Love Song
The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Noted historian of the Broadway musical chronicles the braided lives of two of the twentieth century's most influential artists
For the first time, Ethan Mordden chronicles the romance of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in Love Song, a dual biography that unfolds against the background of the tumultuous twentieth century, scored to music from Weil's greatest triumphs: Knickerbocker Holiday, Lost in the Stars, Lady in the Dark, Happy End, One Touch of Venus and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The romance of Weill, the Jewish cantor's son, and Lenya, the Viennese coachman's daughter, changed the history of Western music. With Bertolt Brecht, they created one of the definitive works of the twentieth century, The Threepenny Opera, a smash that would live on in musical theatre history. Weill, the jazz Mozart, was the creator whose work is backstage, unseen. Lenya, his epic-theatre femme fatale, was the performer who put the work into view. They heard the same unique music, but he gave it form while she gave it life. Love Song is ultimately the story of a great romance scored to some of the twentieth century's greatest music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the 20th-century's greatest composers, Weill, a Jewish cantor's son in Germany, whose only interest was music and who wrote an adaptation of a Rilke poem when he was 19, changed when he met the attractive and pleasing daughter of a Viennese coachman, Lotte Lenya, in Berlin. Lenya's mother had told the young girl that though she was not pretty, men would be crazy about her all her life, and indeed she wrapped Weill and numerous other musicians, artists, actors, dancers, and audiences around her little finger. In this dual biography that is more Weill than Lenya, music historian Mordden monotonously marches through the lives and times of each individual, tracing in detail their childhood and young adulthood, the paths that took them to Berlin and their first meeting, their tumultuous marriage and brief divorce, their successes in Germany in the theater and in film, and their move to America where each established lasting reputations. Although Weill's successful collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera followed him throughout his life, he also went on to some measure of triumph with his Broadway shows, Street Scene (1947), and Knickerbocker Holiday (1938). After Weill's death, Lenya gained considerable notice in films, first as Rosa Klebb in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and then as James Bond's nemesis in From Russia with Love. Mordden follows ground well-trod by previous biographies of Weill (The Days Grow Short ; Kurt Weill ) and Lenya (Lenya: A Life ), offering little new or compelling information about the pair.
