Kurt Weill - Street Scene (2002) [DVD9 PAL]


Label:   Arthaus-Musik
Genre:   Opera
Conductor:   James Holmes
  Francesca Zambello
Recording Date:   1995
Place of recording:   Nombre D'or Widescreen Festival
Running Time:   143 min
Picture Format:   16:9 PAL
Sound Format:   PCM Stereo
Release Date:   2002
Menu Languages PAL: D, F, GB, SP
Subtitle Languages PAL: D, F
Artists:
Ashley Putnam, Marc Embree, Teri Hansen, Kip Wilborn, Film José Montes-Baquer

Orchestra/Chorus:
German Philharmonic Orchestra Rhineland-Palatinate, Ludwigshafen Theatre Chorus, Chorus Master: Klaus Thielitz


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Street Scene is a Broadway musical or, more precisely, an "American opera" by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). It was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Rice. For his work on Street Scene, Weill received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score.

In Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Weill had already begun to use American jazz and por song elements in his operas. After fleeing from Germany in 1933, he worked in Paris, then England, and then, beginning in 1935, in New York. Weill made a study of American por and stage music and worked to further adapt his music to new American styles in his writing for Broadway, film and radio. He strove to find a new way of creating an American opera that would be both commercially and artistically successful. Weill wrote:

   "It's my opinion that we can and will develop a musical-dramatic form in this country (America) but I don't think it will be called 'opera', or that it will grow out of the opera which has become a thing separate from the commercial theater, dependent upon other means than box-office appeal for its continuance. It will develop from and remain a part of the American theater – 'Broadway' theater, if you like. More than anything else, I want to be a part in that development."

Weill sought to create musical theatre that would "integrate drama and music, spoken word, song, and movement." He further wrote:

   "This form of theater has its special attraction for the composer, because it allows him to use a great variety of musical idioms, to write music that is both serious and light, operatic and por, emotional and sophisticated, orchestral and vocal. Each show of this type has to create its own style, its own texture, its own relationship between words and music, because music becomes a truly integral part of the play – it helps deepen the emotions and clarify the structure.

Weill saw Rice's naturalistic play in 1930 and wanted to adapt it. As he wrote:

   "It was a simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death. I saw great musical possibilities in its theatrical device – life in a tenement house between one evening and the next afternoon. And it seemed like a great challenge to me to find the inherent poetry in these people and to blend my music with the stark realism of the play."

In 1936, Weill met Rice in New York and gested the adaptation, but Rice turned him down. After the successes of Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938, Lady in the Dark in 1940, and One Touch of Venus in 1943 (and after Weill had composed incidental music for Rice's Two on an Island in 1939), Weill asked again, and Rice agreed. The two chose Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to, as Weill put it, "lift the everyday language of the people into a simple, unsophisticated poetry."

In order to enhance the realism of the new work, the collaborators utilized dialogue scenes, sometimes underscored by music. To create music that would portray the ethnic melting pot of characters described in Rice's book, Weill travelled to neighborhoods in New York, watching children at play and observing New Yorkers. Hughes took Weill to Harlem nightclubs to hear the newest musical idioms of black American jazz and blues. Hughes wrote, "The resulting song was composed in a national American Negro idiom; but a German, or someone else, could sing it without sounding strange or out of place." Weill and many critics have considered the score to be his masterpiece.

Fortunately, the works of Kurt Weill have been experiencing an impressive renaissance in the past few years. Weill was born in Dessau, Germany, and emigrated with his wife Lotte Lenya to Paris in 1933 and to the USA in 1935. After a few ballets and Broadway pieces, Weill composed several works which would play a major role in the development of American opera, including "Street Scene" in 1947. Although Weill readily adapted the artistic means of the American musical, he maintained his socio-critical tone, which he expressed most predominantly in America in "Street Scene". For Weill, "Street Scene" was his musical and dramatic pièce de résistance, even though he never made a breakthrough with it on Broadway and it fell into oblivion for quite some time. It is modeled after Gershwin"s "Porgy and Bess", also portraying characters in their everyday life. After the British premiere in London in 1989, the work went through an international revival. This unanimously celebrated rediscovery of the work was performed under the direction of Francesca Zambello as a joint production of the Houston Grand Opera, the Theater im Pfalzbau Ludwigshafen and the Theater des Westens in Berlin. Best Performance Award at 1995



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