Work of the Week - Kurt Weill: Magic Night
On March 5th, Kurt Weill’s Magic Night will be presented at the Kurt Weill Festival 2011 in Dessau, Germany. The production is directed by Nina Kurzeja and will be performed by the Arte Ensemble Hannover.
The world premiere of Magic Night took place in Berlin in 1925, but in March 1933--when the composer fled the Nazis--he left the score in Germany. Fortunately, the librettist, Wladimir Boritsch, had taken a set of orchestral parts with him to the United States to prepare for a performance in New York. After Boritsch’s death in 1954 his widow gave all his manuscripts and documents including the orchestral parts to Yale University. The collection of papers should have been catalogued but instead were forgotten for over fifty years until in 2005 an inventory of the archive led to the music's re-discovery. In 2008 Peter Juchem and Andrew Kuster created a critical score, which was published as part of Weill’s complete music.
In Weill’s “Children’s Pantomime” a fairy brings two children’s toys and stuffed animals to life by singing. The toys start to dance and embark on their own adventures while the children try to keep them quiet and under control.
Musically Weill presents himself here as already a master of mixing different styles: giddy waltzs, defiant marches, old and contemporary dances, jazz, salon music, modernism and neoclassicism. All are transferred in a mysterious musical aura, to which one could listen for hours. (NMZ online, 2010)
Two years after the re-discovery of the score, the Bachakademie Stuttgart performed the work for the first time since the pre-1933 Berlin performances in its original form at their Music Festival. In Dessau, this same production will be presented twice as both an afternoon family concert and as an evening performance.
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