Weill, not vile
Last week, I had the joyous task of creating a subject bibliography, my first assignment for my distance-learning MSc in Library and Information Studies. The bibliography could be on any subject we chose, but could only cover material from the last five years and had to be arranged with a particular audience in mind. Of course, I absolutely had to do this on a musical theatre subject, but the options are rather limited in this regard, as the only musical theatre people who tend to receive more than cursory academic attention are Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill and Stephen Sondheim. I chose to compile a bibliography on the American theatre works of Kurt Weill, most famous for his German piece Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), source of ‘Mack the Knife’. Why the American works? Well, I don’t speak German, so I’ve always found it harder to connect with the works in that language. Must try harder, I suppose.
This exercise was simultaneously fascinating and boring. Searching for information can be interesting, and the hunt becomes a sort of game, but it can also be very frustrating to spend an age wrestling with a particularly high-profile data source only to find absolutely nothing of value. I also discovered things about Kurt Weill that I never knew before, largely through use of the Kurt Weill Foundation‘s website, but also through reading extracts from some of the books and articles which I discovered. I hadn’t known, for instance, that he provided music for a number of political pageants while in America, generally connected to his Jewish roots. And I had forgotten that he’d been working on a musical version of Huckleberry Finn when he died, a concept that truly makes the mind boggle.
The Singing Librarian Talks 