Fled from this Weill world
Mark Steyn
KURT WEILL by Ronald Taylor
Simon & Schuster, £20, pp. 199
Will the real Weill please stand up?', asks Ronald Taylor, starting as he means to go on, in his preface to a biography of predictable lines, not infrequent banalities and contemporary clichés. Funnily enough, these are precisely the criticisms he makes of Kurt Weill in the latter half — the Broadway half — of his career. There is, of course, no law which requires a biographer to eschew the faults of his subject, but even so: 'Physician, heal thyself!', as they say, or, at any rate, as Ronald Taylor would probably say.
And, just as the American Weill was often accused of not fully understanding the Broadway vocabulary he was attempt- ing to write in, so, too, you never feel Taylor is quite at home in that territory. After all, that opening question isn't so very difficult. The 'will the real so-and-
so ?' form is an invitation to the addressee to reveal himself. If he put it to Weill, Taylor would get a straight answer: 'First of all, my name is not Koort Vile, whatever the BBC Pronunciation Unit might rule. I am an American composer Curt While, as I have called myself since I landed in New York.' Maxwell Anderson began his lyric to Weill's first US pop hit, 'September Song', with the words 'oh, it's a long, long while', as a contrast with his composing partner's Curt While — a revealing detail, but one which Taylor chooses not to mention. A man's name is as central to his identity as anything, but, since his premature death in 1950, even that has been taken away from Weill. He has, effectively, been posthumously extra- dited to Germany, and allotted a very specific place in history — as the man who provided the seductive, decadent sound- track for the Weimar Republic. The Broad- way stuff is regarded as, at best, an aberration, or, worse, a commercial
He was very interested in money ... He got too involved in American show business and all the terrible people in it,
sneers Otto Klemperer in a quotation Taylor likes enough to put in his book twice. But, even without the Nazis, Weill would probably have aimed for New York: in the Thirties and Forties, from Porgy and Bess through Oklahoma! and On the Town to Finian's Rainbow, the most exciting innovations in musical theatre were being made on Broadway. Flawed though those works are, they beat the hell out of any- thing the opera boys have done since Puccini and, unlike Dreigroschenoper and Mahogonny, they're not weighed down by Brechi's anti-capitalist bunk. But Taylor is more interested in long-forgotten intellec- tual factions like Novembergruppe and obscure creeds like Neue Sachlikeit than, say, Love Life (1948), written by Weill and Alan Jay Lerner and widely considered the first concept musical and therefore the forerunner of much of Stephen Sondheim's work.
It is the curse of civilised countries that they tend to find their best expression in middlebrow art — in America, Hollywood Westerns and Broadway musicals, Walt Disney and Raymond Chandler; in Britain, Elgar, G & S, P. G. Wodehouse. There's no big mystery about why Weill never wrote anything like the Berlin works in America: happily, there's no need for The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny on Broadway, and you'd have to be nuts to try. Weill believed in popular musical theatre; his collaborators were main stem showfolk: Lerner, Anderson, Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart, George Kaufman. As one of those showbiz anthems puts it,
When I want a ditty that's witty and stylish Something Gershwinesque, Portcresque or Kurt Wcillish Gotta sing a show tune From a Broadway show.
What is remarkable is how easily Weill fits in.
You could argue, too, that it is America which vindicates the composer: Taylor may rave about the spiky orchestration of 'Mackie Messer' in the original Berlin production, but most people know 'Mack the Knife' through Bobby Darin's finger- snappy hit record or Quincy Jones' killer arrangement for Sinatra or even the recent American television commercial where a white tuxedoed black pianist, on a rooftop 'When can we start kerb-crawling?' at midnight lit only by the neon glow of McDonald's golden arches, sings (in lieu of 'Someone's sneaking round the corner/Could that someone be Mack The Knife?'): 'It's the great taste of McDonald's/Come on, make it Mac tonight.' 'Mack The Knife' fulfills the definition of an American standard song — a melody so muscular and a lyric idea so strong that, transcending all pop fashions, it's endlessly adaptable. That, in the end, is a greater musical achievement than what- ever political message its dramatic context might have had in all those dreary Brechtian productions in East Germany, a state which no longer even exists.
You would not expect Ronald Taylor, former professor of German at the Univer- sity of Sussex and a man who, according to the hook's jacket, has 'given piano recitals on North German radio', to endorse this view. He is strikingly ignorant of the world in which Weill spent over half his working life. He makes much of Lady in the Dark's sub-heading 'A Musical Play' — 'something different,' he writes, 'from a "musical", like Show Boat.' He couldn't be more wrong: not only was Show Boat, in 1927, not a 'musical' — the term didn't become standard for another 30 years — but it was actually the prototype musical play (although that term goes back to Victor Herbert's Algeria in 1904). 'The Alvin Theatre (now the John Simon.Theatre)' is, in fact, now the Neil Simon Theatre; John Simon is the drama critic for New York magazine, famous for describing the nude Diana Rigg in Ahelard and Heloise as built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses and for whom Broadway theatre owners would flatten the joint and run it as a parking lot, rather than name the place after him. But the factual errors are merely icing on a stale bun: for what's really wrong with this hook, you have to read between the punctuation.
New York [writes Taylor] had become 'his kind of town'. But not only in the material, `American-way-of-life' sense.
Quite apart from the lumpy indigestability of this sort of writing, what's with all the inverted commas? 'His kind of town' are perfectly normal English words, certainly more normal than Gebrauchsmusik which he doesn't consider rates quote marks. But, for inverted commas, read inverted snobbery. Taylor is paraphrasing Sammy Cahn's 'My Kind Of Town (Chicago Is)' and, for sensitive academies, the punctua- tion acts as a sort of condom protecting him from a bad dose of VD (vernacular disease). This is exactly the sort of half- hearted unfelt absorbtion of colloquial forms most highbrow types attempt. It's exactly what Weill didn't do on Broadway — which is why he deserves a better biography than this. To return to that opening question: The reason why the real Weill can't stand up is because critics like Taylor won't let him.
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