Only a few of the compositions remain that Weill wrote before the age of 21, when he became a pupil of Busoni and gave his life its direction: a few songs, a string quartet dated 1918 and a cello sonata dated 1920. These are late-Romantic works, ‘complicated and psychologising’ according to Brecht, that use Max Reger’s musical language and in which the in&uence of Schönberg is also to be heard, although the young Weill had in truth studied with neither of these composers.

Hans P#tzner wrote that ‘The song should shudder and tremble’ as a motto at the start of his Cello Sonata. This was a quotation from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder, and with it the 21 year old composer introduced himself in the #nal year of his conservatory studies as a true Romantic. He had studied composition and piano in Frankfurt and later spent the most important years of his life in Strasbourg as pianist, conductor and director of the local conservatory.

The American composer Samuel Barber was a Romantic through and through, and like P#tzner, he never concerned himself with whether the passage of time allowed this or not. While his older rival Aaron Copland was the #rst of a long line of Americans to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and thus to come directly under the in&uence of Stravinsky, Barber received a more Romantic education in America. He studied composition, piano and conducting at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, taking voice lessons there also.