In the title song of “Lost in the Stars,” the 1949 musical by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson being mounted this weekend by Washington National Opera, the Rev. Stephen Kumalo, a black Anglican priest from a small South African village, experiences a crisis of faith. He has come to Johannesburg, where his son, Absalom, has been jailed after killing a white man during a robbery. Stephen is grief-stricken and horrified that he can’t bring his son home — that his son will likely never come home.
His nephew, a small boy named Alex, suggests the possibility of divine intervention. “You can ask God to help you,” he tells Stephen. “And He will surely help you.”
“I don’t know, Alex.”
With that, Stephen launches into the song, a sort of folk cosmology in which God, in creating the heavens, allows "a little dark star" to "slip through his fingers." God later finds the star and promises that it will never get lost again. "But I've been walking through the night and the day," Stephen sings, "till my eyes get weary and my head turns gra y
And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away
Forgetting the promise that we’ve heard him say
And we’re lost out here in the stars.
A repurposed song
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the song “Lost in the Stars” — especially since it’s the title piece of the musical — is that it was what’s known as a “trunk song,” originally written for an entirely different work.
Weill and Anderson wrote the song for "Ulysses Africanus," an earlier theatrical collaboration that combined references to the Odyssey with a story about a lost African American slave trying to find his way home during the Civil War. The composer and lyricist worked on "Ulysses Africanus" (based on a young-adult novel by Harry S. Edwards) in 1939, then abandoned the project. In 1946, Chappell & Co. published the sheet music of "Lost in the Stars" as a stand-alone song. And when Weill and Anderson came together again to adapt Alan Paton's novel "Cry, the Beloved Country" for the stage, Weill and Anderson repurposed what became the title song — as well as "The Little Gray House," "Trouble Man" and "Stay Well" — for "Lost in the Stars."
“The amazing thing is that the songs from the earlier show fit so well into a completely different setting,” musicologist James L. Zychowicz says. “ ‘Lost in the Stars’ in particular is not just tacked on. It fits thematically, contextually and musically.”
A popular tune
The portability of "Lost in the Stars" turned out to be one of its greatest assets in the larger culture. In an era when Broadway tunes were often widely performed and recorded by the popular music stars of the day — an era that ended, many would argue, with Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" from 1973's "A Little Night Music" — the song caught fire for much of the 1950s and '60s, becoming perhaps Weill's most-covered tune other than "Mack the Knife" from "The Threepenny Opera" and "September Song" from "Knickerbocker Holiday," another Weill/Anderson collaboration. Interpreters included Judy Garland (who performed it on her CBS variety show), Robert Goulet (who in a YouTube video performs the song while strolling along a beach), Walter Huston, Frank Sinatra, Lotte Lenya, Sarah Vaughan, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O'Day and Barbara Cook.
More recently, the song has demonstrated staying power in recordings by performers as diverse as Elvis Costello, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner (yes, Spock and Kirk, exploring again), Patti Austin, Patti Lupone, the cabaret singer Annaleigh Ashford, the choral group Chanticleer, and the opera singers Samuel Ramey and Eric Owens. (Owens has performed the complete musical onstage in multiple versions, including Washington National Opera’s production this week.)
In most of these versions, the song’s context from the musical — specifically its connection to the grim realities of apartheid-era South Africa — is nowhere apparent, but its wistful sadness consistently comes through. “Whether it’s performed as a lullaby or an anthem,” Zychowicz says, “it always ends up as a song about being lost.”
Brought to life
The lead role of Stephen Kumalo — who sings the title song — was created on Broadway by the trailblazing baritone Todd Duncan, who in 1935 had been composer George Gershwin’s personal choice as the original Porgy in “Porgy and Bess.”
Born in Kentucky and trained in Indianapolis and New York City, Duncan made a particularly profound mark in Washington, D.C., where he led a strike against the management of the National Theatre, which was hosting a touring production of “Porgy and Bess,” by declaring that he would never perform at a theater that would not sell tickets for certain seats to African Americans. The theater had offered to allow “blacks only” performances, but Duncan and his castmates held firm. In the end, management backed down, integrating its audience for the first time.
Duncan ended up making Washington his home, teaching for several decades at Howard University, touring and giving private voice lessons. The Washington Performing Arts Society honored him with a birthday gala in 1978; he died in 1998.
His moving performance in the original Broadway cast of “Lost in the Stars” remains definitive, perhaps in part because he sang the title song with the deep emotion he associated with spirituals. “Spirituals are a part of whatever I am,” he told music historian Elizabeth Nash. “When I sing them, my being sings them, not my throat.”
Lyrical phrasing
A close listening of various performances and recordings of the song yields an interesting discrepancy in the lyrics. On the original Broadway cast recording, Duncan sings:
“And the Lord God hunted through the wide night air
For the little dark star in the wind down there
And he stated and promised
He’d take special care
So it wouldn’t get lost again.”
But for reasons that are unclear, many of the pop covers of the song over the years use a different phrasing in the last line. “So it wouldn’t get lost again” becomes “So it wouldn’t get lost no more” — an ungrammatical and somewhat jarring version of the line that feels closer to the African American folk vernacular of “Porgy and Bess” — and apparently of the abandoned “Ulysses Africanus” — than of the Weill/Anderson work. Certainly the alternative phrasing would be uncharacteristic of the speech patterns of Kumalo, an Anglican priest in South Africa.
Garland sings “again,” as do Lenya (Weill’s widow), Lee, Goulet, Austin, Ashford and others. In the 2008 cast recording conducted by Julius Rudel with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Arthur Woodley, as Kumalo, also sings “again.” On the other hand, Huston, Sinatra, Vaughan, Mathis, Bennett, Ramey and others are in the “no more” camp.
What accounts for the difference? Harvey Rosenstein, director of promotional activities for the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York, notes that in the 1946 sheet music for the song, the line read “So it wouldn’t get lost no more.” Weill and Anderson changed it to “again” for the Broadway musical, but both versions have been performed and recorded interchangeably, with individual performers making their own choices, considered or not.
Washington National Opera is also presenting Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” Feb. 12 through 20 at the Kennedy Center. Tickets: $69 to $265.
