A vast epic of the Jewish people in four Acts (or Parts), Der Weg der Verheissung is Kurt Weill's only collaboration with the poet, playwright, and novelist Franz Werfel (1890–1945). The text was written in Austria in the spring and summer of 1934, and the score was drafted during the second half of the same year – mostly in the village of Louveciennes outside Paris. The musical perspectives are exceptionally wide: on the one hand they afford a view of all Weill's major compositions from the Mahagonny opera (1927–29) to Tlie Seven Deadly Sins and the Second Symphony (1933); on the other, they look forward to his very last stage work for Broadway, the ‘Musical Tragedy’ Lost in the Stars (1949) which he and Maxwell Anderson based on Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel, Cry, the Beloved Country.