The notion of influence is a necessary consideration in assessing an artist’s originality and place in history. A composer's aesthetic value, whether he writes for the present or posterity, exists in relation to his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Recent scholarship has transcended the theory that Weill's American period (1936–50) represents a complete departure from the musico-dramaturgical principles he championed in Weimar Germany. Weill research has yet to trace, however, the compositional reception of his music theater aesthetic. As a composer who straddled the worlds of opera and popular theater, Weill leaves behind a legacy which is all themore difficult to catalogue given the bifurcation of musical life since the twentieth century.

Tracing influence in compositions of the modern era is further complicated by an ambivalent relationship between the past and present. Their apparent irreconcilability demands new structural solutions not available in previous aesthetic models. As Bernstein himself illustrated in his 1976 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, composers produce with a certain insecurity vis-à-vis tradition:

This unease is tantamount to the anxiety of influence that Harold Bloom believed to be symptomatic of the post-Enlightenment age. For Joseph N. Straus, who has offered one of the most useful applications of Bloom's theory to twentieth-century music, “artistic ambivalence is worked out through a conflict between old and new elements, and through an attempt by the new elements to subsume and revise the old ones.”

A post-Enlightenment poem, according to Bloom's theory, is not a selfcontained whole but exists in relation to its precursor: “There are no texts, but only relationships between texts. These relationships depend on a critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another.” Straus transfers this view to modern music: “In their combination of stylistically and structurally disparate elements, many twentieth-century works are truly relational events as much as they are self-contained organic entities.”