ABSTRACT
Walter Leigh (1905–1942) composed over 150 works in his short career—cut short by his death in battle in North Africa—in a dizzying variety of genres. His output spanned ‘serious’ music, revue, film scores and light opera. At every turn, Leigh’s main objective was to write for the widest audience appropriate to the genre in which he was composing. Leigh was a traveller between disparate worlds. He was half-German, raised in London, trained and shaped by the avant-gardes of Weimar Republic Berlin, an apostle of the high priest of music for the modern everyman, This chapter examines Leigh’s writings of the 1930s for traces of his encounter with musical modernism as practised in the Weimar Republic during the years he spent in Berlin as a student. It considers how one particular group of cultural problems, one kind of modernist answer to the challenges of the modern, found echoes in Leigh’s writings on music.
