Question: What German composer wrote Happy End? 

 He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht.  With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work "The Threepenny Opera", which included the ballad "Mack the Knife".  Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose.  He also wrote several works for the concert hall. Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900April 3, 1950) was a German composer, active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States.  He became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943. <SEP> Michael Ande (born 5 October 1944, Bad Wiessee) is a German actor best known for his role as Gerd Heymann in the West German crime-drama television series "Der Alte".  He was a well-known German film child star during the 1950s.  A German reader reports, "Michael played in mostly melodramas--those films with nice people, love and mountains, etc (sentimental film in an idealized setting).  Some would consider these rather schmaltz tear-jerkers.  Two words come to mind in German.  The first is "Heimatfilm".  Heimat is home, where I came from This kind of film stands for: very sentimental, lots of love (and some ache but with Happy End), idealistic setting, Lederhosen, Mountains, Conservative ideals, etc.  The second is "Heile-Welt-Film" meaning "intact-world-film" They were, however very popular films in Germany."  He played a variety of roles in these films, including choir boys.  One of these films was "Der schoenste Tag in meinem Leben" (1957) in which he played a chorister in the Vienna Boys' Choir.  There is an image of him, for example, on the HBC choir-film pages.  Michael also played in two German films about the Trapp family: "Die Trapp-Familie" (1956) and "Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika" (1958).  These films were made some years before the 1965 U.S. film musical version of the Trapp films, "The Sound of Music" was made.  (The Broadway version appeared in 1959.)  Michael played the role of Werner in the Trapp-films.  (In "The Sound of Music" the boy's name is Kurt.)  Ande like many child actors had difficulty continuing his career as an adult actor.  He had problems being accepted as adult actor as he had such a youthful-looking face. <SEP> Saint Joan of the Stockyards (German: "Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe" ) is a play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht between 1929 and 1931, after the success of his musical "The Threepenny Opera" and during the period of his radical experimental work with the "Lehrstücke".  It is based on the musical that he co-authored with Elisabeth Hauptmann, "Happy End" (1929).  In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into "Joan Dark", a member of the "Black Straw Hats" (a Salvation Army-like group) in 20th-century Chicago.  The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant.  Like her predecessor, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and (initially, at least) an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers.  Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure and deals with the theme of emancipation from material suffering and exploitation. <SEP> Happy End is a three-act musical comedy by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht which first opened in Berlin at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on September 2, 1929.  It closed after seven performances.  In 1977 it premiered on Broadway, where it ran for 75 performances.