One of the strangest records of Kurt Weill’s music that I have ever listened to has just come my way.  There are two pieces involved; Propheten and Four Walt Whitman Songs.  Propheten has its roots in Weill’s six hour long, Old Testament inspired, opera The Eternal Road which premiered at the Manhattan Opera House in 1937 with a cast of 245 and which ran for 153 performances before, perhaps unsurprisingly, disappearing for a long,long time.  Propheten is a 1998 adaptation of the last act by David Drew using the original German text by Franz Werfel plus biblical quotations and additional orchestration by Noam Sheriff.  It basically deals with the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and comes in at a more digestible 45 minutes.

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