A haunting melody — Kurt Weill's "September Song" — was first heard by the public on today's date in the year 1938. It's the most famous tune from "Knickerbocker Holiday," a Broadway musical by Kurt Weill that had its premiere on September 26, 1938, during a trial run in Hartford, Connecticut.

Weill was 38 years old at the time, and had been in America just three years. He had left his native Germany after being warned that he was under danger of imminent arrest by the Gestapo. In Europe, Weill had been a successful composer of both concert and stage works, most notably the enormously popular "Three-Penny Opera" from 1928, a collaboration with the Marxist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.

In America, Weill set out to establish himself on Broadway, but to remain faithful to the philosophical thrust of his European work. The text for Weill's "Knickerbocker Holiday," for example, was by Maxwell Anderson, inspired by Washington Irving's fanciful "Father Knickerbocker's History of New York." But in the Anderson-Weill treatment, the historical Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant comes off as a proto-Fascist dictator, a comic but very pointed reference in the year 1938, when both Hitler and Mussolini were at the height of their power.

Until his untimely death in 1950, Kurt Weill's Broadway musicals continued to set serious subjects — ranging from psychoanalysis to South African apartheid — in a distinctive yet accessible style.