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Love Life Editor Wins Preeminent Award

Nov. 27, 2024

The American Musicological Society has bestowed its coveted Claude V. Palisca Award on Joel Galand for his recently published critical edition of Love Life, Kurt Weill’s 1948 work created in collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner. Performing materials deriving from the new edition have already been tested in productions in Freiburg and Bern and are now poised to be used in two new productions planned for 2025: one by Opera North and one by New York City Center’s Encores!.

The Palisca Award is among the most prestigious in the discipline, recognizing excellence in the creation of scholarly editions and translations. Given annually, the award pays tribute to the publication judged by a committee of scholars “to best exemplify the highest qualities of originality, interpretation, logic and clarity of thought, and communication.” 

The appearance of the critical edition of Love Life late in 2023 was a major milestone, the latest product of the ongoing Kurt Weill Edition project. The first publication of the work’s score and book ever, it at long last provides producers, performers, and scholars with full access to the “vaudeville” that is simultaneously one of Weill’s longest, least known and yet most influential works. Victim of a labor dispute that prevented the recording of an original cast album at the time of its first production in 1948, Love Life’s inspirational position as the first concept musical has been recognized as the progenitor of the likes of Cabaret, Company, Assassins, and Scottsboro Boys. Stephen Sondheim opined that “most people didn’t see Love Life, so they don’t think of it as having the kind of effect that Oklahoma! had. But I think it did.”

From its founding in the 1990s, the KWE has pioneered the field of critical editions of Broadway musicals. Love Life is the fourth published by the KWE, following The Firebrand of Florence, Johnny Johnson (whose editor, Tim Carter, earned the 2013 Palisca), and Lady in the Dark. It is also among the largest editions yet, with 888 score pages distributed across two volumes, plus a critical report of 237 pages. Galand’s magisterial introductory essay runs to more than 30,000 words. Love Life is also the eighth product of The Kurt Weill Edition to be awarded a Paul Revere Award for Graphic Excellence by the Music Publishers’ Association of the United States.


"This is the Life" from Love Life, performed by Quirijn de Lang and Jim Holmes for Opera North


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