Composer; born in Dessau, Germany. Son of a rabbi, after a moderately successful career as a musical avant-gardist he teamed with playwright Bertolt Brecht to create a series of popular theater works that joined radical social ideas to jazz-influenced music; most notable was the 1928 Threepenny Opera, which became a sensation across Europe and its best-known song "Mack the Knife" an international classic. Driven from Germany by the Nazis, he and his actress wife Lotte Lenya moved permanently to the U.S.A. in 1935; three years later came his first Broadway hit, Knickerbocker Holiday, which introduced the immortal "September Song." After other Broadway successes including Lady in the Dark (1941) and One Touch of Venus (1943), he wrote the "folk opera" Down in the Valley (1948), which used traditional Kentucky tunes. He died suddenly while working on a musical version of Tom Sawyer.