As Joana Mallwitz prepares to begin her second season as chief conductor and artistic director of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, she’s embracing the history of her adopted city. In addition to her new position, Mallwitz – who was born in Hildesheim and came most recently from Staatstheater Nürnberg where she was general music director – signed with Deutsche Grammophon last year. She’s now using that platform to explore the work Kurt Weill did in Berlin a century earlier.
“I just discovered Weill’s music”, Mallwitz says. “I knew the big masterpieces, but a few years ago I had no idea, for example, of the two symphonies that he had written so early in his life. When I discovered that music, I was just fascinated. I tried to get into everything that Weill wrote and listened to a lot of things. At the same time, I started planning my first season here in Berlin with the Konzerthausorchester. It was great to see all these connections, and I felt there was no better moment or place to celebrate these early works of Kurt Weill than here in Berlin in my first season with the Konzerthausorchester.”
The Kurt Weill Album, set for release 2nd August, features both of those symphonies, played with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, along with his celebrated “sung ballet” The Seven Deadly Sins.
“The two symphonies are not so often heard in concerts”, Mallwitz says. “We don’t really see Weill as a symphonic composer. It’s not on our radar in the concert world. I joke about these symphonies, especially the Second Symphony, everyone loves it and nobody knows it. Orchestras love to play it. Audiences love to hear it. But no one knows [the First Symphony] because it’s so rarely done. Weill himself has never heard it live. He never conducted it – he never could because he was a young student.
“The score ended up in Italy in a convent, with the nuns who hid it from the public. The first page was even torn off so that the name of this Jewish composer wouldn’t be discovered. At that time in Germany, Weill was among those whose books and scores were being burnt – he had go into exile because of his Jewish heritage. The symphony was only recovered years after Weill’s death, when his wife, his widow, Lotte Lenya, made a request in the Berlin Tagespiegel newspaper to ask for works of her late husband that were still somewhere around. And then this score was sent back and performed. The premiere only happened years after Weill’s death.”
Mallwitz speaks quickly, and with focus. A search for the right word in English (not her first language) never takes long and is resolved with precision, and questions about other subjects seem to find their way back to Weill. She stresses the significance of the First Symphony held for Weill and how even as it faded toward the horizon, he seems to have been concerned about it not being forgotten.
“We see how important it was for him that his second symphony had the name ‘Second Symphony’,” she says. “Bruno Walter, who premiered the second symphony, fell in love with this piece. He really believed in this piece. He took the piece everywhere. He premiered it in Amsterdam with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He took it on tour to the Netherlands. He took it to New York, to the New York Philharmonic, and later he took it to Vienna. Weill really had a fighter in the form of this famous conductor Bruno Walter.
“Walter tried to persuade Weill to change the name”, she continues. “He said, ‘People will only get it if you give this piece a more programmatic name’. Like Fantaisie Symphonique, it was called in France. For the American premiere, he even suggested to name it Three Night Scenes. Weill was always dead against that and said, ‘No, it’s a symphony’.”
It’s notable that Bruno Walter took Weill’s music to so many countries, as Weill himself would go on to live in different parts of Europe and ultimately in the United States, adapting to what he heard in each location. “He’s a citizen of the world”, Mallwitz says. “He came from Dessau to Berlin, then to Paris, and then to New York, and he wrote in all these different styles, even with the Broadway things and the stage things and the symphonies. And he really took all this experience of his life and put it into his music.
“He came to Berlin as a young man, to study with Busoni. And he was very interested to really learn all the old ways and techniques – to learn counterpoint and study the old masters. That’s why he started with a symphony. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Weill didn’t have to leave Germany, if maybe his life would have taken a completely different artistic direction. Maybe he would have composed many more symphonies in this style, because that was what he was going after: the depth, really, of the tradition of classical music, to be in line with that”.
The first and second symphonies were separated by 13 years. In 1934, when Weill composed the Second Symphony, he had only recently completed work on the bitingly satiric Seven Deadly Sins. The story of two sisters – one portrayed by a singer, one by a dancer, with the suggestion that they might be two aspects of the same woman – who travel across the United States in search of fortune but finding only sin (one for each city they visit), it would be Weill’s last major collaboration with his famed partner, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.
“Seven Deadly Sins is a masterpiece”, Mallwitz says. “I wanted to show on this album not only the composer of these two unknown symphonies, but also the side that we know of these stage masterpieces. The second symphony and The Seven Deadly Sins were composed at the same time. Even in some of the motives you hear, they’re quite close to each other. So I thought that's a good connection to put these three works in a context.”
The coming season will bring Mallwitz’s debuts with the Berliner Philharmoniker as well as the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, along with guest appearances in Madrid and Rotterdam. And, she says, she hopes to bring the Weill symphonies to audiences in concert sometime soon.
“The most important thing, I think, to him was to write music for people, to bring music to people”, she says. “It was the message of the music to tell people something, to make people care about it – maybe that’s why later in life he wrote more and more works for stage and for more popular genres, without losing the depth and complexity of absolute symphonic music. His later Broadway works sound like an extract of his early symphonies.
“I believe, in his first symphony, he was interested in this pure idea of humanity, of a people finding peace”, she continues apace. “He really had this message that he wanted to carry. And this is why this first symphony, with all its weird angles and complications, it has a very immediate direction into the heart of the listener. And you can feel listening to it that it’s so honest. It’s so raw. There's no showiness in it. He really cared about this message, and this makes it incredibly strong.
“We don’t have a letter from Weill where he outlines what the First Symphony means. We do know that there is a close programmatic connection to a play by Johannes R Becher”, she adds. “But I feel so strongly that, following Becher’s play, what Weill cared most about was this idea of humanity, of peace. Of a people searching for peace. Something that you want to reach, but you can’t really reach it. You can’t really grasp it, but you believe in it. And you don’t let go of this belief throughout all the turbulence of this symphony. I think you can hear this belief, this reassurance, manifest in the last chord of the symphony.”
Now available on STAGE+
Watch Joana Mallwitz and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin perform Kurt Weill’s First Symphony on STAGE+, the streaming service for classical music by Deutsche Grammophon.
See upcoming performances by Joana Mallwitz.
This article was sponsored by Deutsche Grammophon.
