Maxwell Anderson, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, Elmer
Rice, Oscar Hammerstein II, Maurice Magre, Ira Gershwin,
Bertolt Brecht, Howard Dietz, Ogden Nash, Roger Fernay—what
do all these writers have in common? The answer is Kurt
Weill. Weill (1900–1950) collaborated with an
extraordinarily diverse array of lyricists during the short
but intense composing career that took him from Berlin to
New York to Hollywood. The partnership with his countryman
Brecht produced not only the famous Threepenny Opera but
Happy End, the opera Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahoganny, and the Balanchine “ballet with singing” The
Seven Deadly Sins. During his American period Weill wrote
the music for some groundbreaking musicals, notably Lady
in the Dark (with Gershwin), Street Scene (with Hughes
and Rice), and One Touch of Venus (with Nash; it was to be
Nash’s only successful Broadway venture).

Upon reading Speak Low (When You Speak of Love): The
Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya (1996), the director
Harold Prince realized that it might be possible to relate
the couple’s compelling and rather bizarre romance
dramatically, through the use of the great Weill songbook.
He and the playwright Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy, The
Last Night of Ballyhoo) developed the project, with Uhry
telling the story in dialogue and interposing Weill numbers
wherever he felt they enhanced a moment or an emotion within
the tale. The result is LoveMusik, starring Michael
Cerveris as Weill and Donna Murphy as Lenya.