By Steven Suskin
22 Aug 1999
Lotte Lenya emigrated to America with her husband Kurt Weill in 1935. Over the next 19 years, she appeared on Broadway in two short-lived Weill musicals (which ran a combined total of six months) and two plays by Weill's friend, neighbor, and sometime collaborator Maxwell Anderson (which ran four months). Which is to say, this distinctive and accomplished singer-actress was severely underemployed in the United States. Until 1954, that is, when Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of The Threepenny Opera -- with Lenya very much in evidence -- opened off-Broadway. Thus began a reexamination and rediscovery of the work of Weill, and a successful career on stage, screen, and disc for Lenya.
As a direct result of the American Threepenny -- and the sudden fame of the "Moritat vom Mackie Messer," refashioned as "Mack the Knife" -- Lenya was invited by Columbia to record a 1955 album of Weill's Berlin song hits (which was reissued in 1997). This led to a series of six albums, in all. Weill, who died in 1950 at the age of fifty, has been posthumously recognized as one of the most important and influential composers of the second quarter of the twentieth century. (A reading of his letters to Lenya -- collected in a fascinating book called "Speak Low" -- indicate that he spent much of his energy during his years here struggling to earn a living.)
The 1957 collection, "September Song and other American theatre songs of Kurt Weill," has now been spiffed up with 24-bit technology, as they say, and expanded into "Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill, The American Theatre Songs." Which is a fine (if limited) view of Weill's Broadway output. Many of these songs have been recorded elsewhere, of course, but there is something inescapably authentic about Lenya's renditions.
The album is marred, somewhat, by some strangely cheery, 50s-style orchestrations on half of the original tracks (in hopes of hit singles, perhaps). Weill, of course, wrote his own orchestrations for the theatre, and it's a shame that we don't have Lenya singing to his original (and superior) charts for "Speak Low" and "September Song." None of the orchestrations are credited in the extensive liner notes, but the selections from Street Scene and Lost in the Stars seem to use Weill's charts -- and it is on these tracks that Lenya is most effective. Three songs especially stand out: "Lonely House" and "A Boy Like You" from the former, and "Stay Well" from the latter. These are typically performed by singers with an operatic bent; Lenya sings them in theatrical style, simple and straightforward, and I find the songs far more moving than in other recordings.
The folks at Sony appear to have gone through the Columbia archives to add every scrap of miscellaneous Lenya they could find, effectively doubling the length of the original album to seventy-eight minutes. Included is a previously-unreleased song from the 1957 sessions, "Song of Ruth." (This transitional Weill piece was first performed by Lenya on Broadway in Max Reinhardt's 1937 religious pageant The Eternal Road). Some of the other additions are of questionable interest. Songs by Weill's Berlin contemporaries Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler, from the cast album of the 1962 off-Broadway revue Brecht on Brecht, serve mostly to demonstrate how much more interesting Weill's work is; the lugubrious "Song of a German Mother" ("My son, I gave you the jackboots, and the brown shirt came from me, etc.") might well make you want to fling your stein of beer at the CD player. And I suppose that the late Jack Gilford would be startled to find himself singing, in 24 bits, about pineapples on a "classical" label. He's here, nevertheless, with two Cabaret duets -- written not by Weill but by John Kander, with lyricist Fred Ebb -- which we really don't need to hear again, folks. On the plus side, Lenya's opening number "So What?" has apparently been re-remastered since last year's remastering of Cabaret. It sounds crisper and more alive than ever, and I'm always glad to hear Lenya's heart-wrenching performance of "What Would You Do?"
And then there's Weill's biggest hit, written back in 1928. First we hear trombonist Turk Murphy's jazz arrangement, with Lenya singing Brecht's original German lyrics to the "Moritat." This was recorded in 1955, but the 55-year-old Lenya sounds 30 years younger. The album ends with an English-language Lenya/Louis Armstrong duet version of "Mack the Knife," recorded six days later. This is a swinging rendition, as you might expect, followed by eight minutes worth of highly amusing session takes. Lenya can't get the syncopation, the patient Armstrong keeps gently coaching her, she keeps missing it. ("That's easy for you, ja" she laughs.)
A slight cavil, though. "Moritat" is a fine song, certainly, and I suppose I would admire it even if it had never been translated. But the song surely wouldn't have achieved its immense international success had it not been for Marc Blitzstein. It was Blitzstein who coined the phrase Mack the Knife, an English-language nickname presumably patterned after Jack the Ripper or Billy the Kid; and it was Blitzstein -- a composer himself -- who was canny enough to wed this moniker to the final three notes of Weill's refrain, giving the song an unforgettable title phrase. With 15 percent of the playing time on this disc dedicated to Blitzstein's version of "Mack the Knife" -- and with lyricists of all the other songs duly noted -- they really ought to have credited him, don't you think?
