KURT WEILL

KURT WEILL
DIE SIEBEN TODSÜNDEN - CHANSONS (1993)
320 KBPS

Nazism committed another crime against humanity that we cannot even start to measure eighty years later. Germany was in 1933 a phenomenal melting pot for all arts and Nazism stopped all that in three directions. First it forbade all artistic simmering, boiling over at times or deep frying that was flourishing in the country. Then they caught, deported and got rid of quite many artists. Finally they forced a great number of them into exile and when they came back, if they came back, they were never able to live it over and leave it behind. Bertold Brecht is the best example of this waste doubled with the cold war wasting engine: he was trapped in an impasse in East Berlin. These artists, of whom Kurt Weill is one master, could have invented German jazz. The present CD shows how far this composer had gone and how far he could have gone if he had not been cut off from his roots. Die Faulzeit is a marvel in itself. It expresses laziness with such an energy that the antagonistic music seems to tell us that to be lazy is a lot more energy-consuming than working full time. Der Stolz expressed by this woman and the hollywoodian snobbish music is the show window of capitalism stuffed with aristocratic vanity. Die Zorn and its voices that pull and push in all directions. And there comes a woman again to ride on the folly of all these men and ride she does. Die Völlerei and its deep slow constant all-sensory call to eat, to eat, to eat again. It sounds like some pulling down, twisting and wringing of all your insides never going anywhere and yet coming from everywhere. It turns into a self-satisfied lamentation. Die Unzucht is brilliant music to take you to the funfair of big boobs and fat legs, rippling stomachs and hard desires. But a guitar gets you down into a dark cave where some musical sentences are cut short or just can't go up without dropping again, now and then, with some notes that pull you down or give you the taste of the asphalt. Die Habsucht. Look at them looking around with greedy eyes. One is a miser, the others would-be misers and the last ones real thieves. Follow the violins and you will end up on a grill, the grill over the fire of the desire never to lose what you don't have and are going to have by taking it definitely, stealing it if necessary. Der Neid is there. The woman can yell and gloat and grab. What she is and the others are not is seen as a dramatic tragedy. She wants to be what the others are. So she has to destroy in order to be. And she goes on a triumphant war path to conquer what she wants to be, have, own, because she is not, has not, owns not all that. The music is that of an army of looters and killers at her own, disposal and sure enough there is the male army that is going to pound upon the world for the sake of that insatiable jealous being. Kurt Weill could and should have written a full opera or film or even an oratorio on these deadly sins. The best aspect of this musician is that he could have become a genius of a German brand of jazz if he could have continued working in his own country. He had to live up with a challenge: to move operatic and even Wagnerian voices towards a more emotional, closer and jazzy way of speaking and singing. He was thrown into the world though he needed to keep his umbilical cord uncut with his mother Germany. The sad element is that all that could sound like a lie or a misconception because the exile only came after the break up separation with and from Brecht. He might have been able to find new adventures in Germany if 1933 had not occurred, or in Europe. Imagine his music with the genial films by Fritz Lang, or Murnau and a voice like that of Marlene Dietrich. But... Or ... should he have been able to develop the obvious Jewish inspiration of his.

Die sieben todsünden
1. Prolog
2. Faulheit
3. Stolz
4. Zorn
5. Völlerei
6. Unzucht-Lust
7. Habsucht
8. Neid
9. Epilog
Chansons
10. Complainte de la Seine
11. Youkali, tango habanera
12. Nanna's lied
13. Wie lange noch ?
14. Es regnet
15 Berlin im licht-song