When Kurt Weill died of cardiac arrest on April 3, 1950, in New York, his ambitions for American opera were not yet fulfilled. He had begun collaborating with Maxwell Anderson on a musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and had dreams of turning Herman Melville's Moby Dick into an opera. He had also jotted down interest in setting Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath and other American classics. His opera Street Scene had been declared “Broadway's First Real Opera” upon its 1947 premiere but did not run for more than 148 performances. The 1948 “folk opera” Down in the Valley had made the most impact during his lifetime, receiving 250 performances by 1950 and becoming the first American television opera—or at least one of the first music theater works to be produced for television—when it was broadcast nationally by NBC (National Broadcasting Company) in January of that year.

Shortly before his death, Weill indicated in letters to his parents that he was on the brink of an exciting new period in his career. Recounting a critic's observation that “Kurt Weill will be known to later generations as the founder of American opera,” he wrote in July of 1949, “you can imagine what this means to me … since this recognition of my endeavors now allows me to work once more in the field of opera.” Two months later, he reported: “It almost looks as if I could reap some kind of harvest after twenty-five years of heavy, indefatiguable work—not in a financial but in an idealistic sense.”

Weill's ambitions for music theater fell outside the norms of the commercial industry. The only composers to attend his funeral were Marc Blitzstein and Arthur Schwartz (the playwright Maxwell Anderson, Weill's collaborator on Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars, was chosen to give a speech).