The BBC's fascinating, problematic Kurt Weill weekend of concerts, films and talks at the Barbican ended where it began - with sexual intrigue and erotic shenanigans played out between quartets of feuding lovers. Der Protagonist - Weill's first opera, premiered in Dresden in 1926 - is about an actor who confuses illusion with reality and murders the sister he incestuously fancies when the quadrangular, partner-swapping drama in which he is acting runs hideously out of control. The Firebrand of Florence (New York, 1944) exposes the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and his self-assured, if ditsy girlfriend Angela to the machinations of the philandering Duke of Florence and his alienated, sex-starved duchess.
Whatever their inherent quality, both works confound expectations and are, to some extent, out on an artistic limb. Given its subject matter, one expects Der Protagonist to be an expressionistic scream-out, but its hysteria is shot through with whiffs of cool irony and edgy humour. Firebrand, hampered by a less than perfect Ira Gershwin text, aspires in places to a density and weight for which the Broadway musical wasn't ready. Both works have something else in common - they've slipped from view behind our abiding fascination with Weill's collaboration with Brecht, behind the image of Weill as the composer who defined the world of the Weimar republic.
The image stuck in Weill's lifetime and remains unshakeable. It led to tension during his collaboration with Fritz Lang on the 1938 film You and Me. Weill wanted assimilation and acceptance in America; Lang filmed a tribute to the Berlin years.
The only event during the weekend that was, significantly, packed to the rafters was Ute Lemper's late-night cabaret concert with the Matrix Ensemble and Robert Ziegler. Shedding a black velvet coat part-way through to mutate into a spangled deco diva, Lemper belted her way through a catalogue of Weill's best-known numbers, while a divinely decadent-looking audience yelled its head off.
Elsewhere, the weekend was a journey through the unknown, the lost, the abandoned Weill, with variable results. The 1927 one-acter Royal Palace, with a text by the surrealist poet Iwan Goll, proved to be a genuine lost masterpiece. A feminist tragi-comedy, it focuses on the figure of Dejanira (named after the mythic wife of Hercules), who rejects the selfishness of past, present and future lovers before teasingly transforming herself into a mermaid, a siren who will return to haunt the men who have abused her. The score, full of poised waltzes and ending with one of the best tangos ever written, is to die for - and it got a performance to match, glowingly conducted by Andrew Davis, with a radiant Janice Watson triumphant in the title role. It took everyone by surprise and deflected attention from the two events that were clearly planned as the weekend's main events: the unearthing of Firebrand and the resurrection of the 1934 operetta Der Kuhhandel.
The latter, which received a botched premiere in English at London's Savoy theatre, is one of Weill's weakest scores. He took Offenbach as his model, but where Offenbach is concise, Weill sprawls. Every number is at least one verse too long, dangerously blunting its grim arms-race satire, which neither a brilliant new translation by Jeremy Sams nor a punchy performance under Robert Ziegler could quite disguise. Firebrand, despite the presence of the amazing Rodney Gilfry - every inch the "famous stud" of the libretto - is a better score, though it's uneven and one wonders why it was chosen to represent Weill's Broadway years when the infinitely superior One Touch of Venus (written for Marlene Dietrich, though she never performed it) remains undiscovered by British audiences.
The Brecht collaboration was represented by two works more talked about than performed, the harrowing Berlin Requiem (composed for the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg) and Das Lindberghflug, a nailbiting adventure story about the famous first flight across the Atlantic. Both were sung with considerable ferocity by the BBC Symphony Chorus, while the excellent Thomas Randle was an eloquent Lindbergh who mourned "Red Rosa's" demise with heartfelt grief. Both works should be restored to the mainstream repertoire as soon as possible.Like Royal Palace, they belong there.
