics more accessible and human. I admire both artists

greatly. With this newest addition to my own instrumental inventory, I have learned more about writing

for the clarinet, while saluting two very interesting artists of the twentieth century.



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