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Professor Rebecca Schmid

Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence

Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence

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  • More about Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence


Rebecca Schmid's book explores how Kurt Weill's formal innovations laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, catalyzing an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre.

Format: Hardback
Length: 226 pages
Publication date: 20 June 2023
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd


Theodor Adorno famously declared that the model of Kurt Weill could not be replicated. However, Weill's stage works set an inescapable precedent for composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca Schmid examines how Weill's formal innovations, particularly in his opera reform, laid the groundwork for operas and musicals by Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, although both composers resisted or downplayed his aesthetic contribution to American tradition. A comparative analysis based on Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and other modes of intertextuality reveals that the principles of Weill's opera reform would catalyze an indigenous movement in sophisticated, socially engaged music theatre.

Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence focuses on works that represent different phases of Weill's mission to renew the genre of opera, evolving from Die Dreigroschenoper to the musical play Lady in the Dark and the Broadway Opera Street Scene. Blitzstein and Bernstein, in turn, defied formal boundaries with The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, and West Side Story. This was part of a short-lived movement in mid-twentieth-century America that coincided with a renaissance for Weill's German-period works following the premiere of Blitzstein's translation, The Threepenny Opera, under Bernstein's baton. The unpublished A Pray by Blecht, for which Bernstein rejoined Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, his collaborators on West Side Story, deepens the connection of Bernstein's aesthetic to Weill.


Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781648250606

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