Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill (1900-1950) was a German composer. After studying music with the distinguished composer Ferruccio Busoni, Weill joined a leftist theater group in Berlin in 1922, through which he met his future wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, and the playwright Bertolt Brecht, with whom he collaborated on several plays, most notably The Threepenny Opera. Like other composers in Germany at the time, he was influenced by American jazz and used it intermittently throughout his work.

A Jew, he fled Germany with Lenya in 1933, spending two years in Paris, where he wrote songs in French. In 1935, he settled in New York City, where he wrote the opera Street Scene and Broadway musicals with a series of collaborators. He died of a heart attack in 1950.