Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill had two careers on two continents. The son of a synagogue cantor in Dessau, Germany, he trained as a classical composer in Berlin and found fame in 1928 with The Threepenny Opera, written with the playwright Bertolt Brecht: a beggars' opera for the Weimar era whose opening number became the standard "Mack the Knife."

When the Nazis took power in 1933, Weill, who was Jewish, fled Germany, and by 1935 he was in New York. There he rebuilt himself as a Broadway composer, working with writers such as Ira Gershwin and Maxwell Anderson, and insisted his American shows be judged on their own terms rather than as a comedown from Berlin.

The Threepenny Opera is the essential starting point. Then try The Seven Deadly Sins, a sung ballet about a woman sent out to earn money for her family, written with Brecht just after both had fled Germany.