His Legacy Lives On

Thursday: A reconstruction of Harry Smith’s bizarre four-screen film “Mahagonny,” in which Kurt Weill’s opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” is reinterpreted through scenes of ‘70s New York, is screened for the first time at the Getty Center.

Friday: A daylong symposium at the Getty explores Smith’s “Mahagonny,” concluding in the evening with a concert by Patti Smith (who makes an appearance in the film). The same evening, an opera singer, Angelina Reaux, who made a name for herself a decade ago as a riveting Weill interpreter, directs and stars in a small but striking production of “The Threepenny Opera” in Santa Barbara.

Sunday: As a break from the Ojai Festival survey of late Beethoven and Shostakovich string quartets, popular cabaret singer Ute Lemper makes a rare daylight appearance for a morning recital that revolves around Bertolt Brecht and Weill. A typical Weill weekend? Maybe not, but everywhere you look, there are traces of the composer.

For instance, the blockbuster Andy Warhol show at the Museum of Contemporary Art has everyone talking about the merging of high and low and about how art images brand themselves. Yes, of course, Warhol gave the visual art world a shock of the new. But Kurt was there long before Andy.

The Doors sang, “Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar” in the ‘60s; Brecht and Weill wrote it in 1927. When Bobby Darin put “Mack the Knife” on the hit parade in the late ‘50s, it was just one more example of the groundbreaking Brecht-Weill high-low breakdown.

Even a connection between Warhol and Weill is not farfetched. I can imagine the young Andy, a hustling fashion illustrator, as a small character in Weill’s Broadway hit “Lady in the Dark,” a musical about a fashion magazine editor. (Had Warhol been in it, by the way, he would have seen Stravinsky and Richard Rodgers jostling each other backstage, trying to be the first to congratulate the composer on opening night.) Yet another connection: Lou Reed--who rose to stardom as a member of the Warhol-linked rock band Velvet Underground--once recorded a curiously credible version of “September Song” from another Weill show.

The range of Weill interpreters may be unprecedented. At one extreme, worn-out German rock singer Nina Hagen makes a startling appearance on a terrific recent recording of “The Threepenny Opera,” conducted by noted Viennese composer HK Gruber. At another, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and early music specialist John Eliot Gardiner made a not-bad Weill recording several years ago that included “Seven Deadly Sins.” I happen to have a fondness for Marianne Faithfull’s not unfaithful version of it.

Indeed, under every musical stone seems to lurk a Weillian. David Atherton, artistic director of the Mainly Mozart Festival that that got underway in San Diego over the weekend, has a first-rate recent recording of the two Weill symphonies. On the other hand, you can also hear Weill’s influence on songs in recent albums by Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and Patti Smith.

But for all that, it is still possible to get Weill wrong. And sad to say, the past Weill weekend was more travesty than tribute, beginning with the wrongheaded restoration of Harry Smith’s film.

Avant-garde filmmaker, alchemist, artist, folk-music ethnomusicologist, oddball collector and who-knows-what-else Smith made “Mahagonny” because of his obsession with the opera. He apparently listened to it endlessly in his room at the Chelsea Hotel and then came up with a half-cocked idea that he might make a film of the opera based upon an elaborate mathematical analysis he undertook of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous work, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” which is etched on a large glass. The connection is vague at best, although Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” as the work is sometimes known, and the city of Mahagonny represent sex machines of sorts.

What is interesting about Smith’s film--which uses the 1956 recording of the opera, with Lotte Lenya, as its soundtrack--is not the imagery or the elaborate structure. The shots of Manhattan 30 years ago and of underground celebrities (notably Allen Ginsberg) in Smith’s room are enjoyable enough, as is the homemade animation that uses cigarettes, toys, drugs.

The most original aspect of the project is that Smith intended the film as a “performance” of the opera. He hoped to present it as four films projected on pool tables set up in a boxing ring (the “Mahagonny-Songspiel,” Brecht and Weill’s experimental predecessor to the opera, was staged in a boxing ring). That never happened, but it was first screened in New York “live” on four screens, the operators syncing four 16-millimeter projectors as best they could. Smith accompanied the film with his own reel-to-reel tape dub of the opera LPs.

The restoration includes professional synchronization of the films to a terrible digital version of the original recording. At the Getty, it was played at high volume, as if it were a John Williams score meant for a summer blockbuster. The recorded performance was highly flawed in the first place, and here sounded grating, unmusical, untrue to Smith and Weill. Each element, the four films and soundtrack, needs independence, a life of its own, not slick synchronization.

The good news is that, in making the restoration, the Harry Smith Archives now have the original materials in good shape, and a true performance of the film is a possibility.

In a very different way, Lemper also killed Weill with too much slickness. There are some who enjoy her shtick (she had many in the Ojai crowd Sunday morning asking for more). That she is not a very good singer is not necessarily a deadly sin with Weill (we have Lenya as the model for that). That she turns every deliciously cynical phrase into something cute, however, is a very great one. Her accompanist was classical guitarist Eliot Fisk, whose strumming along was a musical non sequitur.

Curiously, the Weill that felt like Weill--raw, nasty, full of deep meaning--was found in the most modest of the weekend’s enterprises. In Victoria Hall, a Santa Barbara church converted into a small theater, Reaux offered a startling re-creation of “The Threepenny Opera,” in the English adaptation by Marc Blitzstein. There were no sets. The cast looked like a kinky cross between the Addams Family and the Simpsons.

Baritone Michael Sokol was a fine Macheath. Reaux was a hilarious Mrs. Peachum. The rest of the cast was vocally uneven. There was a not very good four-piece band. But every number was staged in the audience’s face, and a very familiar work shocked and stunned all over again.

Reaux, who came to Weill fame with a show she did in New York in the early ‘90s, “Stranger Here Myself,” has been little-seen of late (her last major local appearance was singing “Seven Deadly Sins” at the Ojai Festival seven years ago). She is still as strikingly effective and original a singer as she has always been. Now she shows a real talent for direction.

After the show, Santa Barbara had suddenly turned cold and misty. It was exactly the right atmosphere for “Threepenny Opera.” There was no question that Weill was in the air that dark night.