Weill: The Seven Deadly Sins

The collaboration between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is rightly legendary. The two men could not have been more different from each other, and like the Brahms/Joachim relationship I mentioned in my recent show about the Brahms Double concerto, the friendship between Weill and Brecht was stormy to say the least. The two collaborated on some of the most memorable works of the Weimar era in Germany, such as the Threepenny Opera, which features a pretty famous tune called Mack the Knife.

Their final collaboration was on the “sung ballet” The Seven Deadly Sins. This is a piece that was written at a point of remarkably high tension within Weimar Germany. On an artistic level, the 1920s and early 1930s had seen a veritable explosion in the world of culture, with art, dance, theater, and music all featuring artists who were pushing the boundaries with wild experimentation and a kind of ecstatic fervor that produced some of the world’s greatest and most memorable cultural achievements. On a parallel track however, the rise of the Nazis cast a pall over all of this. By 1933, both Brecht and Weill(who was Jewish) knew that Germany was not a place that they could stay safely. Weill ended up in Paris and then in the US for the rest of his life, while Brecht bounced around Europe before returning to East Germany after the war, hoping to be a part of the Marxist Utopia that he believed had been founded there.  The simmering combination of Weill’s mastery of transforming popular forms into a unique kind of classical music along with Brecht’s pointed satire and brilliantly inventive libretti resulted in the Seven Deadly Sins, a piece that that brutally satirizes extreme capitalism and the degradation of the human soul that supposedly results from it. This is a nakedly political piece, and I should make it clear that by talking about it, by choosing to feature it on the show, and by regularly performing it, I don’t necessarily endorse its views. Brecht was extreme in all ways, as we’ll get to today, and the power of this piece in my opinion doesn’t come from its politics, but from its remarkable and devastating portrayal of a human soul and the tragedies that can befall it. This is one of my favorite pieces of the whole 20th century, and I’m so happy to share it with you today. Join us!