Looking Ahead to a Double Anniversary:
Kurt Weill in 2025

Weill’s birth in 1900 and his death exactly fifty years later ensure that his anniversaries always come in pairs. One such milestone approaches in 2025, marking the one-hundred-twenty-fifth  anniversary of his birth and the seventy-fifth of his death. A raft of significant performances will mark eighteen months of celebration, from January 2025 through the entirety of the 2025/26 season. This month’s E-News offers a sneak preview of some highlights from the first half of 2025.

The anniversary year begins spectacularly with the long-anticipated return to the stage of Love Life, one of the landmark achievements–albeit a rarely performed one–of Weill’s American career. The first months of 2025 offer not one but two productions. Opera North’s opens in January in Leeds, England, under the baton of James Holmes, one of the world’s leading Weill conductors, and directed by Matthew Eberhardt. In March, the Encores! series in New York City at long last presents the production, directed by double Tony Award winner Victoria Clark and conducted by Rob Berman, that was poised to open just as the pandemic hit in 2020.

A “Weill Triptych” conducted by Riccardo Chailly is in the wings at Teatro alla Scala, combining the revival of two Irina Brook productions (Die sieben Todsünden and Mahagonny Songspiel) with a new one making use of the songs from Happy End, Weill’s follow-up to his Dreigroschenoper collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann. The La Scala Todsünden is one of roughly half a dozen to take the stage in the first half of 2025, including those of HK Gruber, Ensemble Modern, and Wallis Giunta and Czech Philharmonic performances led by Simon Rattle and featuring Magdalena Kožená.

Another from the first rank of Weill interpreters, conductor Markus Stenz, leads at Teatro La Fenice in Venice a rare production of Weill’s Der Protagonist, the early opera that first made the composer’s name as a young, twenty-something star in Germany. In London, prominent baritone Roderick Williams is set to perform Four Walt Whitman Songs with Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The first half of 2025 is capped off in July by Benedikt von Peter’s and Katrin Wittig’s unconventional production of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, to be performed in and around the house of Deutsche Oper Berlin.

Further exciting realizations of Weill’s works await in the 2025/26 season. The Kurt Weill Foundation Grants Program is open to receiving proposals for support, with the next deadline approaching on 1 November 2024.

Conductor Joana Mallwitz burst upon the world stage last year in her debut season as Music Director of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. She chose Weill’s first symphony, Symphonie in einem Satz, to be programmed on her first concert in her new role. Her debut recording on Deutsche Grammophon is an all-Weill disc, bringing together both of Weill’s symphonies with the always popular sung ballet Die sieben Todsünden, with Katharine Mehrling in the lead role. Released in August, the recording quickly amassed a wealth of reviews, meriting such enthusiastic descriptors as: “a discographic skyscraper” (Ingobert Waltenberger, Online Merker), “a prime example of multidimensional musical radiance” (Marco Borggreve, Aachener Zeitung), “a polished and meaningful Weill Renaissance” (Manuel Brug, SWR Kultur). Gramophone magazine named it “Recording of the Month” for September.

With particular insight into the nature of the repertoire on the recording, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times: “Kurt Weill’s early music, with its Berliner brightness and swagger, may not sound like Mozart, but it has Mozart’s delicacy. The works that Weill wrote in his European years, before emigrating to the United States in 1935, are so precisely orchestrated and so deceptively simple, they leave no room for imperfection. Too often, though, they are performed with a barbed cabaret affect that verges on Weimar-era kitsch. Not so on The Kurt Weill Album, the conductor Joana Mallwitz’s Deutsche Grammophon debut…. Mallwitz is the real deal: She leads the Konzerthausorchester Berlin here with teeming vitality and brilliantly rendered detail.” Aart van der Wal of Klassiek Centraal concluded succinctly: “Deutsche Grammophon has released a Weill album that makes discographic history. No doubt about it.”

20 September – Excerpt from Quodlibet op. 9
Beethovenfest Bonn (Beethoven Orchester Bonn; Iñigo Giner Miranda, concept; Dirk Kaftan, conductor)
Part of Weill’s early orchestra work figures along with excerpts from works by important composers (including Bartók, Milhaud, and Shostakovich, among others) of the 1920s in this conceptual program dedicated to the question: “How did Europe sound a hundred years ago?”

19 October – Die sieben Todsünden
New World Symphony (Stéphane Denève, conductor; Danielle de Niese, soprano)
In the past year, Danielle de Niese has been a leading champion of the role of Anna in Die sieben Todsünden. With this performance, she brings her interpretation to the United States, joining with the young musicians of the acclaimed, Miami-based training orchestra.

31 October – Symphonic Nocturne from Lady in the Dark and songs
Konzerthaus Berlin (Orchester der Komische Oper Berlin; James Gaffigan, conductor; Susan Zarrabi, mezzo-soprano)
For this symphony concert advertised as being “James’ Choice,” Gaffigan programs Robert Russell Bennett’s masterful orchestral arrangement of passages from Weill’s first big Broadway hit. The production also includes three of Weill’s best-known American songs: “Speak Low,” “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” and “Lost in the Stars.”

For a full listing of upcoming events, view the Kurt Weill events calendar.

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