Ruth Leon recommends… Pirate Jenny – Lotte Lenya
Ruth Leon recommendsPirate Jenny – Lotte Lenya
The recent Cabaret Convention in New York had a whole evening devoted to the songs of Kurt Weill, the German refugee who, on his arrival in New York in 1933, having been forced to leave his beloved Berlin, chose to become the most American of composers without ever losing his European sensibility.
Between 1926-1933 Weill had become a leading cultural figure in Weimar Germany. In 1926 he had married Lotte Lenya, a big star in Germany. He was riding high in the cultural life of his country and the huge success of The Threepenny Opera assured him fame and fortune.
And then came the Nazis. Weill was Jewish, he had to leave. Lenya was not Jewish and the upheaval of moving from country to country and the uncertainty of their peripatetic life put such strain on their marriage that they divorced in 1933, the year Weill finally settled in New York. But they couldn’t stay apart, they remarried in 1937.
His American musicals – Lost in the Stars, Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, Street Scene and more – are wonderful, of course, but his masterpiece was and remains Der Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), written with Bertolt Brecht in 1928 and premiered in Berlin. Lenya originated the role of Jenny in the first production and there is unanimous agreement among theatre people that, althugh she wasn’t the greatest singer, nobody ever sung Kurt Weill like Lotte Lenya.
Here she is, 40 years later, from an 1968 American TV special, with her, and his, greatest song. It’s out of context, sung in English in a translation by Mark Blitzstein, and in black and white, but I wouldn’t exchange this version for any other singer who ever sung it. Such vicious menace, such delightful vengeance. Marvellous. See if you agree.
I heard Lotte Lenya singing this for the first time about 5 years ago when it was played on Radio 3 and I was stunned by it. She was a huge talent and it’s quite sad that for most people she’s best known for her role in the Bond film “From Russia With Love”.
“many”
I do not consider that his greatest song. Two better ones that spring immediately to mind are Mack the Knife, from The Threepenny Opera, and The Alabama Song from Mahagonny.
And I suggest you consider the conjugation of the verb “to sing.” Twice in your piece you use the incorrect tense. Your first and third uses of it should read “sang,” not “sung.”
In 1971, I was lucky enough to attend a production of Brecht’s “Mother Courage and her Children” at the University of California at Irvine, starring Lotta Lenya, 73 at the time. She was a guest faculty member at UCI. As I had hoped, she was riveting, the experience unforgettable.
Blitzstein’s translation is pretty damn great, too.
I see a video of Lotte Lenya and I always expect the release of a stiletto from her shoe.