•
Rating: The pirates will come. They will come from the flaming Mediterranean. They will take what we stubbornly believe to be ours. Then the hunt will begin, and on that day, there will be no innocents.
Jenny the pirate, Jenny the scullery maid, Jenny the whore will walk among them and decide which heads to cut.
Lotte is Jenny; she always has been.
But she is also Polly who said "yes" to the wrong man and Jenny Hill the sweet hussy who gives no discounts, she is the soldier’s wife receiving gifts from burning cities and Venus brought to life by a kiss, Minny Belle, the Duchess, Liza Elliott, and all the others.
But Lotte is also everyone else: from Mackie Messer the murderer to Johnny Johnnson the lost soldier.
All, indeed all, the characters from the works set to music by Kurt Weill.
Because, Kurt, wrote that music for her. Thinking of her and her voice.
She, Lotte, born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer in Austria to a poor family, maybe circus artists, perhaps with a little gypsy blood in her veins, who had started dancing at 16 and had gone to Berlin to seek fortune.
And it is precisely there – in Berlin – that Lotte meets Kurt.
Kurt, the son of the chazan of the Dessau synagogue who had studied with Ferruccio Busoni and who, just over twenty, was beginning to make a name for himself as an avant-garde composer.
He was seeking a path between Mahler and Schönberg, but in the evenings he played the piano in beer halls to support himself.
Thanks to Georg Kaiser, who wanted his music for the drama “Der Protagonist,” Kurt met the two greatest (and most tormented) loves of his life: theater and Lotte.
Lotte was twenty-five, with a sea of red hair and fire in her eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was a burning ember and had a voice...
That voice.
Hoarse, ungraceful, bawdy, sensual, deep, evocative, rude, lascivious, seductive. Murky.
The little Jew lost his head.
It was the twenties and it was Berlin, and Berlin was the center of the world.
For better and for worse.
There were Gropius and Fritz Lang, Hindemith and Kirchner, Otto Dix and Max Liebermann, Webern, Pabst, Piscator, Billy Wilder.
Josephine Baker introduced Germans to the Charleston at the Nelson-Theater on Kurfürstendamm, expressionists turned reality upside down like a glove, the Bauhaus reinvented spaces, and the AVUS (Automobil-Verkehrs und Übungsstrecke) was the first freeway in the world.
The Spartacists had been drowned in their blood, and the Munich putsch had failed.
But the Weimar Republic was a stillborn experiment, a body already infected with the germs of the disease that would lead it to death. A serpent's egg which reveals the developing reptile inside.
In Berlin, there was also the Novembergruppe. Kurt became a member, and there he met Bertolt Brecht.
Bertolt and Kurt were born to work together. Their collaboration lasted little more than three years, but those were three years that would leave an indelible mark on 20th-century theater and music history.
“Mahagonny Songspiel,” “The Threepenny Opera,” “Happy End,” “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Is there a need to say more?
Weill composed for Brecht some of his most beautiful and rightfully famous songs; like “Mack the Knife,” “Alabama Song,” “Pirate Jenny,” “Surabaya Johnny,” “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife,” and others. Music that would live independently to this day even when separated from the theatrical text, which wouldn’t simply create the “estrangement” effect theorized by Brecht. And that would be interpreted by brilliant jazz musicians, dapper crooners, impeccable opera singers, and long-haired rockers, light singers, and actors with polished voices.
And they are still relevant.
Kurt found that third way he was seeking between song and research, between Mahler and Schönberg, between melody and atonality, between vulgar and select. In short, between “high” and “low,” without ever betraying either.
A path that is only the beginning and which will take him much further.
And Lotte is there with him, she is the voice for which that music is born, which everyone who wants to sing will have to contend with.
But that unheard-of hybrid (in the sense of “never heard”), that incestuous fruit, that music so outrageous will become a scandalous subject and “degenerate” art when the Weimar Republic dies amid the labor pains of birthing the monstrous reptile that it harbored in its bowels.
Nazi presses targeted it: “It is inconceivable that a composer producing completely anti-German works should still have the opportunity to appear in a theater supported by German taxpayers” reads the '32 “Völkischer Beobachter.”
“WEILL, Kurt (Curt) Julian, Dessau 2-3-1900 Composer. The name of this composer is inseparably connected with the worst degradation of our art. In Weill's theater works, the Jewish anarchic orientation manifests itself openly and shamelessly.” Decreed the “Lexicon der Juden in der Musik.”
The Director of the State Opera will be fired for attempting to stage the new opera by Weill, and Brecher, who directed the premiere of Mahagonny in Leipzig, will shoot his wife and then commit suicide.
Lotte and Kurt have no choice but to flee Berlin. In March of '33, they are in Paris and then London.
Kurt continues to write: the ballet “The Seven Deadly Sins,” the operas “Marie Galante” and “Der Silbersee,” and the musical “A Kingdom For A Cow.” But the reception is cold.
Lotte no longer wants to stay in Europe; for her, the next stop is America. But Kurt is caught up in the project of writing together with Max Reinhardt a work on the fate of the Jews: “The Way of the Promise,” which will become “The Eternal Road” and will be presented on Broadway. Kurt, an atheist and communist, is rediscovering Judaism due to Nazi persecution.
And Lotte leaves.
The two divorce. Kurt lasts two years and then goes to retrieve her in America.
They remarry in '37 and never part again until Kurt's death. Even though Lotte will betray him with playwright Paul Green.
In America, it is not easy: Kurt is almost unknown as a musician but has a reputation as a communist. Also, the conditions of the music and theater market are vastly different: Kurt will have to deal with the rules of Broadway and Hollywood.
But several composers and musicians appreciate him, among them George Gershwin, who will invite him to the premiere of “Porgy and Bess.” Leftist theater companies like the Group Theatre in New York welcome him favorably and commission work from him, like “Johnny Johnson.” Thus, Kurt resumes working and writing.
It's his third life.
Kurt takes American citizenship and becomes an author of musicals and music for the radio.
At first, it does not go well: “Johnny Johnson” and “The Eternal Road” are received coldly. But it's just the beginning. Soon his shows will be box office hits. “Knickerbocker Holiday,” “Lady In The Dark,” “One Touch Of Venus,” “The Firebrand Of Florence,” “Street Scene” are all successes and contain beautiful songs like “Speak Low” or “September Song.”
And it is always Lotte who sings them first.
However, someone raises an eyebrow. There are those who see in that transformation a surrender to the logic of consumption and easy entertainment. The student of Busoni, Brecht's comrade, the incendiary who had gutted the rules of the lied had become a harmless entertainer?
Fools.
Aside from the fact that works such as “Down In The Valley,” “Love Life,” and “Lost In The Stars” introduce elements of innovation and research, absolutely revolutionary by the standards of the time, how can one not understand that from the “Symphony No.1” to the “Concerto for Violin and Winds op.12” to the other works of the '20s, passing through the theater music of his European years, up to his “American” production there is growth, an ideal continuity, a coherent design?
Weill is pulling 20th-century Western music out of the shallows into which the obese grandiloquence of Wagner and the navel-gazing autism of the avant-garde had bogged it down.
Weill has charted a path where visionaries and courageous people (and also many strange types and some bad elements) like the Residents, John Cale, Tom Waits, the Can, LaMonte Young, Lou Harrison will walk; but also serious composers like Stockhausen and Nono, or unclassifiable ones like Morricone and Zorn and many others who will walk a tightrope between popular and elitist, between refined and vulgar, between pop and classicality.
Like Kurt, but rarely to Kurt's level.
Those songs will end up with people like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, Jim Morrison and Lou Reed, Ute Lemper and Barbara Hannigan, and many, many others (Nina Simone, Marianne Faithfull, Dagmar Krause, PJ Harvey, Louis Armstrong, Bowie, Domenico Modugno, etcetera, etcetera). At home in a jazz club as in an opera house or on the boards of a rock concert.
Universal music.
And perhaps it would have amused Kurt to see those young men with electric guitars and drums redo his songs.
But Kurt could not see it: a terribly foolish heart attack swept him away at only 50 years old, still in the prime of his maturity. Who knows what he would have envisioned? Instead, that music was lost among the stars.
It was left to Lotte to preserve and manage that music. And she does so with decisiveness and a proud scowl. Even Louis Armstrong had to get her approval to add the improvised trumpet parts to his version of “Mack The Knife” (which he would sing in duet with Lotte herself).
Lotte records those songs. And it’s worth getting at least some of those records to know how those songs were meant to be sung. I recommend this “Lotte Lenya Album” from '70, because it’s a bit easier to find, it’s well-recorded, and it doesn’t limit itself to only the Brechtian production like other works in her name. The voice has gained maturity for what it lost in freshness and brashness, but it is always “that” voice. Watch out, though, because the CD version has a different title (why is that?).
And then Lotte did other things as well: like remarry, act, and write for the theater, win awards, even in cinema.
Hollywood didn’t love her much, to be honest, but her interpretation in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” earned her an Academy Award nomination.
But we’ve all seen her, without knowing who she is, in another movie when, in the guise of the cruel dominatrix with lesbian tendencies, Rosa Klebb, she tries to kill James Bond with a poisoned knife hidden in a shoe (a knife in a shoe!) in “From Russia with Love.”
And someone will raise an eyebrow.
Of that entire story, of all that Art, the only thing remembered, the only - true - moment of glory is the participation in a Bond movie?
Don’t be foolish.
Watch her, Rosa, as she clumsily dances with her ridiculous weapon, trying to kill that smug pomaded dandy Bond.
She’s clumsy, bawdy, sensual, cruel, rude, lascivious, indomitable. Murky.
She’s Jenny. She’s always Jenny, the whore, the scullery maid, the traitor.
Rosa Klebb is Jenny the pirate.
The pirates will come. They will come from the flaming Mediterranean. From Syria and Morocco, from Nigeria and the Maghreb, and from further afield. From Asia, the seas of China, the Orient. From all the Easts and Souths of the World.
And they will take what we believe is ours, they will walk our streets, sleep with our women, mangle our language. They will destroy our Cathedrals. And they will mix their deities with ours, we will celebrate Christmas, Ramadan, Halloween, and Seollal. In the streets, children of a thousand colors will play.
And we will have a black president with a strange name.
The Mediterranean is already burning.
Tracklist
Loading comments slowly
