Joseph Horowitz on Kurt Weill's "Dirge"

"In America, Weill became an American (his wife Lotte Lenya once corrected me when I pronounced her husband's name with the 'v' sound of the German 'w'). An artist at all times attuned to his collaborators and to his audience, he gravitated to Broadway. He shunned the Eurocentric Metropolitan Opera and also his fellow German immigrants. 'Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here,' he told Time in 1945; 'I'm not.' Of Weill's four Walt Whitman songs, three - 'Beat! Beat! Drums!', 'Oh Captain! My Captain!,' and 'Dirge for Two Veterans' - were a 1942 response to the December 7, 1941, attack; he set a fourth Whitman Civil War poem - 'Come Up from the Fields, Father' - in 1947. His early death, in 1950, pre-empted further such Whitman settings. As the Weill scholar Kim Kowalke has long maintained, the four extant songs form a felicitous cycle. They're tuneful, they're touching, and they fascinatingly mediate between Broadway and the concert hall - as if Weill were propounding a distinctive New World art-song genre. The most beautiful of them is the 'Dirge' (Thomas Hampson has recorded it with piano)" ("Pearl Harbor Music," The Unanswered Question, 2/21/10).