Forgotten Broadway Blockbuster: The Eternal Road and the All-Star Effort to Save German Jewry

In 1935, impresario Meyer Weisgal enlisted the leading secular cultural luminaries of German-speaking Jewry – Kurt Weill, Franz Werfel, and Max Reinhardt – to create a popular work to raise awareness of the horrors the Nazi regime was inflicting on its Jews. The result was The Eternal Road, an opera-oratorio that highlighted biblical accounts of Jewish historic wandering and suffering and suggested messianic hope. Despite critical success, glowing reviews, great tickets sales, big names, and the status of being the largest and most grandiose performance staged to date in New York, it closed after 153 performances in 1937 and no attempt was made to stage any of it again for more than 60 years.

This session will critically examine the production’s problematic history, its music, its libretto, its staging, its creators (and the surprising number of prominent figures with both direct and ancillary ties to them) and their impact on American culture, and its “revival” in various forms since 1998.

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Bruce Kaplan is a practicing urban planner with graduate training in 20th century European intellectual history and Continental philosophy. In addition to running Boston’s Goethe Institut’s philosophy discussion group in his spare time for the past 15 years, he is an active opera aficionado and independent scholar. He has presented at conferences on 4 continents on modern intellectual history, film, architecture, urban planning, communal studies and Jewish studies. He holds a BA from Oberlin College (with Honors), a MUP from Texas A&M University in Urban and Regional Planning, a MA from Boston University in History, and a ridiculous number of professional planning certifications. He and his wife Kate Heilman, who accompanies him to performances and patiently indulges his love of dissonant and atonal music, live in Somerville.

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