September Song

Music: Kurt Weill

The Word of the Week this time around is “September.” So what song comes to mind? If you guessed “September Song,” you are correct! The composer of this tune was not a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, although he did live in New York in the heyday of those writers and collaborated with lyricists such as Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein. Kurt Weill arrived in the United States in 1933, a refugee from — and target of — the Nazi madness which had descended on his native land. Once in the United States, he thoroughly embraced American musical theater, where he immediately found a welcome place for his considerable talent. Not just a classically trained composer, Kurt Weill had studied with some of the European masters of his day. In addition to composing music in all of the classical forms, Weill worked for decades on his project of “reforming opera” by introducing it into musical theater, a venue through which he hoped to bring high musical art to the masses. Fittingly, his most widely…