Herr Huck

"I don't give a damn about posterity," declared Composer Kurt Weill. "I write for today." Nonetheless, since Weill's death in 1950, his catchy, sophisticated music (September Song, Mack the Knife, Alabama Song) has inspired a fiercely devoted following in the U.S. and abroad and prompted a spate of memorial record albums and revivals, most memorably the phenomenal off-Broadway production (2,707 performances) of his Threepenny Opera (1954-61).

Best & Worst. One work that so far has been denied posterity is Weill's Huckleberry Finn, a "folk opera" that the composer and his neighbor, Playwright Maxwell Anderson, were working on in New City, N.Y., when Weill died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The five songs Weill completed for Huckleberry were locked away and all but forgotten for 14 years. Finally, Lys Symonette, Weill's former secretary and rehearsal pianist, and Broadway Conductor Milton Rosenstock resurrected the musical remains of Huckleberry, with the idea of molding it into a half-hour TV show. Several U.S. producers turned down the idea, so this spring Mrs. Symonette approached Heinz Scheiderbauer, Vienna's leading independent TV film maker, who leaped at the proposition. Rosenstock took leave from Funny Girl to write, direct and conduct the show. Just completed--with Mississippi River scenes that were shot along a muddy stretch of the Danube ten miles upriver from Vienna--the German-language version of Huckleberry will be shown in West Germany beginning this October. The music shows Weill both at his threadbare worst and his richly melodic best.

The TV plot is little more than a string of vignettes revolving around the characters of Huck, his drunken father, and Jim, the runaway slave. The role of Huck is sung in a reedy voice by towheaded, freckle-faced Franz Elkins, a 14-year-old Austrian TV actor who won the part over several singers from the Vienna Boys Choir partly because of his prowess at tree climbing. Lys Symonette's husband Randolph, an American baritone currently with the Duesseldorf Opera, is Huck's coarsely villainous father. He and Huck dangle their fishing lines in the Danube to whistle and sing a tuneful folk ditty called Catfish Song:

Oh, two hungry men are we.

Oh, you are a noble fish.

Oh, hark to this desperate plea,

Fill up our empty dish.

Adhesive Melody. But Symonette's resonant, deep-chested baritone is heard to best advantage in River Chanty, a heave-ho work song with chorus that evokes the lure and lore of ol' man river. The score's low-water mark is struck in a rankly commercial number entitled Apple Jack, a shallow echo of some of Weill's earlier work. "Weill's best melodies are like glue," exclaims Rosenstock. "If you listen to them, they stick." The most adhesive refrain in Huckleberry is called This Time Next Year and expresses Jim's dream of freedom. Sung by Thomas Carey, a Negro baritone from New York City, and lushly embellished by 45 crack musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic and Volksoper orchestras, this hauntingly romantic song ranks with the finest of Weill's ballads.

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