KURT WEILL
Son of a synagogue cantor, Kurt Weill showed soon his predisposition and affection towards music. He studied with Engelbert Humperdinck and Ferrucio Busoni, becoming one of the prominent figures of Germany's musical panorama at the end of the twenties. The Cantata Der Neue Orpheus (1925) marks the turning point of his music; the use of american jazz influences, and his encounter with Bertolt Brecht, in 1927, are the definitive componentes which take to his career outburst. The premieres of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) and Der Silbersee (1932) earn him the enmity and repulse of the nazi regime; Weill flees from Germany in March of 1933, and after a two-year stay in Paris he stablished in the United States. There he becomes one of the keys figures in the American Musical spread, if also he never left to represent an image hardly resembled to the conventional Broadway environment.
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