Kurt Weill as Modernist

Abstract

Kurt Weill seems the opposite of a Modernist when compared with Schoenberg, or with the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s Doktor Faustus–composers who seem furiously to reject the warm-hearted, gemütlich aesthetic of much nineteenth-century art. But in such works as Die Dreigroschenoper and Der Jasager, Weill, like Thomas Mann himself, shows himself a Modernist of a sophisticated sort by devising a new sort of irony, an irony that does not reject bourgeois values but instead dwells in an interspace between derision and warmth.