All-Girl reviews effectively competed with the cinema for mass audiences. For more discriminating tastes, there was the new “jazz-opera.” Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek, two of Weimar Berlin’s most important avant-garde composers, consciously incorporated elements of jazz and blues into their operatic works. In his jazz opera Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Strikes Up), which chronicles the adventures of a black dance band violinist, Krenek fused Duke Ellington with Béla Bartók and Arnold Schonberg, a dazzling combination. Berliners got their first look at Jonny on November 21, 1927, at the Stadtische Oper (Municipal Opera). In the last act they saw the hero leap up on a train station clock and ride the big hand down playing his violin, while the chorus sang: “The hour of the past has struck, the future is approaching. Don’t miss your connection. We are off to the unknown land of the free.” Meanwhile, over at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Weill’s and Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) was beginning its long run. The story derived from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of 1728, but the music, once again, drew on American jazz. To perform it, the producers hired a Berlin jazz group with a predictably American name: The Lewis Ruth Band. Reviewing the production, Alfred Kerr thought that Weill’s “magnificently simple music” was the only good thing about it. (In fact, the simplicity was deceptive; in the famous “Mack the Knife” song Weill subtly altered the rhythmic patterns and countermelodies in extremely sophisticated fashion.) Kerr noted that Brecht’s text had been plagiarized from Francois Villon’s poetry. Later, Brecht blithely confessed to the charge of plagiarism: “I am quite sloppy when it comes to matters of intellectual ownership.”
While American jazz was adding new dimensions to Berlin’s popular culture, the city’s composers and conductors were reworking and reinterpreting the classical tradition. In the 1920s and early 1930s Berlin competed with New York for the title of world capital of classical music. The German city housed twenty classical orchestras and three major opera companies. It boasted two preeminent music schools, the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music. Both schools included new forms of composition in their curricula. Arnold Schonberg taught at the Prussian Academy and Paul Hindemith at the Academy of Music.
Like jazz, the new directions in symphonic and choral music inspired a mixture of approbation and revulsion. The premier of Schonberg’s Pierrot Lunaire on January 5, 1924, at the Academy of Music provoked a riot to rival the famous upheaval at the Paris debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. Appalled conservatives shouted that the piece was “cacophonic garbage” inspired by “Jewish Bolshevism” (Stravinsky was not Jewish, and he hated the Bolsheviks). Two years later Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, based on a play by Georg Büchner, opened at the old State Opera on Unter den Linden under the baton of Erich Kleiber. This opera employed Schonberg’s radical twelve-tone system and unmelodious Sprechstimme, a cross between speech and chant. The audience, which consisted almost exclusively of friends of the composer, was predictably enthusiastic, but the reviews were mixed. The SPD’s Vorwa’rts hailed the performance as “a historic event” in which the “hard logic [of Buchner’s play] was ennobled, humanized, psychologized through the spirit of music.” Oddly, the critic for the conservative Kreuz-Zeitung found something good to say: “[Berg’s] Tonmalerei seldom supports the singers with singable melody. . . . But the final act more than makes up for this. Here the composer explores new paths, becomes less harsh in his harmony—indeed, every once in a while he is ‘simply old-fashioned pretty’ and the listener can relax.” The Berliner Tageblatt, liberal on political matters but not on high culture, was disdainful: “All those who today purposely create the ugly (dissonant, impoverished, overdone, distorted) are damned to vacuity. It is no accident that their music is boring. . . . Is the State Opera House the right place for such experiments?” The Catholic Germania thought it was not: “Pretense! Ingenious pretense, but, in any case, pretense! And this is what ‘German’ composers, controlled by unseen strings [a reference to Berg’s Jewishness] call art. The time is approaching to rebel against giving this inspired methodological nonsense a respectable backdrop.”
