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Brooklyn College Magazine -- Fall 2001
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Biographer's Notes
Foster Hirsch tracks
the lives of Kurt Weill and Otto Preminger
Biographers are often privy to the dark sides of their subjects—personality traits that have been concealed from the general public and, without the biographer's careful digging, might have remained concealed.
While poring over personal correspondence of the German-born composer Kurt Weill, Professor of Film Foster Hirsch was surprised by how complex the composer was. "Weill's sort of the opposite of Will Rogers in that he never met anyone he didn't dislike," Hirsch observes. "And that really comes through in his correspondence with his wife, the singer Lotte Lenya."
Weill and dramatist Bertolt Brecht first gained fame in 1928 with Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). Many who love the Bobby Darin tune "Mack the Knife" with its irresistible first line, "Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear," are unaware that the song comes from that Brecht-Weill show, itself an update of an eighteenth-century musical by John Gay, The Beggar's Opera. With its lumpenproletariat characters and brilliant music, The Threepenny Opera was an immediate hit with the German public. It played to packed houses until Hitler came to power in 1933, when it was banned by the Nazi government.
Brecht and Weill "absolutely hated each other," according to Hirsch, but they also shared a grudging respect. After collaborating on a few more shows, including the ill-fated Happy End (see excerpt), both men came to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. Weill found success and critical acclaim on Broadway, with such shows as Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, while Brecht faced political persecution from the U.S. government and eventually returned to East Germany after the war. "Weill was a company man," says Hirsch. "On the outside he was proper, focused, solid, disciplined, and refreshingly unneurotic. He was also high strung but kept the turmoil inside him. That probably contributed to his death from a heart attack at age fifty."
Hirsch, a native of California, came to the Department of English in 1967 and was one of the first professors to join the newly established Film Department in 1973. An inveterate theater- and moviegoer since childhood, he has written sixteen books on subjects related to the stage and screen. Best known for his history of the Actors Studio, A Method to Their Madness (1984), and his two cinematic surveys, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (1981) and its sequel, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (1999), Hirsch is always in the process of writing one or two books or updating an old one. His new edition of Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen, and a revised version of his biography of producer-director Hal Prince were published this year.
This spring will see the publication of Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, Hirsch's first foray into musical biography. "I was a little hesitant at first because I had never done anything like it, but the Weill Foundation wanted a nonmusicologist to write about Weill's theater work."
Hirsch is now absorbed in writing a biography of the notorious film director Otto Preminger. He was inspired to write the book in 1998 when Brooklyn College's Institute for Studies in American Music held its Gershwin Centennial celebration, which included a screening of Preminger's rarely seen film adaptation of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. While researching the movie, Hirsch was surprised to learn that there was no full-scale biography of the colorful Viennese exile, who directed such Hollywood blockbusters as Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder, and The Man with the Golden Arm. The opportunity to write the biography of this larger-than-life figure was one he could not pass up.
"The two emigres, Weill and Preminger, have much in common," says Hirsch. "Both men were talented, found great success in the United States, and had a certain kind of German-Jewish irony." Yet they were opposites in temperament: Weill was an unflappable professional with a calm exterior; Preminger was infamous for constantly erupting into violent anger, but, as Hirsch points out, he never stayed mad for long. "Five minutes later, he'd put his arm around your shoulders and be your best friend."
Happy End, a Brecht-Weill musical that premiered a year after The Threepenny Opera, was a flop. It boasted a good score by Weill but had a disastrous third act, which is described in this excerpt from Foster Hirsch's Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (Knopf, forthcoming).
This time the first-nighters did not need to get warmed up. They were Brecht-Weill fans and they were eager to have a good time. Laughter and applause were generous right from the beginning; Lenya recollected that during the intermission following Act Two, Weill called her backstage at her theatre, his voice vibrating with excitement, to announce another hit. But that was before the unfinished and soon-to-be-infamous Act Three had been performed. At the end of the show, Helene Weigel as the Lady in Grey delivered a ringing Communist manifesto. Did Weigel improvise her harangue on the spot? Did she read explosive passages from a Communist Party pamphlet calling for revolution? As a gesture of solidarity with his new fellow travelers, had Brecht secretly embellished the speech during the intermission following Act Two? All have been claimed, and each is conceivable. [Producer Ernst] Aufricht recalled that during rehearsals "a deputation of Communists came to Brecht, complaining that, ideologically, the play was too feeble. This gave Brecht an idea, a bad idea, and suddenly the weak third act became even weaker. . . . Helene Weigel suddenly drew out a sheet Brecht had written during the intermission and began to read a Communist pamphlet. A scandal broke loose; our failure was sealed."
"Robbing a bank's no crime compared to owning one! The world belongs to all of us—let's march together and make it our own!" Weigel, a fierce-looking firebrand, declared, introducing a political slant that was out of phase with the essentially good-natured and sentimental play. Her comments, and her challenging stance, angered Aufricht's well-heeled audience. "Hosanna Rockefeller," a coda in the form of a mock hymn to Saint Henry Ford, Saint John D. Rockefeller, and Saint J. P. Morgan—caricatures of the American millionaires appeared on giant stained-glass windows—further enflamed the crowd. In this single sustained piece of musical irony in the show, the writers attacked money and religion, sacred ground for the bourgeois spectators. At the curtain call a barrage of jeers greeted the startled actors.
Although the score was well received, the play and the production were derided. Not for the first time, Alfred Kerr, the dean of Berlin critics and a staunch anti-Brechtian, accused the playwright of plagiarism. Even Herbert Ihering, Brecht's great advocate among Berlin critics, was negative. Poor reviews, as well as fear of riots, spelled silence at the Schiffbauerdamm box office. Two days later, Aufricht closed the show, which disappeared immediately from Brecht's resume and was never to be produced again during the lifetimes of its cocreators.