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Weill's Musical Theater

Stages of Reform
by Stephen Hinton (Author)
Hardcover eBook
Price: $52.95 / £45.00
Publication Date: Apr 2012
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 592
ISBN: 9780520951839
Endowments:
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About the Book

In the first musicological study of Kurt Weill’s complete stage works Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of twentieth-century musical theater’s key figures. Hinton shows how Weill’s experiments with a range of genres—from one-act operas and plays with music to Broadway musicals and film-opera—became an indispensable part of the reforms he promoted during his brief but intense career. Confronting the divisive notion of “two Weills”—one European the other American—Hinton adopts a broad and inclusive perspective establishing criteria that allow aspects of continuity to emerge particularly in matters of dramaturgy. Tracing his extraordinary journey as a composer the book shows how Weill’s artistic ambitions led to his working with a remarkably heterogeneous collection of authors such as Georg Kaiser Bertolt Brecht Moss Hart Alan Jay Lerner and Maxwell Anderson.

About the Author

Stephen Hinton is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. His publications include Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

1. Biographical Notes
2. The Busoni Connection
3. One-Act Operas
4. “Songspiel”
5. Plays with Music
6. Epic Opera
7. Didactic Theater (“Lehrstück”)
8. Stages of Exile
9. Musical Plays
10. Stage vs. Screen
11. American Opera
12. Concept and Commitment
Coda

Appendix: Weill’s Works for Stage or Screen
Abbreviations
Notes
Credits
Index

Reviews

“Weill’s Musical Theater is eminently readable, with or without his music playing in the background. Professor Hinton is a fine writer who conveys what he knows and feels in terms insightful, intuitive and nuanced, yet accessible to those of us who are musically marginalized. I like to think Kurt Weill would enjoy this book, too, probably enough to set some of Stephen Hinton’s own words to music.”
— Washington Ind Rev Of Bks
“Hinton has produced an in-depth view of the entire oeuvre of Weill's stage compositions. . . . The reader follows Weill through his explorations of form/style as he discovers new ideologies and creates new, often groundbreaking, works. This is a scholarly and thoroughly researched work. . . . Highly Recommended.”
— Choice
“In his new ‘Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform,’ the music historian Stephen Hinton has subtly and magisterially enshrined the view that Weill in America maintained the same plateau of inspiration and originality that made his reputation abroad.”
— Artsjournal/Unanswered Question: Joe Horowitz On Music
"This is essential reading not only for Weill scholars but also those interested in twentieth-century opera and the history of the American musical. . . . Its achievement will not soon be surpassed."
— Journal of the American Musicological Society
"A majestic study."
— Journal of the Society for American Music
"Meticulously reasearched and offering abundant references . . . By carefully documenting the continuity of the experiments that Weill carried out in his musical theatre in Europe and the United States, this book succeeds in assessing the work of one of the key reformers of twentieth-century musical theatre."
— Journal of Theater Research International
“This book the first scholarly consideration of Weill’s complete output of stage works is without doubt the most important critical study of the composer’s oeuvre to date in any language. Hinton’s scholarship is superior and his insights original and illuminating. The product of several decades of engagement with Weill’s works their sources and reception as well as the secondary literature the book is a stunning achievement. Brilliantly conceived and executed it will take its place as one of the cornerstones of Weill studies.”—Kim H. Kowalke University of Rochester and President Kurt Weill Foundation for Music

“In Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform Stephen Hinton reminds us that Kurt Weill was always a revolutionary. The composer’s insistent dedication to a provocative constantly evolving lyric theater that spoke directly to audiences meant that Weill remained as controversial as he was popular. The celebrity that endeared him to Broadway made him anathema in Berlin. Some sixty years after Weill’s death Hinton is finally able to demonstrate the consistent brilliance theatrical power and coherence of a composer who revolutionized every genre he touched (or used) and whose collaborators read as a who’s who of twentieth-century theater.”

—David Savran author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater Jazz and the Making of the New Middle Class



"Stephen Hinton presents us with an image of Weill that is at once monumental yet still alive. A truly Protean figure Weill is not an easy man to grasp in his totality; Brecht once wrote that a man thrown into water will have to develop webbed feet and as a refugee from Nazi Germany Weill had to become a cultural amphibian. But in Weill's Musical Theater we see the composer from every angle: through the gaze of countless critics and reviewers through Weill's own eyes and finally through the filter of Hinton's judicious focused prose. This account will stand."—Daniel Albright author of Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music Literature and Other Arts

Awards

  • 2013 Kurt Weill Book Prize, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music