And we're lost out here in the stars
Little stars and big stars, blowing through the night
And we're lost out here in the stars
Little stars and big stars, blowing through the night
And we're lost out here in the stars.
Lost in the Stars was a 1948 Broadway musical with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, based on the novel Cry the beloved Country by Alan Paton. Here you can hear Barbara Hannigan and Simon Rattle perform Lost out here in the Stars, the title song. There are many other interpretations by other famous performers, but most of them are too elaborate for me. They obscure the simplicity of a beautiful poem beautifully set.
The music was by Kurt Weill, who had collaborated with Berthold Brecht. Weill's most famous song is probably Mac the Knife, from their work The Threepenny Opera. In 1930 he heard himself, Thomas Mann, and Albert Einstein denounced as a threat to the country of his birth [1].
In 1933 Weill travelled to America with his wife Lotte Lenya and never returned to Germany. He wrote
“Although I was born in Germany, I do not consider myself a 'German composer.' The Nazis obviously did not consider me as such either, and I left their country (an arrangement which suited both me and my rulers admirably)” [2].
[1] A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League Paperback – 15 Jan 2010, Lily E. Hirsch.
[2] https://www.americancomposers.org/weillinamerica.htm
