Agitprop Theater and Kurt Weill’s Collaborations of 1927–1928

Abstract

Agitprop theater (a portmanteau deriving from agitatsiya and propaganda) was a form of politically charged troupe performance that came to the fore in the early years of the Soviet Union. As the ten-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1927 brought a renewed push for Soviet celebration and propaganda, agitprop theater emerged as an international phenomenon with particularly strong traction in the Weimar Republic. The robust and increasingly radical music and theater culture of late 1920s Weimar allowed for rapid assimilation of agitprop theater into both vernacular and professional music and theater realms. Yet despite its significant presence in Weimar, agitprop has yet to be accounted for by musicologists in relation to Kurt Weill’s concurrent radical developments of 1927–1928. How significant was cultural and ideological cross-fertilization between the growth of agitprop in Weimar and the radical developments of Kurt Weill’s collaborations of 1927–1928? I approach this question less with a biographical focus and more with the aim of a better understanding of Weill’s milieu and its capacity for assimilating elements of agitprop theater. I take two case studies for which Weill wrote music, Mahagonny Songspiel (1927), produced with Bertolt Brecht and set designer Caspar Neher, and Leo Lania’s play Konjunktur (1928) produced with Erwin Piscator. I rely on discourse analysis involving several articles by Weill and his contemporary theater critics and communist journals to portray an interconnected culture turning towards embodiment of strong anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist ethics. I then interpret these two productions using a staging analysis based on photographs and descriptions to draw out more concrete parallels to agitprop. Finally, I conduct a musical analysis of Weill’s contributions to these works to identify the ways his music reinforced agitprop aesthetics. I argue that Weill’s collaborative projects of 1927–1928 reflect agitprop theater in ideological, dramaturgical, and musical terms and that this indicates a highly networked and distributed culture of music theater in step with Soviet solidarity. I also suggest that this link merits additional consideration to Weimar cultural historiography, particularly with the hindsight of current new media scholarship on propaganda and social networks.