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Edward Jablonski

During his lifetime, Alan Jay Lerner received every imaginable award in American musical theater, and rightly so: As the lyricist of such astonishing Broadway successes as Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot, he was one of its architects. He was also one of its last greats, never quite able to regain his footing once the face of Broadway changed for good in the 1960s. Here, noted scholar of musical theater Edward Jablonski tells the story of Lerner's career and of his personal life, filling in the cracks purposely left open in Lerner's own autobiography. A well-off child of the Depression, Lerner was born in New York City, the son of the founder and president of Lerner Stores. Following an education in England and at Harvard, he ended up in New York, where he wrote advertising copy, radio scripts, and spring gambols for the Lambs Club. While lunching at the Lambs one day, he was approached by composer Frederick Loewe, who asked Lerner if he would like to work with him - and thus began a celebrated collaboration. Lerner also worked with a roll call of Broadway's and Hollywood's best, with varying degrees of success: Fred Astaire and Jane Powell (Royal Wedding), Kurt Weill (Love Life), Burton Lane (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), Leonard Bernstein (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), and, of course, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews (My Fair Lady). He experienced the vertiginous highs of being at Broadway's pinnacle: My Fair Lady ran for 2,717 performances in New York, establishing Lerner's reputation as a master of urbane, highly literate songwriting. But when his money ran out - as did the Broadway for which he had been born - his life soured, and, by all accounts, it was something he himself failed to realize. Compelled to keep working by a nervous drive and a stubborn perfectionism, Lerner in later years wrote lyrics for some famously troubled productions. His personal life became just as tangled: All eight of his marriages ended in acrimonious and well-publicized dissolutions, and he was an anxiety-ridden spendthrift to the end.

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Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the laconic, rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me he draws directly from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about coming of age and leaving home, about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he traces the flowering of his love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." And throughout, there is the land where his family has worked and lived and died for six generations, land at once richly abundant and cruelly demanding.

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Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund

In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. Wolff has pioneered various compositional and notational idioms, including overtly political music, indeterminacy, graphic scores, and extreme virtuosity. Trained as a classicist rather than a musician, Wolff has never quite had both feet in the rarefied world of contemporary composition. Yet he's considered a "composer's composer," with a mind ensconced equally in ancient Greek tragedy and experimental music and an eccentric and impulsive compositional approach that eludes a fixed stylistic fingerprint. Hicks and Asplund cover Wolff's family life and formative years, his role as a founder of the New York School of composers, and the context of his life and work as part of the John Cage circle, as well as his departures from it. Critically assessing Wolff's place within the experimental musical field, this volume captures both his eloquence and reticence and provides insights into his broad interests and activities within music and beyond [Publisher description].

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dargestellt von Jürgen Schebera

Kurt Weill--the famed composer of The Threepenny Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Knickerbocker Holiday, One Touch of Venus, Lost in the Stars, and many other musical works--led a life as rich and complex as the music for which he is so justly acclaimed. This engaging and lavishly illustrated book draws on a wealth of previously unexplored written and pictorial material to present a biography of Weill that is the most up to date and balanced ever written. Jurgen Schebera explores the many phases of Weill's life, from his childhood as the son of a cantor in the Jewish section of Dessau, Germany, to his renunciation of Germany in 1933, his emigration to America in 1935, and his premature death there in 1950. Schebera describes Weill's rise to prominence during the Weimar Republic, when he created brilliant orchestral and chamber music and became a leading operatic innovator; his marriage, divorce, and remarriage to the famed actress Lotte Lenya; his escape from Nazi Germany, exile in France, and move to America; his collaboration with such famed writers and lyricists as Georg Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht, Maxwell Anderson, Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, and Ogden Nash; and his efforts in the United States to aid the mobilization for war. He presents fascinating information about Weill's musical creations: an anti-war musical (Johnny Johnson); a biblical drama (The Eternal Road); his first American song "hit," "September Song"; a Kiddush for cantor, chorus, and organ; a new genre of Broadway opera (Street Scene); a musical tragedy (Lost in the Stars); and many other musical ventures in New York and Hollywood. Schebera contends that it is pointless to argue the relative merits of Weill's music from his European and American periods, as many critics have done. As Weill himself said, "I have never acknowledged the difference between 'serious' music and 'light' music. There is only good music and bad music." And, in fact, the current international renaissance of Kurt Weill's works attests to the beauty, originality, and variety of the music he composed throughout his career. First published in Germany to enthusiastic reviews, this English edition adds new information and illustrations to the earlier work.