Kurt Weill’s work stands front and center in New York City during the first months of 2024. Carnegie Hall’s festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice” includes a generous helping of the composer’s music. Among a host of events, performances of five important works by great artists stand out: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik by the Met Chamber Ensemble (22 January);  Symphony No. 2 by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin (23 January); Symphony No. 1 by The Knights (29 February); Four Walt Whitman Songs by Justin Austin (5 March);  and The Seven Deadly Sins (fifteen-player version) by Ensemble Modern, with HK Gruber and Wallis Giunta (12 April). A number of concerts in the festival are projected to include songs by Weill as well, including those of Ute Lemper, Meow Meow, Max Raabe and Palast Orchester, and the American Composers Orchestra. As a bonus, just before the festival opens, soprano Julia Bullock includes four Weill songs in her recital on 19 January.

Of its festival, Carnegie Hall writes: “From January through May 2024, as the centerpiece of its 2023–2024 season, Carnegie Hall presents ‘Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,’ an expansive citywide festival exploring one of the most complex and consequential chapters in modern history: Germany’s Weimar Republic of 1919–1933. Through 30 concerts and events at Carnegie Hall and 70+ multidisciplinary offerings at more than 50 leading cultural and academic institutions across New York City, the festival examines the arts and culture that flourished as artists sought bold avenues for creative expression in this increasingly traumatic time.”

Read more here.

Love Life Arrives
In a New Critical Edition

In a major milestone, the Kurt Weill Edition has published a critical edition of Love Life. Edited by eminent scholar Joel Galand, this is the first publication of the score of the work’s score and book ever. Producers, performers, and scholars will at last have full access to the show that is simultaneously one of Weill’s least known and yet most influential works. Victim of a labor dispute that prevented the recording of an original cast album at the time of its first production in 1948, Love Life’s inspirational position as one of the first concept musicals on Broadway has been acknowledged among professionals but remains largely invisible to a broader public. Stephen Sondheim himself opined that “most people didn’t see Love Life, so they don’t think of it as having the kind of effect that Oklahoma! had. But I think it did.”

From its founding in the 1990s, the KWE has pioneered the field of Broadway musical critical editions. Love Life is the fourth American musical theater work published in the KWE, following The Firebrand of Florence, Johnny Johnson, and Lady in the Dark. It is also among the largest editions yet, with 888 score pages distributed across two volumes, plus a critical report of 237 pages. Galand’s magisterial introductory essay runs to more than 30,000 words. Performing materials deriving from the new edition have already been tested in productions in Freiburg and Basel, and are poised for further use in not just one but two new productions planned for spring 2025, including that of New York City Center’s Encores! whose presentation in March 2020 was postponed because of COVID.

For information on subscriptions or purchase of individual volumes, contact kwfinfo@kwf.org .

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