The Days Grow Short: The Life And Music Of Kurt Weill
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Few lives in twentieth-century music were as dramatically bifurcated as that of Kurt Weill — a German-Jewish composer who rose to international fame in the cabarets and theatres of Weimar Berlin before reinventing himself as a celebrated voice of the American Broadway stage. The Days Grow Short chronicles the full arc of Weill's extraordinary journey, from his early collaborations with Bertolt Brecht that produced the scandalous and enduring The Threepenny Opera, to his later American works that cemented his reputation as a master of popular musical theatre. Ronald Sanders presents a richly researched and compelling narrative that traces the artistic evolution of a man forever caught between the high and the popular, the political and the melodic. Sanders writes with a biographer's precision and a music critic's ear, illuminating the cultural and historical forces — exile, war, the rise of fascism — that shaped Weill's creative output at every turn. The biography situates Weill within the broader landscape of modernist music, drawing meaningful connections between his European roots and his American ambitions, and unpacking the often-contested legacy of a composer who defied easy categorisation. For anyone who has ever wondered how a man who wrote Mack the Knife also composed groundbreaking works of musical theatre on two continents, Sanders's account offers a revelatory answer — and raises fresh questions about the very nature of artistic identity.
Author: Ronald Sanders
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Few lives in twentieth-century music were as dramatically bifurcated as that of Kurt Weill — a German-Jewish composer who rose to international fame in the cabarets and theatres of Weimar Berlin before reinventing himself as a celebrated voice of the American Broadway stage. The Days Grow Short chronicles the full arc of Weill's extraordinary journey, from his early collaborations with Bertolt Brecht that produced the scandalous and enduring The Threepenny Opera, to his later American works that cemented his reputation as a master of popular musical theatre. Ronald Sanders presents a richly researched and compelling narrative that traces the artistic evolution of a man forever caught between the high and the popular, the political and the melodic. Sanders writes with a biographer's precision and a music critic's ear, illuminating the cultural and historical forces — exile, war, the rise of fascism — that shaped Weill's creative output at every turn. The biography situates Weill within the broader landscape of modernist music, drawing meaningful connections between his European roots and his American ambitions, and unpacking the often-contested legacy of a composer who defied easy categorisation. For anyone who has ever wondered how a man who wrote Mack the Knife also composed groundbreaking works of musical theatre on two continents, Sanders's account offers a revelatory answer — and raises fresh questions about the very nature of artistic identity.