This installation of artworks from the Museum’s collection expands a transatlantic program of opera songs that the baritone Justin Austin has precisely curated to create aesthetic dialogues and thematic connections across music, poetry, performance, and the visual arts. It embraces the voices of the oppressed, invokes political and moral dissidence, and speaks to the turbulences of human existence, allegorically and prosaically.

Austin’s program is centered on Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, with music by Kurt Weill, who found inspiration in jazz, German folk music, and the avant-garde. The (anti-)opera, with its infamous antihero Mack the Knife, dates back to the late 1920s, when Germany experienced its first democracy—a time of unprecedented social, economic, and political upheavals, yet also widespread cultural innovations. A new realism emerged across artistic genres, with the participation of many artists on the political left, including Brecht, George Grosz, and Käthe Kollwitz. In their frequently sarcastic and disdainful artworks, they attacked social injustices, emphasized victims, and cynically showcased political profiteers. And some—like Hanns Eisler, Kurt Tucholsky, and Karl Zerbe—warned about a society controlled by fascism. In these and similar artworks a volatile society irreparably scarred by World War I and its aftermath is dispassionately dissected through sarcastic humor, illuminating the demoralized to affront a hypocritical bourgeoisie.

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Austin also incorporated songs by American poets and composers. Some of them—including Walt Whitman, the exile Kurt Weill, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Langston Hughes—illuminate the racialized history of the United States and mourn its violent and oppressive realities. Others celebrate and transcend the Black experience, as demonstrated by Hughes and the visual artists James Van Der Zee and Romare Bearden. Although certain themes reoccur in German and American contexts, such as sensations of alienation in the works of Olaf Bienert and Owens for example, it is in contrast to the often impersonal voice and alienating gaze of German artists that their American counterparts embrace empathetic and stark emotions.

The words of the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, “I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see why Democracy means everybody but me,” highlight some of the core artistic motivations of this interdisciplinary exhibition.

A version of “Don’t Be Angry” premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Fall of the Weimar Republic festival in March 2024. Austin’s performance at the Kemper Art Museum on January 9, 2025, is part of the Belonging in Opera Series, supported by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, WashU’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity, and the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences.

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Justin Austin

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

City Lyric Opera's production of The Threepenny Opera (online release, November 2000)