September Song (1938)

“What’s the range of your voice?” Kurt Weill asked Walter Huston on being told by the producer of Knickerbocker Holiday that he had to write an extra song for him. “I have no range,” replied Huston. Though by his own admission not much of a singer, he wanted a romantic song added to the part of Peter Stuyvesant which, to everyone’s surprise and delight, he had just taken on and the composer and lyricist had no alternative but to supply one. Maxwell Anderson wrote the words of “September Song” in an hour and Weill took scarcely longer to write the music. In spite of Huston’s problems in learning it, when Knickerbocker Holiday opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York in October 1938, “September Song” proved to be the hit of the show. It success was all the more unlikely not only because it was a hastily written afterthought but also because Weill’s music is very different in style from the typical Broadway music of the day and, indeed, has much in common with “Surabaya Johnny” from his Brecht collaboration Happy End.