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\u201cWherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kurt Weill wrote those words after returning from a visit to Germany in 1947. I read them aloud at least a dozen times during the Kurt Weill festival in El Paso last week. Every time I invited my listeners to consider whether or not they still apply.<\/p>\n
Because Weill was an exemplary immigrant, he furnishes a singularly timely topic for the NEH-funded Music Unwound<\/a> consortium I am fortunate to direct. \u201cKurt Weill\u2019s America\u201d has so far been produced at DePauw University and the Brevard Festival<\/a>. It will travel to Chapel Hill and to Buffalo. But El Paso \u2013 a Mexican-American city on the Mexican border \u2013 is where we always knew it would most hit home.<\/p>\n Thanks to Music Unwound, El Paso hosts the closest collaboration between an orchestra, a university, and a community anywhere in the US. The orchestra is the El Paso Symphony and the university is the purest embodiment of the American Dream I know: the University of Texas\/El Paso, known as UTEP. The vast majority of the students are local. Most are the first in their families to go to college. All high school graduates who apply are admitted. UTEP anchors El Paso.<\/p>\n The festival lasted seven days and included five concerts, three master classes, seven classroom presentations, and a visit to a semi-rural high school. Lots of questions are being asked these days about the relevance of orchestras to American communities. Those questions have been silenced in El Paso.<\/p>\n The first undergraduate UTEP class I visited was Selfa Chew\u2019s \u201cAfro-Mexican History.\u201d She is herself Mexican\/Chinese\/Japanese, an authority on the fate of Japanese Mexicans during World War II. I told Weill\u2019s story: a Jewish cantor\u2019s son, born in 1900, he was the foremost German operatic composer of his generation. He fled Hitler and wound up in New York, where he re-invented himself as a leading Broadway composer before dying young in 1950. Weill considered himself an American from day one. He did not wish to consort with other German immigrants. He told Time<\/em> Magazine: \u201cAmericans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here. I\u2019m not.\u201d<\/p>\n The immediacy with which Professor Chew\u2019s students engaged with this story was electrifying. One student asked with a trembling voice: how was Weill able to do it? She missed Mexico. Another wanted to know if Weill in America ever composed music that alluded to his German past. Not that I know of, I said. The students had me thinking \u00a0about Weill in new ways.<\/p>\n On Friday afternoon a UTEP Music \u201cconvocation\u201d featured the El Paso Symphony\u2019s exceptional guest soloists \u2013 William Sharp and Lisa Vroman \u2013 singing Weill. Bill sang \u201cThe Dirge for Two Veterans,\u201d a patriotic setting of Walt Whitman in response to Pearl Harbor. I introduced this performance by screening FDR\u2019s \u201cday of infamy\u201d speech, declaring war on Japan. Brian Yothers, from UTEP\u2019s English faculty, gave a 10-minute talk on Whitman and why Weill would have found this iconic American a kindred spirit. Two UTEP vocalists sang \u201cHow Can You Tell an American?,\u201d composed by Weill three years into his American period. The students keenly appreciated the song\u2019s answer: you can\u2019t tell Americans what to do.<\/p>\n I would call this presentation an exemplary humanities public program in miniature. When our 80 minutes expired, no one got up to leave. I am now accustomed to this kind of response in El Paso. The students are\u00a0the hungriest I know. There is no sense of entitlement to get in the way.<\/p>\n Bill and Lisa sang and coached at UTEP throughout the week. Brian addressed three Music classes.<\/p>\n The central event was an EPSO subscription concert, given twice. The first half explored Weill in Europe; the main work was the Weill\/Brecht Seven Deadly Sins<\/em> (1933) with Lisa as both Annas. Part two was Weill in America: the four Whitman songs sung by Bill as a potent cycle; a Broadway medley to close. This was music as sanguine as Weill\/Brecht is cheeky.<\/p>\n What was Weill about? We posed the question with a scripted exegesis and a continuous visual track. Here\u2019s an excerpt, i<\/a>ncluding Weill\u2019s own voice and his 1938 song \u201cNowhere To Go But Up.\u201d Our host and screen also allowed us to ambitiously contextualize the Whitman songs as an immigrant\u2019s charged response to the bombing of the American fleet, and situate the sui generis Seven Deadly Sins<\/em> \u2013 a work that can easily confound \u2013 within Weimar culture: its barbed aesthetics and politics; the \u00a0assaultive paintings of Otto Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.<\/p>\n After that came \u201cI\u2019m a Stranger Here Myself\u201d \u2013 a joint presentation of UTEP\u2019s Opera and Theatre programs. Cherry Duke, director of Opera UTEP, wrote in a program note: \u201cWith the prevalence of division, xenophobia and fear in today\u2019s news, I was struck by similar themes in many of Weill\u2019s works. He seems to ask the question: Who exactly is the stranger, the outsider, the exile?\u201d Weill\u2019s songs, and a chunk of his 1946 Broadway opera Street Scene<\/em>, were interspersed with excerpts from Brecht\u2019s Mother Courage<\/em>, and from the 1929 Elmer Rice play upon which Street Scene<\/em> the opera was based. These juxtapositions registered powerfully. Even more powerful was a recitation of \u201cLet America be America Again\u201d (1935) by Langston Hughes, who collaborated with Weill on Street Scene<\/em>. It reads in part:<\/p>\n Let America be America again.<\/p>\n Let it be the dream it used to be. . . .<\/p>\n (America never was America to me.)<\/p>\n . . .<\/p>\n I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,<\/p>\n I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.<\/p>\n I am the red man driven from the land,<\/p>\n I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek\u2014<\/p>\n And finding only the same old stupid plan<\/p>\n Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.<\/p>\n The show began hypnotically, with a student clarinetist, Aaron Gomez, \u00a0performing his own solo version of \u201cSpeak Low,\u201d a rendition that eloquently discovered Jewish\/Yiddish roots.<\/p>\n The entire week was saturated by a density of discourse and inquiry about the American experience that relentlessly targeted the present moment.<\/p>\n I will never forget the testimony of a Jewish El Paso resident who remembered her childhood in Sioux Falls, where her father sold automobiles and supported the local NAACP. Her family had to house Harry Belafonte because no hotel would take him. Black workers were resented as outsiders. Anti-semitism was virulent. Her father\u2019s favorite recordings included Weill\u2019s anti-apartheid Lost in the Stars<\/em>. He himself used to sing \u201cSeptember Song.\u201d Only now, she told us, did she understand why.<\/p>\n I had my own \u201cSeptember Song\u201d epiphany during my week in El Paso. It was and is one of Kurt Weill\u2019s two most popular Broadway songs, the other being \u201cSpeak Low.\u201d We heard Bill Sharp sing it \u2013 unforgettably \u2013 with the El Paso Symphony. The Hudson Shad \u2013 a one-of-a-kind male vocal quartet long associated with Weill \u2013 offered a doo-wop a cappella version of \u201cSpeak Low.\u201d When a student named Jose, in Selfa Chew\u2019s class, brought home to me the riddle that Weill in his American music never looked back, I recalled a conversation I once had with Lotte Lenya when I had the opportunity to interview her for the New York Times<\/em>. She speculated that for Weill \u201cnever look back\u201d was not only a strategy of renewal, but a way of suppressing intrusive memories, both good and bad. It cannot be a coincidence that both \u201cSeptember Song\u201d and \u201cSpeak Low\u201d course with a commanding nostalgia.<\/p>\n But it’s a long, long while from May to December<\/p>\n And the days grow short when you reach September<\/p>\n Weill was still a young man when he set those lyrics. Do not those signature Weill songs sublimate personal retrospection?<\/p>\n The quarterback for the El Paso Weill festival was Frank Candelaria, who as Associate Provost at UTEP has the vision and persistence to make big things happen. (Next fall, he becomes Dean of the Arts at SUNY Purchase.). Frank is an El Paso native, the first member of his family to obtain what is called \u201chigher education\u201d — Oberlin and Yale. He left a tenured position at UT\/Austin to return to El Paso five years ago. He expected the Weill festival to catch fire in El Paso, but the intimacy with which it penetrated personal lives took him by surprise. On the final day he said to me: \u201cI learned a lot about my own city and how strongly people identify as Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings me to my final vignette. Once again a visit to Eastlake High School proved a humbling experience. It serves a semi-rural \u201ccolonia.\u201d Of the school\u2019s 2,200 predominantly Hispanic students, 69 per cent are \u201ceconomically disadvantaged.\u201d Frank and I visited Eastlake last year for \u201cCopland and Mexico.\u201d I described that visit in this space<\/a>.<\/p>\n Again some 300 students were taken out of their classes for an hour-long assembly. When I entered the auditorium I was applauded \u2013 I was remembered. I spoke about Kurt Weill and immigration, I shared my clip of FDR<\/a> declaring war, I played a recording<\/a> of \u201cDirge for Two Veterans.\u201d A girl raised her hand to tell us that she had wept twice during the song \u2013 the parts where Whitman and Weill describe moonlight overlooking the twin graves of the two Civil War soldiers, a father and son. Then I played a Frank Sinatra recording of \u201cSeptember Song,\u201d after which the students requested another one. So I played Sinatra singing \u201cSpeak Low.\u201d<\/p>\n Afterward, the East Lake Chorus asked to sing for me. They chose the \u201cStar-Spangled Banner.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n