Kurt Weill

On 31 August 1928 a new play with music opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, and Berlin found its theme tune. The Threepenny Opera, with Kurt Weill’s music and Bertolt Brecht’s words, gave the world Mack the Knife, and the theatre where it began is still one of the great stages of the city.

From Dessau to Berlin

Kurt Weill was born in Dessau on 2 March 1900, the son of a cantor. He came to Berlin to study at the Hochschule für Musik, where he found the training and the rare lessons with Engelbert Humperdinck too stifling; a Berlin memorial plaque at Altonaer Straße 22 in the Hansaviertel marks the house where he lived as a young student in the summer of 1919.

From 1921 to 1923 he studied composition in Ferruccio Busoni’s master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts, the great influence of his early years. In 1924, at the playwright Georg Kaiser’s house at Grünheide outside Berlin, he met the singer and actress Lotte Lenya, and they married in 1926.

A new kind of music theatre

With Brecht, Weill found the partner for a new kind of music theatre. Mahagonny, a Songspiel, was commissioned by the Baden-Baden festival in 1927, and between then and 1930 they made a run of works for the stage that still feel startlingly modern.

The Threepenny Opera

Based on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of 1728, in Elisabeth Hauptmann’s translation, The Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on 31 August 1928, with Lenya as Jenny. A plaque at Luisenplatz 3 in Charlottenburg records that Weill wrote its music there in 1928, at the guesthouse where Georg Kaiser lived.

Its Ballad of Mack the Knife became a standard around the world, and the original Berlin production played some 400 times in two years. Happy End followed at the same theatre in 1929, and the full opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny opened in Leipzig in March 1930.

Paris and Broadway

In March 1933 Weill left Germany for Paris, where he wrote The Seven Deadly Sins, a ballet with singing, for George Balanchine’s company Les Ballets 1933. In September 1935 he and Lenya sailed for New York, and Berlin lost one of its brightest voices.

The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, with its gilded auditorium and great chandelier, has been the home of the Berliner Ensemble since 1954.

On Broadway he began again. Lady in the Dark, with Moss Hart and the lyricist Ira Gershwin, was his first hit and ran for 777 performances; Street Scene, with words by Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, won him the first Tony Award for best original score; Lost in the Stars was his last Broadway work. He died in New York on 3 April 1950.

Weill’s Berlin today

The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, with its gilded auditorium and great chandelier, has been the home of the Berliner Ensemble since 1954. Lotte Lenya is remembered too: the Lotte-Lenya-Bogen, an arcade near the Kurfürstendamm, carries her name.

Our advice: book a performance at the Berliner Ensemble on Schiffbauerdamm, a short walk across the Spree from Friedrichstraße station. Check the theatre’s programme before you go, as the repertoire changes.