Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill was a German-born American composer whose stage works fused popular song idioms with modernist harmony and biting social commentary, producing some of the most enduring theatre music of the twentieth century. He was born Kurt Julian Weill on March 2, 1900, in Dessau, in the German state of Anhalt, the third of four children of Albert Weill, a cantor at the city's synagogue, and Emma Ackermann. He absorbed Jewish liturgical music and German Romantic concert repertoire from an early age.

He studied composition in Berlin under Engelbert Humperdinck and later, from 1921, with Ferruccio Busoni, while supporting himself as an opera coach and accompanist. His one-act operas of the mid-1920s established him as a leading younger modernist.

His collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht produced Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in 1928, a Berlin sensation whose "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" became internationally known as "Mack the Knife." The pair followed it with Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) and the sung ballet Die sieben Todsünden (1933).

Forced from Germany by the Nazi regime, he settled in the United States in 1935 with his wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, and devoted himself to Broadway. He composed Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Lady in the Dark (1941), One Touch of Venus (1943), Street Scene (1947), and Lost in the Stars (1949), working with Maxwell Anderson, Ira Gershwin, and Langston Hughes. He died of a heart attack on April 3, 1950, in New York City, aged 50.

The name Kurt is a German masculine given name, a short form of Konrad, meaning "bold counsel," carried throughout his musical career.