Kurt Weill’s “Wie Lange Noch”, with an enigmatic text by his fellow German-Jewish emigré Walter Mehring, was written for broadcast behind enemy lines on Radio Free Europe during the Second World War.  Reworking a tune he had set previously to a French text, in“Wie Lange Noch,” Weill speaks of lost trust and the betrayal of a man who had promised and inspired a nation with dreams of hope in the guise of a torch song.  The sparse opening begins with a painfully beautiful duet between Julie Baumgartel (violin) and Paul Pulford (cello), which is marked by starkness and quiet desperation. With the change in tonality from minor to major, a sense of light and hope glimmers in the distant future. The accordion here becomes musical portrayal of a sorrowful memory while the intensity of this text explodes in the questioning of time, as Mehring desperately asks: Wie lange noch—how much longer. The underlying meaning of the words cannot possibly have been lost on Germans listening to this song in 1944.