One of the most swinging American jazz standards of the mid-century, Mack the Knife, was written by a classically trained German Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis. This episode traces Kurt Weill from his birth in Dessau in 1900 as the son of a cantor, through his studies at the Berlin Hochschule with Engelbert Humperdinck, and into the post-war collapse that forced him to drop out and play piano in a beer cellar. Under Ferruccio Busoni he abandoned post-Wagnerian romanticism for a leaner style in which music offers ironic commentary on the action, and with Lotte Lenya and Bertolt Brecht he created The Threepenny Opera in 1928.

We explore his guiding idea of Gebrauchsmusik, socially useful music, and why he split from Brecht in 1930 rather than set a political manifesto to music. After fleeing in March 1933 and arriving in New York in 1935 fo ...