CHEMNITZ, Germany— For lovers of great melodies, Kurt Weill is the composer of ''Mack the Knife'' and ''September Song.'' For fans of 1940's musical comedies, he wrote the scores of ''Street Scene'' and ''One Touch of Venus.'' For operagoers, he bequeathed at least two classics to the modern repertory with ''The Threepenny Opera'' and ''The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.''

Yet in this eastern German industrial city, where celebrations of next year's 100th anniversary of Weill's birth began with a flourish this month, the multitalented German-born composer is being remembered above all as a Jew, a seemingly peculiar reminder that it was Weill's very Jewish identity that forced him to flee Germany in the first place.

The two-season centennial was nonetheless inaugurated with the Old Testament pageant opera, ''The Eternal Road,'' Weill's only work written from a strictly Jewish point of view. The production, the opera's first since 1937, will return to Chemnitz in November and then go in early 2000 to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, the New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv and the Opera Krakow in Poland.

How ''The Eternal Road'' became a highlight of the ''Kurt Weill 2000'' program reveals more about Chemnitz today than about Weill in his lifetime. Weill himself, who died in 1950, probably never set foot here. And after he fled Germany in 1933, he made a point of never returning. Yet with this production, Chemnitz has turned him into a powerful symbol of its campaign to make amends for past behavior.

When the Nazis took power in January 1933, the city's 350,000 inhabitants included a thriving community of some 3,500 Jews. By the time the city's synagogue was burned down on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, most Jews had fled and some had been arrested. In 1945, when Chemnitz became part of East Germany, there were 59 Jewish survivors living here. And when Germany was reunited in 1990, the Jewish community was down to just 17 people.

For Chemnitz, renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt by the Communists, the past had become a void because, while West Germany showed penitence for the Holocaust, East Germany denied all responsibility for the Nazis' barbarities. It was only when Chemnitz began to reflect on life before 1933 that it recognized an outstanding debt to Jews and understood what was lost with the destruction of its Jewish community. Courageously, the city decided to act.

Eight years ago, the municipal council instituted annual Days of Jewish Culture, with concerts, plays and lectures, to which it began inviting Jews who fled Chemnitz in the 30's. The city informed the German Government that it would welcome Jewish migrants from the East, notably Russia (it now has some 300 Jewish residents). And, instigated by the Social Democratic Mayor, Peter Seifert, the city decided to build a $6 million synagogue. And it was this project that led to ''The Eternal Road.''

The opera -- it is also often described as a Jewish oratorio -- takes place in a synagogue where a Jewish community is seeking refuge from a pogrom. To give heart to the Jews, the Rabbi begins reading from the Torah. He conjures images from the Old Testament, including familiar stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon and the Prophets, which are then enacted onstage. Finally, soldiers drive the Jews from the synagogue, but they are consoled by the promised coming of the Messiah.

The opera was born of a suggestion by the American producer Meyer Weisgal that the renowned German director Max Reinhardt put together a musical drama based on the Old Testament. Reinhardt turned to Weill for the score and Franz Werfel for the German-language libretto. The three, all Jews already in exile, worked on the project from 1934 to 1936. Titled ''Der Weg der Verheissung,'' or ''The Road of Promise,'' the opera was renamed ''The Eternal Road'' in its English translation. And eventually, after immense difficulties, it had its premiere at the Manhattan Opera House on Jan. 7, 1937 (with Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya, in the cast). It was a critical success but a commercial flop, and it closed after 153 performances.

A Transitional Work Between the 2 Weills

For Weill it was a transitional work between his German life and his American life, between what have become known as the ''Two Weills.'' In Germany he was known as an avant-garde composer whose main theater works -- ''The Threepenny Opera,'' ''Mahagonny'' and ''Seven Deadly Sins'' -- were written to librettos by Bertolt Brecht. In the United States, where Weill settled in 1935, he adjusted quickly and successfully to the demands of Broadway musicals, with Ira Gershwin, Langston Hughes and Alan Jay Lerner among his librettists. ''The Eternal Road,'' meanwhile, literally disappeared, its orchestral score long believed lost.

In the 1980's, when Rolf Stiska was assistant director of the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company founded by Brecht, his research into the Weill-Brecht partnership led him to the opera. Subsequently, as assistant director of the Berlin Staatsoper, he suggested presenting it. And when he was appointed director of the Theater Chemnitz in 1992, he brought the idea with him. But it was Chemnitz's new interest in its Jewish past, along with talk of a new synagogue, that suddenly made a production of ''The Eternal Road'' seem viable.