Berliner Requiem

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KURT WEILL
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Vom Tod im Wald - Violinkonze
Chœeur de La Chapelle Royale
Ensemble Musique Oblique
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Would Kurt Weill have followed the respectable career of a con­ductor of a provincial theatre
orchestra if he had not felt the urge to meet Busoni in Berlin in 1920 and to settle in the
capital? Did Berlin not deflect him from his vocation as a composer of chamber music
and of religious music of Jewish lineage? Would he have become the composer for New
York’s Broadway Theatre even if Hitler had not come to power? However fascin­ating these
conjectures may be in Weill’s case, they do not throw any light on the un­comprom­ising
procedures of this other enfant terrible born in 1900 (with Antheil, Copland and Krenek),
who, as a result of his aesthetic convictions, became the incarnation of the Weimar Republic.
The fruitful years of study with Busoni (1921-1923) did not deter him from taking part in the
cultural activities of post-war Berlin. He frequented the expressionist poet Johannes Becher,
and joined in the demonstrations of the ‘November Group’, an association of revolutionary
­artists. This activism was to have a decisive effect on his development.
The Concerto for Violin and Wind Band was the first large-scale work Weill wrote after his
period of study with Busoni. It was composed in the spring of 1924 for Joseph Szigeti,
but after its first performance in Paris on 11 June 1925 by Marcel Darrieux, the Concerto
became a favourite work of the great violinist Stefan Frenkel who played it all over Germany.
Even if some of Busoni’s aesthetic principles are still discernible, there is already a
noticeable detachment from the technical procedures of his master. Another in­flu­ence began
asserting itself, that of Stravinsky, to whom Weill acknowledged being indebted for a long
time, especially for the objective clarity of his textures and the innovating concept of the
theatre as was illustrated in L’Histoire du Soldat and Oedipus Rex. The one-act opera, Der
Protagonist, first performed in 1926, with its paring down of the action and the dialectical
use of wind instruments, was another reflection of Stravinsky’s influence. The Concerto
came after a series of works in which the wind instruments play a leading role, like the
suite Quodlibet based on the pantomime Zaubernacht and the Lieder cycle, Frauentanz. At
the same period Hindemith, in his Kammermusik and Konzertmusik, and Stravinsky (Sym­
phonies of Wind Instruments, Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra, Octet) abundantly ex­
peri­mented with the resources of the brass instruments in the quest for objectivity and
polyphonic transparency. The first movement, Andante con moto, is structured by the opening
motif of a drum roll and two clarinets, calling to mind the writing and the spirit of Hindemith.
In this movement the constant tension between the soloist and the orchestra is heightened
by a complex atonal vocabulary that, although it develops within a formal structure clarified
by the cadences of the various sections, leaves us very few aural landmarks. Trills, repeated
notes and melodic motifs of a clearly sculpted rhythmic character (double bass, horn), as
well as the calculated balance of contrapuntal and homophonic sections are the principal
factors in the writing.
If Busoni, Hindemith and Stravinsky were the omnipresent guiding spirits in the first
movement, the second movement, in three sections, is evocative of Mahler and Berg in
the capricious idea introduced in the Notturno. The use of the xylophone, the extended
dotted rhythms, the punctuations by the winds and the melody in the popular style of the
Viennese café (Un poco tranquillo) create a brief moment of peace. The tension returns in the
Cadenza which calls for feats of extreme virtuosity in the violin. It is resolved in the Serenata,
dominated by the rhythmic figure in triplets and the highly Stravinskian cantilena in the violin
(as in the first movement, the kinship with certain passages in the Sacre is striking).
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In the finale, Allegro molto un poco agitato, the soloist states the principal subjects, but
it no longer has a life of its own as in the beginning of the work. The winds in turn with
the percussion give the dicourse its impulse. A pugnacious energy that explodes in the
Con brio and Con fuoco sections with their square-cut rhythmic beat, irresistibly drives the
piece towards its conclusion. Only the middle passage, un poco meno mosso, brings the
soaring of a sort of sonorous halo, a short expanse of smooth time before the reconquest
of corrugated time – to paraphrase the terms of Boulez.
The Concerto has an important place in Weill’s development: it is the last instrumental work
of his German period and its language has the dramatic features and premonitions of the
style that became characteristic after 1927. It is a work of pure music, but it nonetheless
reveals certain features that Weill was to apply in his stage music: the stamp of the
rhythmic contour of the motifs, the ostinato rhythmic figures, the recourse to the winds,
factors of sonorous clarity. At the same time his atonal idiom, which will still be that of Der
Protagonist, was abandoned around 1927 for a tonal one, the vehicle of the works composed
in collaboration with Brecht.
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The decisive encounter took place in 1927 at the restaurant Schlichter, a meeting place
of the Berlin intelligentsia. Weill had recently written a review in the weekly broadcasting
magazine, Der Deutsche Rundfunk, praising Brecht’s Mann ist Mann, and a collaboration
seemed inevitable. The Mahagonny-Songspiel, performed at the Baden-Baden Festival in
the spring of the same year, was followed by a whole series of works of an epic character,
such as Die Dreigroschenoper, the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the Berliner
Requiem, the cantata for radio, Der Lindberghflug, the comedy with music, Happy End,
and the opera for schools, Der Ja­sager. In its approximation of Brecht and Weill, posterity
has not always been very clear-sighted regarding the nature of their collaboration and the
basic differences in their conception of the world or ethical problems as important as the
renewal of the opera. But this did not detract from the extraordinary impact created by their
productions, or from the unequivocal agreement of their points of view on the nature of
the musical theatre and the symbiosis engendered by the use of crude, realistic language
that makes no concessions and an incisive type of music that is open to the most varied
influences. It was Brecht’s poetry that Weill appreciated above all, and his admiration is
manifest in the two cantatas, Vom Tod im Wald and Das Berliner Requiem which throw a
visionary light on the famous ‘golden twenties’.
The Berliner Requiem illustrates two fundamental aspects of Weill’s involvement in the
twenties: his contribution to a repertory destined specifically for the radio and his struggle
against any form of conservativism. His numerous articles on the radio show that Weill was
very soon convinced of the pedagogical, social and aesthetic potentials of the new medium.
The conditions of his development were connected with the appearance of a new society
born out of the upheaval of the war and the breaking down of the barriers between social
classes that had been virtual strangers to one another.
The Requiem was commissioned by the Frankfurt radio station. Its composition coincided
with the tenth anniversary of the cessation of hostilities and the quelling of the revolt of the
Spartacus League. A poem by Brecht on ‘Red Rosa’ (Rosa ­Luxemburg) was rejected by the
radio authorities and was not broadcast by the Berlin transmitter. Shortly afterwards Weill
quit his position as editor of Der Deutsche Rundfunk which he had occupied since 1924.
A secular Requiem, the cantata emanates from the man of the large cities and is also
addressed to him; it is a kind of ‘assembly of commemorative tablets, epitaphs, funeral
songs representing the feelings of the widest levels of the population’. It is scored for
limited forces (tenor, baritone, male choir, wind band, guitar, banjo and percussion), and the
economy of the writing is in keeping with the spiritual gist of the work. A Großer Dankchoral
(Large Hymn of Thanksgiving) begins and ends the work, reflecting, in the sparseness of its
means, its homophonic writing and the harsh rhythmic scansion of the winds, the general
tone, both grave and cynical, of the work as a whole. The Ballade vom ertrunkenen Mädchen
(Ballad of the Drowned Girl) is accompanied by chords in the guitar and the homophonic
style intensifies the poetry and the tragic quality of the text. It ends on a flourish in the tenor
part, a sort of profane benediction destined for this godforsaken ‘slut among sluts’. Marterl
(Grabschrift) (Martyrs – Epitaph) is highly characteristic of the Weill-Brecht musical idiom:
slow dance rhythm, a saxophone tune, uniform accompaniment, the mixture of interior
chromaticism and progressions in fifths. This section is followed by the Erster Bericht über
den unbekannten Soldaten and the Zweiter Bericht (the first and second Accounts concerning
the Unknown Soldier) in which the violence of the text (in the spirit of the Brecht-Eisler pieces,
like Die Maßnahme) is heightened by the incisive dotted rhythms and the ostinato. While the
Erster Bericht recalls the atmosphere of Mahagonny in its alternation of homophonic tutti and
speciously nostalgic melodic passages in the saxophone, the second assumes the character
of a liturgical recitative.
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The cantata (or scena) for bass and ten wind instruments (2 clarinets, bassoon, double
bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, tenor trombone, bass trombone), Vom Tod im Wald (Death
in the Forest) was to have been placed at the beginning of the ­Requiem, but Weill gave up
the idea just before the première considering that its tone was incompatible with that of the
other poems. It had its first perform­ance on 23 November 1927 in the Berlin Philharmonic.
Weill would never write such a sombre work again; the atonal writing is closer to that of
the Violin Concerto than to the later works. This hymn to animal existence, to the return
to and the ab­sorption by nature is characteristic of Brecht’s early poetry. The depiction of
this death-return to the sources is the counterpart to that of the corpse of the drowned
girl. Written in 1922, the poem was inserted into the play Baal, before being published in a
revised form in the third lesson of his Hauspostille (Domestic Sermons).
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Pascal Huynh
Translation Derek Yeld
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