On today’s date in 1980, a new production of a seldom-heard work by the German composer Kurt Weill was staged by the New York City Opera. Their production of Silverlake, starring Joel Grey, opened on the eve of the 47th anniversary of Weill’s hasty departure from Nazi Germany after being tipped off that the Gestapo was hunting for him.

“Silverlake,” or “Der Silbersee” in its original German title, was Weill’s last work to premiere in Germany, shortly before the Nazi’s total ban of his music. As early as 1930, at a rally in Augsburg, Hitler had railed against anti-Nazi intellectuals and singled out BY NAME the novelist Thomas Mann, the scientist Albert Einstein, and the composer Kurt Weill. Astonishingly, Weill happened to be in Augsburg observing the crowds that very day.

Despite that, Weill courageously stayed in his native land until 1933, despite violent Nazi protests at performances of his music.

In 1935, after two unhappy years in Paris and London, Weill arrived in New York, applied for U.S. citizenship, and reinvented himself as a successful Broadway composer, insisting on Anglicizing the pronunciation of his last name from “Vile” to “While,” and refusing to even speak German.

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Kurt Weill's "Silver Lake"

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