- We Shall Never Die
We Will Never Die was a dramatic pageant staged before an audience of 40,000 at
Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943, to raise public awareness of the mass murder of the European Jews. The pageant starredEdward G. Robinson andPaul Muni and subsequently traveled to other cities.Kurt Weill (1900-l950) was a leading composer inGermany and subsequently for theBroadway theatre .Moss Hart (l904-l961) was a leading Broadway dramatist.Weill and Hart had recently scored a big Broadway success with
Lady in the Dark (lyrics byIra Gershwin ) and at the time were supporting the war effort by collaborating on "Lunch Hour Follies", a series of variety shows staged by theAmerican Theatre Wing to boost the morale of workers in factories manufacturing war materials. It is unlikely that Weill andBen Hecht had met during Hecht's reporting stint for theChicago Daily News inBerlin in the early 1920s, but Weill had identified Hecht as early as 1934 as a potential American collaborator. It is probable that they met soon after Weill came to the U.S. in 1935 to work on "The Eternal Road", a huge biblical spectacle staged inNew York byMax Reinhardt with music by Weill and a libretto byFranz Werfel . Weill was also eventually connected socially to Hecht through his fellow neighbors living inRockland County , includingBurgess Meredith ,Helen Hayes , and her husbandCharles MacArthur , who was Hecht's frequent collaborator.Weill had all the necessary credentials to collaborate on "We Will Never Die". As a German emigrant, son of a
cantor , student ofFerruccio Busoni , and a born theater composer, he had mastered techniques for the effective use of music in both pageants and radio. He had used theater to highlight social concerns throughout his career. Although often characterized as a political composer because of his association in Germany withBertolt Brecht , close analysis of his music and writings reveal him to be more concerned with the human condition than with political causes. His willingness to work on "We Will Never Die" was probably motivated more by the plight of the Jews in Europe than by a conviction to join Hecht in supportingPeter Bergson and theCommittee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews .Although largely a
pacifist in his early years, Weill was deeply committed to supporting the American war effort and demonstrating his allegiance to the U.S. In 1941 he provided music for "Fun to be Free". This earlier pageant byBen Hecht andCharles MacArthur was staged atMadison Square Garden and sponsored by Fight for Freedom Inc., a group that supported total U.S. involvement in the European war. He also wrotepropaganda songs (some for broadcast in Germany); incidental music for Your Navy, a radio program written byMaxwell Anderson and jointly commissioned byCBS andNBC ; music for "Salute to France", a U.S. propaganda film directed byJean Renoir ; and four patriotic melodramas forHelen Hayes , recorded byRCA Victor under the title "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory".When approached by Hecht to collaborate on "We Will Never Die", Weill was busy developing a script with Bella Spewack for a Broadway show based on "One Man's Venus" to star
Marlene Dietrich (a project that did not materialize but that would later develop with other collaborators into "One Touch of Venus"). After reading Hecht's script, Weill decided to reuse some music from "The Eternal Road" as well as other preexisting music that would have meaning to the audience. As a result, the score is not a formal composition but a collection of incidental music compiled to highlight the dramatic shape of Hecht's script.Weill brought composer and conductor
Isaac von Grove to the project to lead the 50-pieceNBC Orchestra , prepare the choruses, and deal with musical logistics. Having conducted 153 performances of "The Eternal Road", Grove was the perfect musician to adapt excerpts from the work to the requirements of "We Will Never Die." (Grove had also conducted Weill's music for "Railroads on Parade", which played five performances a day during the 1939-40 New YorkWorld's Fair ).The
Hollywood Bowl performance on July 21, 1943, which was broadcast on NBC nationwide, was conducted by well-known film composerFranz Waxman . Unfortunately, none of the performing materials have survived, which would have provided clues as to how much the score was altered to accommodate the requirements of subsequent productions after the first two performances at Madison Square Garden in New York. Although this Hollywood Bowl broadcast describes the production as an exact replica of the New York production, the recorded text differs in some respects from Weill's copy of the script. One can hear music from "The Eternal Road" adapted as background music for the spoken texts and an orchestral version of Miriam's Song used for incidental music. Also included are sundry fanfares, successions of sustained chords, and fragments of Nazi music countered by arrangements of theHatikvah and the Warschawianka. The second section, Jews in the War, features a sequence of national anthems and melodies, includingTipperary and the "Red Army Song" byLev Knipper , which is also known as "Cavalry of the Steppes".Because most of the musical sources have vanished, it is very difficult to reconstruct the music for "We Will Never Die" short of transcribing what can be imperfectly heard on the radio recording.
References
*Citron, Atay. "Pagentry and Theatre in the Service of Jewish Nationalism in the United Sates, 1933-1646." Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1989.
*Drew, David. Kurt Weill: A Handbook. Berkeley: University of California, 1987.
*Farneth, David with Elmar Juchem and Dave Stein. Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents. New York: Overlook: 2000.
*Hecht, Ben. We Will Never Die. Two unpublished versions of the script bearing Weill's annotations. Weill-Lenya Research Center: Series 20 and Yale Collection, folder 475.
*Symonette, Lys and Kim H. Kowalke, trans. and ed. Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Berkeley: University of California, 1996.
*Whitfield, Stephen J. "The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946." American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (1996): 221-251.
External links
* United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007047 Kurt Weill and "We Will Never Die"]
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