Would Kurt Weill have followed the respectable career of a conductor of a provincial theatreorchestra if he had not felt the urge to meet Busoni in Berlin in 1920 and to settle in thecapital? Did Berlin not deflect him from his vocation as a composer of chamber musicand of religious music of Jewish lineage? Would he have become the composer for NewYork’s Broadway Theatre even if Hitler had not come to power? However fascinating theseconjectures may be in Weill’s case, they do not throw any light on the uncompromisingprocedures of this other enfant terrible born in 1900 (with Antheil, Copland and Krenek),who, as a result of his aesthetic convictions, became the incarnation of the Weimar Republic.The fruitful years of study with Busoni (1921-1923) did not deter him from taking part in thecultural activities of post-war Berlin. He frequented the expressionist poet Johannes Becher,and joined in the demonstrations of the ‘November Group’, an association of revolutionaryartists. This activism was to have a decisive effect on his development.The Concerto for Violin and Wind Band was the first large-scale work Weill wrote after hisperiod of study with Busoni. It was composed in the spring of 1924 for Joseph Szigeti,but after its first performance in Paris on 11 June 1925 by Marcel Darrieux, the Concertobecame a favourite work of the great violinist Stefan Frenkel who played it all over Germany.Even if some of Busoni’s aesthetic principles are still discernible, there is already anoticeable detachment from the technical procedures of his master. Another influence beganasserting itself, that of Stravinsky, to whom Weill acknowledged being indebted for a longtime, especially for the objective clarity of his textures and the innovating concept of thetheatre as was illustrated in L’Histoire du Soldat and Oedipus Rex. The one-act opera, DerProtagonist, first performed in 1926, with its paring down of the action and the dialecticaluse of wind instruments, was another reflection of Stravinsky’s influence. The Concertocame after a series of works in which the wind instruments play a leading role, like thesuite Quodlibet based on the pantomime Zaubernacht and the Lieder cycle, Frauentanz. Atthe same period Hindemith, in his Kammermusik and Konzertmusik, and Stravinsky (Symphoniesof Wind Instruments, Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra, Octet) abundantly experimentedwith the resources of the brass instruments in the quest for objectivity andpolyphonic transparency. The first movement, Andante con moto, is structured by the openingmotif of a drum roll and two clarinets, calling to mind the writing and the spirit of Hindemith.In this movement the constant tension between the soloist and the orchestra is heightenedby a complex atonal vocabulary that, although it develops within a formal structure clarifiedby the cadences of the various sections, leaves us very few aural landmarks. Trills, repeatednotes and melodic motifs of a clearly sculpted rhythmic character (double bass, horn), aswell as the calculated balance of contrapuntal and homophonic sections are the principalfactors in the writing.If Busoni, Hindemith and Stravinsky were the omnipresent guiding spirits in the firstmovement, the second movement, in three sections, is evocative of Mahler and Berg inthe capricious idea introduced in the Notturno. The use of the xylophone, the extendeddotted rhythms, the punctuations by the winds and the melody in the popular style of theViennese café (Un poco tranquillo) create a brief moment of peace. The tension returns in theCadenza which calls for feats of extreme virtuosity in the violin. It is resolved in the Serenata,dominated by the rhythmic figure in triplets and the highly Stravinskian cantilena in the violin(as in the first movement, the kinship with certain passages in the Sacre is striking).In the finale, Allegro molto un poco agitato, the soloist states the principal subjects, butit no longer has a life of its own as in the beginning of the work. The winds in turn withthe percussion give the dicourse its impulse. A pugnacious energy that explodes in theCon brio and Con fuoco sections with their square-cut rhythmic beat, irresistibly drives thepiece towards its conclusion. Only the middle passage, un poco meno mosso, brings thesoaring of a sort of sonorous halo, a short expanse of smooth time before the reconquestof corrugated time – to paraphrase the terms of Boulez.The Concerto has an important place in Weill’s development: it is the last instrumental workof his German period and its language has the dramatic features and premonitions of thestyle that became characteristic after 1927. It is a work of pure music, but it nonethelessreveals certain features that Weill was to apply in his stage music: the stamp of therhythmic contour of the motifs, the ostinato rhythmic figures, the recourse to the winds,factors of sonorous clarity. At the same time his atonal idiom, which will still be that of DerProtagonist, was abandoned around 1927 for a tonal one, the vehicle of the works composedin collaboration with Brecht.The decisive encounter took place in 1927 at the restaurant Schlichter, a meeting placeof the Berlin intelligentsia. Weill had recently written a review in the weekly broadcastingmagazine, Der Deutsche Rundfunk, praising Brecht’s Mann ist Mann, and a collaborationseemed inevitable. The Mahagonny-Songspiel, performed at the Baden-Baden Festival inthe spring of the same year, was followed by a whole series of works of an epic character,such as Die Dreigroschenoper, the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the BerlinerRequiem, the cantata for radio, Der Lindberghflug, the comedy with music, Happy End,and the opera for schools, Der Jasager. In its approximation of Brecht and Weill, posterityhas not always been very clear-sighted regarding the nature of their collaboration and thebasic differences in their conception of the world or ethical problems as important as therenewal of the opera. But this did not detract from the extraordinary impact created by theirproductions, or from the unequivocal agreement of their points of view on the nature ofthe musical theatre and the symbiosis engendered by the use of crude, realistic languagethat makes no concessions and an incisive type of music that is open to the most variedinfluences. It was Brecht’s poetry that Weill appreciated above all, and his admiration ismanifest in the two cantatas, Vom Tod im Wald and Das Berliner Requiem which throw avisionary light on the famous ‘golden twenties’.The Berliner Requiem illustrates two fundamental aspects of Weill’s involvement in thetwenties: his contribution to a repertory destined specifically for the radio and his struggleagainst any form of conservativism. His numerous articles on the radio show that Weill wasvery soon convinced of the pedagogical, social and aesthetic potentials of the new medium.The conditions of his development were connected with the appearance of a new societyborn out of the upheaval of the war and the breaking down of the barriers between socialclasses that had been virtual strangers to one another.The Requiem was commissioned by the Frankfurt radio station. Its composition coincidedwith the tenth anniversary of the cessation of hostilities and the quelling of the revolt of theSpartacus League. A poem by Brecht on ‘Red Rosa’ (Rosa Luxemburg) was rejected by theradio authorities and was not broadcast by the Berlin transmitter. Shortly afterwards Weillquit his position as editor of Der Deutsche Rundfunk which he had occupied since 1924.A secular Requiem, the cantata emanates from the man of the large cities and is alsoaddressed to him; it is a kind of ‘assembly of commemorative tablets, epitaphs, funeralsongs representing the feelings of the widest levels of the population’. It is scored forlimited forces (tenor, baritone, male choir, wind band, guitar, banjo and percussion), and theeconomy of the writing is in keeping with the spiritual gist of the work. A Großer Dankchoral(Large Hymn of Thanksgiving) begins and ends the work, reflecting, in the sparseness of itsmeans, its homophonic writing and the harsh rhythmic scansion of the winds, the generaltone, both grave and cynical, of the work as a whole. The Ballade vom ertrunkenen Mädchen(Ballad of the Drowned Girl) is accompanied by chords in the guitar and the homophonicstyle intensifies the poetry and the tragic quality of the text. It ends on a flourish in the tenorpart, a sort of profane benediction destined for this godforsaken ‘slut among sluts’. Marterl(Grabschrift) (Martyrs – Epitaph) is highly characteristic of the Weill-Brecht musical idiom:slow dance rhythm, a saxophone tune, uniform accompaniment, the mixture of interiorchromaticism and progressions in fifths. This section is followed by the Erster Bericht überden unbekannten Soldaten and the Zweiter Bericht (the first and second Accounts concerningthe Unknown Soldier) in which the violence of the text (in the spirit of the Brecht-Eisler pieces,like Die Maßnahme) is heightened by the incisive dotted rhythms and the ostinato. While theErster Bericht recalls the atmosphere of Mahagonny in its alternation of homophonic tutti andspeciously nostalgic melodic passages in the saxophone, the second assumes the characterof a liturgical recitative. The cantata (or scena) for bass and ten wind instruments (2 clarinets, bassoon, doublebassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, tenor trombone, bass trombone), Vom Tod im Wald (Deathin the Forest) was to have been placed at the beginning of the Requiem, but Weill gave upthe idea just before the première considering that its tone was incompatible with that of theother poems. It had its first performance on 23 November 1927 in the Berlin Philharmonic.Weill would never write such a sombre work again; the atonal writing is closer to that ofthe Violin Concerto than to the later works. This hymn to animal existence, to the returnto and the absorption by nature is characteristic of Brecht’s early poetry. The depiction ofthis death-return to the sources is the counterpart to that of the corpse of the drownedgirl. Written in 1922, the poem was inserted into the play Baal, before being published in arevised form in the third lesson of his Hauspostille (Domestic Sermons).