The Research Center maintains a large and growing collection of scholarly articles focusing on Weill, Lenya, Blitzstein, or some aspect of their world. A more scattershot collection of complete journals and magazines, some from Lenya’s personal collection, is available as well. Articles and magazines may date from as far back as the 1920s up to the present; new items are added frequently. The collection includes articles by every Weill scholar of note and many by contemporaries of Weill, such as Theodor Adorno, George Antheil, Marc Blitzstein, Ernst Bloch, Hans Curjel, Olin Downes, Alfred Einstein, David Ewen, Hans Heinsheimer, Henry Marx, H.H. Stuckenschmidt, and Virgil Thomson.

The book collection is likewise narrowly focused on Weill, Lenya, and Blitzstein. In addition to books acquired by the Research Center since 1983 and shelved in the Reading Room (General Collection and Reference), our holdings include the libraries of Weill and Lenya accumulated during their years in the U.S. Weill’s library includes numerous books by his collaborators (some inscribed) as well as collected editions of Blake, Chekhov, Milton, Shakespeare (in which he marked the line “Speak low if you speak love”), and Whitman. There are also many books about music — composer biographies, correspondence collections — and of course scores. Not just Mozart, Verdi, Bartók, and other canonical composers, but a rich collection of songbooks and anthologies that reveal his interest in American music and the path he took to become thoroughly familiar with all facets of it. Lenya’s library, larger and more heterogeneous, incorporates books that belonged to her second husband George Davis. She owned many books inscribed to her from a panoply of show business figures. Her literary tastes ran wide, and her library shows it, with everything from classics to twentieth-century memoirs.