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.
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