Before Weill was catapulted to superstardom by the explosive success of Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928 he had garnered some notoriety, with Hindemith and Krenek, as one of Germany's most promising young talents, the composer of innovative stage works—Der Protagonist, Royal Palace, Der Zar lässt sich photographieren—couched in a briskly functional, often brittle, idiom cautiously employing fox trots, tangos, and other elements of pop music. Apart from the Mahagonny Songspiel (1927), these pre-Dreigroschenoper works were forgotten or ignored until the end of the twentieth century. In the case of Royal Palace, the orchestral score had disappeared during the Nazi regime and was reconstructed by Noam Sheriff and Gunther Schuller only in 1971 from a detailed piano reduction. While these works lack the sheer visceral impact of Die Dreigroschenoper or Happy End (1929) they possess considerable interest in the context of the volatile, state-subsidized Weimar Republic theater scene in which they were generally well-received. Among them, Royal Palace holds a unique place as Weill's only aesthetically oriented—that is, non-didactic, non-propagandizing—stage work. Its surreal libretto by literary gadabout Iwan Goll features a goddess-like femme fatale, attended by a husband and two lovers, who drowns herself from boredom. Composed over 1925-1926 and premiered by Erich Kleiber at the Staatsoper Berlin on Weill's 27th birthday, March 2, 1927, Royal Palace conceals an homage to—and a declaration of independence from—his teacher, Ferruccio Busoni, read out of Busoni's unfinished summary testament, Doktor Faust. Weill was accepted as a student in Busoni's elite composition master class, under the auspices of the Prussian Academy of Arts, in 1920, and remained close until Busoni's death in 1924. He was one of the very few insiders with whom the stricken composer shared his work-in-progress. As a student, Weill presented Busoni with scores of grinding complexity and radical outlook (e.g., the choral Recordare, Symphony No. 1) though the lessons of the master became apparent, notably in Weill's Violin Concerto (1923), only after Busoni had become too ill to respond. Royal Palace's opening, with its distant bells and choral tumult, evokes the introductory Symphonia of Busoni's opera—though it seamlessly gives way to an auto horn salvo and honky tonk piano—while many passages between essay the characteristic orchestral colors, harmonic syntax, and dramatic gestures of Arlecchino and Doktor Faust at their most eldritch. The final tango to which Dejanira walks on water then disappears into it marks the end of Weill in the unaccustomed guise of a fin de siècle artist.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide