Weill: The Seven Deadly Sins

The collaboration between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is
rightly legendary. The two men could not have been more different
from each other, and like the Brahms/Joachim relationship I
mentioned in my recent show about the Brahms Double concerto, the
friendship between Weill and Brecht was stormy to say the least.
The two collaborated on some of the most memorable works of the
Weimar era in Germany, such as the Threepenny Opera, which
features a pretty famous tune called Mack the Knife.


Their final collaboration was on the “sung ballet” The Seven
Deadly Sins. This is a piece that was written at a point of
remarkably high tension within Weimar Germany. On an artistic
level, the 1920s and early 1930s had seen a veritable explosion
in the world of culture, with art, dance, theater, and music all
featuring artists who were pushing the boundaries with wild
experimentation and a kind of ecstatic fervor that produced some
of the world’s greatest and most memorable cultural achievements.
On a parallel track however, the rise of the Nazis cast a pall
over all of this. By 1933, both Brecht and Weill(who was Jewish)
knew that Germany was not a place that they could stay safely.
Weill ended up in Paris and then in the US for the rest of his
life, while Brecht bounced around Europe before returning to East
Germany after the war, hoping to be a part of the Marxist Utopia
that he believed had been founded there.  The simmering
combination of Weill’s mastery of transforming popular forms into
a unique kind of classical music along with Brecht’s pointed
satire and brilliantly inventive libretti resulted in the Seven
Deadly Sins, a piece that that brutally satirizes extreme
capitalism and the degradation of the human soul that supposedly
results from it. This is a nakedly political piece, and I should
make it clear that by talking about it, by choosing to feature it
on the show, and by regularly performing it, I don’t necessarily
endorse its views. Brecht was extreme in all ways, as we’ll get
to today, and the power of this piece in my opinion doesn’t come
from its politics, but from its remarkable and devastating
portrayal of a human soul and the tragedies that can befall it.
This is one of my favorite pieces of the whole 20th century, and
I’m so happy to share it with you today. Join us!