About the work
Kurt Weill composed this “ballet chanté” in Paris exile in 1933, to a libretto by Bertolt Brecht, for George Balanchine’s newly founded company “Les Ballets 1933”; sets and costumes were designed by Caspar Neher. It premiered on 7 June 1933 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, with Lotte Lenya as the singing and Tilly Losch as the dancing Anna, conducted by Maurice Abravanel.
Plot
The sisters Anna I (singer) and Anna II (dancer) together portray a single person who travels for seven years through American cities to earn money for a small house by the Mississippi for her family back home. In each city she encounters one of the seven deadly sins, with good and evil reversed: what the family brands as sin – such as pride or anger – actually stands in the way of Anna’s earnings, while economic success wins out over moral scruples.
Cultural significance
The work is regarded as a sharp critique of capitalism and as Weill and Brecht’s last collaboration; the passages sung by Lenya count among Weill’s best-known exile compositions. After a lukewarm premiere the piece was largely forgotten for decades before becoming a fixture of the concert and dance repertoire from the 1960s onward.