Revisiting "September Song" in January

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

We’ve had illness in our family for the past week, so the New Year, 2025, is off to a rocky start. I had in mind a lovely Grammy-winning song to share for Sometimes a Song, but — sort of the way Kurt Weill describes it in his beautiful “September Song” — time got away from me. So I will leave you with a mystery song to look for next week. Some of our readers will guess immediately what song the word “year” brought to my mind. And in the meantime, I hope you will enjoy another wonderful and wistful tune about the passing of the days, months, and years, performed by the tremendous crooner, Tony Bennett.

The composer of “September Song” was not a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, as were so many of the great popular composers of his time, although he did live in New York in the heyday of those writers and collaborated with lyricists such as Ira Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein. Kurt Weill arrived in the United States in 1933, a refugee from — and target of — the Nazi madness which had descended on his native land. Once in the United States, he thoroughly embraced American musical theater, where he immediately found a welcome place for his considerable talent. Not just a classically trained composer, Kurt Weill had studied with some of the European masters of his day. In addition to composing music in all of the classical forms, Weill worked for decades on his project of “reforming opera” by introducing it into musical theater, a venue through which he hoped to bring high musical art to the masses. Fittingly, his most widely known work in America to this day comes from a musical version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which Weill produced with Berthold Brecht, first in Germany and later in New York. Although The Threepenny Opera bombed on Broadway (closing after only 13 performances) a tune from the production went on to be one of the most-recorded songs in the panoply of America popular song, “Mack, the Knife” ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer"). Oddly enough, “September Song,” which likewise became a part of The American Songbook, Weill wrote for another Broadway bust, Knickerbocker Holiday. It’s a tribute to Kurt Weill’s musical genius that he was able to compose such an immortal song while staying within the limited vocal range of Walter Huston, the show’s star. Necessity, in this case, was the mother of a remarkable piece of musical art.

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A final note about Kurt Weill: by no means were all of the musical plays he worked on bombs. In fact, he was among the inaugural winners of Broadway’s Tony Award (1947, for his score of Street Scene).

The version above of “September Song” was recorded by Tony Bennett late in his career, as befits the song. His voice was still great, if a wee bit gravelly .. but just a wee bit.

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