By Steven Suskin
01 Oct 2000

While writing about Kurt Weill back in 1983, I came across eight numbers from Marie Galante. Sitting at the piano, I discovered that one -- "J'attends un navire" -- was absolutely superb; it remains one of my favorites. I couldn't make much of the others at the time, but I've always wondered what this score sounded like.

Weill fled Germany in 1933, stopping first in Paris. While there, he wrote five songs and incidental music for this play by Jacques Deval (best known hereabouts for Tovarich). Marie Galante opened and quickly closed, and Weill moved on to England en route to America. That was the end of Marie, although when Weill and Lenya recorded six songs in America in 1942, he included "J'attends un navire" -- which indicates that he must have liked it, too.

That song has become slightly familiar, as it is favored by all those chanteuses who record foreign-language Weill collections. But now the rest of the score has been recorded as well. I know that some Broadway musical fans find non-English Weill an acquired taste they haven't bothered to acquire, and I don't suppose they are about to start here. But if language is no barrier, this is a fascinating mini-score that captures Weill between Berlin and Broadway. "Le Grand Lustucru" is especially haunting, while "Les filles de Bordeaux" is also affecting. Only five of the selections are songs, per se, but Weill fans know that his "incidental music" is often stronger, musically, than many songs by his peers. Marie's "Scène au dancing," for example, is dazzling, and demonstrates -- presumably -- what Berlin cabaret music really sounded like.

The orchestrations are uncredited in the liner notes, but they are presumably by Weill (who usually provided his own), and they are wonderful. Listen to "Navire." Marie sings, hopelessly, of her dreams, to an ascending scale; the trombone, conversely, pulls her down to earth by counteracting with a descending scale. All the while, the song is driven by the insistently pulsating beat-beat-beat of the tom-tom. The lyrics are credited to Deval and Roger Fermay, but I believe this is mistaken. Fermay wrote a lyric (not recorded here) for a later song version of the "Tango," but as far as I know he had nothing whatsoever to do with Marie Galante.

The ten rare Marie selections are rounded out by five even more obscure songs from the unproduced Davy Crockett. Weill's first Broadway musical, Johnny Johnson, opened in November 1936. Despite some acclaim, the show lasted only eight weeks and resulted in no major offers for Weill. He finally settled on an adaptation of The Ballad of Davy Crockett, a decidedly non-commercial folk play about the legendary frontiersman who died at the Alamo. Hoffman Reynolds Hays, author of the original play, provided the lyrics. Work was interrupted when Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson and the powerful Playwrights Company invited Weill to compose the 1938 musical Knickerbocker Holiday.

That was the end of Davy, and probably just as well. Weill chose never to return to the project, although the piece seems similar -- in style, not in musical themes -- to his 1948 "folk opera" Down in the Valley. The Davy Crockett selections are of negligible interest, but the reason to get this album is to discover Marie. Themes from both scores will sound familiar to keen-eared Weill fans, as the composer reused them in subsequent work. And why not? Certainly, Marie Galante was heard by very few audiences and Davy Crockett was never performed.

The songs are sung by Joy Bogen, whom we are told in the liner notes was Lotte Lenya's only student (whatever that signifies). It is unfair to ask a lone soprano to sing all the songs, especially when most of the Davy solos were written for men. However, she does extremely well on "J'attends un navire" and Marie's other songs. Victor C. Symonette is the conductor, and he does an especially good job with the French selections. The conductor has Weill in his blood; his mother, Lys Symonette, was Weill's musical assistant on his final shows. She serves as vice-president of the Kurt Weill Foundation, and knowledgeably helps protect the Weill/Lenya legacy.

So if the newly remastered The Threepenny Opera offers enhanced enjoyment, Marie Galante makes an unexpected treat for Weill fans.

-- Steven Suskin, author of the new Third Edition of "Show Tunes" (from Oxford University Press) and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. Prior ON THE RECORD columns can be accessed in the Features section along the left-hand side of the screen. He can be reached by E-mail at Ssuskin@aol.com