The Woman Behind the Songs

...The Jenny of Die Dreigroschenoper was a small part and even the Jenny of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny was a less than demanding one...

...The first husband, George Davis, was a gifted but blocked writer, a genuinely intellectual magazine editor who lacked the talent for editorial politics, and a masochist who kept seeking out "rough trade" that of ten landed him in the hospital...

...Having read and heard so much about his "epic theater," she was worried as she confronted him about what he would make of her renditions...

...She was not only the keeper of her husband's flame, she was also—with that hair, that mouth, that voice—an inextinguishable flame herself...

...The reasonis not far to seek...

...Her protector, Révy, now promoting her in Berlin, originally dubbed her Grushenka, after Dostoevsky's trollop...

...each was necessary, and in Spoto's biography—sometimes with the author's help, sometimes by reading against the grain—we find and learn to appreciate both...

...Dying, Lenya called out many names from her past, but most often "Russi, Russi...

...next, he Russianized Linnerl into Lenja, and in America that would become Lenya...

...Kaiser, a generous man who had helped many a struggling artist, introduced her to his wife, Margarethe, and soon the needy actress became an au pair to the Kaiser children...

...She encourged the girl to live to the fullest...

...If, for all of the research, it is sometimes less than penetrating, it also generally avoids pretentiousness and allows a fascinating life to speak for itself...

...Further on, he claims that Lenja was trying to duplicate an uncaring, absentee father with a man wrapped up in his composing, whose declaration of love was, "You come right after my music...

...but when she sang...

...Too bad that, especially in America, Lenya did not get the chance to do more acting...

...Nevertheless, she became, partly out of guilt, the indomitablechampion, promoter and watchdog of his work, on top of being its supreme interpreter...

...As Lys Symonette, a friend of both spouses put it, "She knew she hadn't givenKurt solace...

...then, Off-Broadway again, in Brecht on Brecht—to mention only her most outstanding appearances...

...A worthy attempt at describing something that ultimately eludes description...

...Spoto does some speculating on Johanna's masochism and its effect on her daughters, but such conditions were not unusual in Vienna's lower-class families...

...And the curmudgeon of curmudgeons began to weep...

...What was unusual was Johanna's solicitude, enabling Linnerl to get back to Switzerland...

...Spoto tersely and vividly retells the oft-told story of those unleashed Berlin years when the Brecht-Weill works were premiered to overwhelming acclaim despite progressively more rabid sabotaging by the nascent Nazis...

...Weill was gentle and so different from her father, he says in one place...

...Her death did not elicit the notice it deserved, but her recordings—almost all of them of Weill's music—live happily on, today on compact disks...

...On the other hand, the two Jennys were prostitutes and it may be that Lenja's early life contributed to her success as both...

...Lenya's avarice increased, to the point of her throwing Kaiser's visiting widow, Margarethe, out of her house and breaking off with her, merely because her former benefactress gave away some of Lenya's old clothes to charity...

...In Europe, to be sure (and in Germany in particular), there was a longstanding tradition of the diseuse: a woman who speaks rather than sings her songs...

...A transient in various menial jobs, Linnerl was also, by age 11, a child prostitute in Vienna's streets...

...Spoto's book, more down-to-earth than his previous biographies, is—even if grammatically and syntactically deplorable—relatively free from factual error...

...When Lenya had to have the tessitura transposed downward, the immediate causes were age and heavy smoking...

...We all saw her fine work in the OffBroadway Threepenny and the Broadway Cabaret...

...but it was in its shrewd intoning rather than mere pretty singing, insidiously effective...

...the fine art of perseverance...

...Let us now backtrack a bit...

...What that meant for Lenya I, and still more for Lenya II, was acting rather than singing with the voice—the sort of thing that middle America discovered en masse in 1956 when Rex Harrison starred in My Fair Lady...

...With the passage of time and the emergence of many others performing that repertoire, we have come to realize that there are only two ways of doing it: by consciously or unconsciously imitating Lenya, or by carefully going out of one's way to take a different approach...

...She was back with her family in Vienna when the War broke out...

...A jealous woman friend who was looking after her prevented some of her other friends from coming to see her, and went so far as to place a symbolic wedding ring on her finger...

...Very petite, with an overlarge head and an excess of nose and jaw that, despite fine, expressive eyes, gave her a somewhat equine face...

...Her fourth marriage was to a documentary filmmaker who never made the film about her and Weill he was supposed to, but exploited her financially as best he could...

...Although her death was a hard one, she kept optimistically disbelieving it...

...He was just slightly younger than Lenya, helped her with numerous shrewd career moves, and died of much the same sort of heart trouble as Weill at much the same age...

...Clearly, she knew the value of understatement...

...Indeed, the early Lenya who performed in the premières of The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny and the rest—in a higher voice and with less textured artistry—was not quite the same person who, in the United States, had a second, more varied and far-reaching career...

...Lenya's chief pleasure was the various homes she was making, culminating in a house in Rockland County in the Hudson Valley...

...In Brecht and Weill's last marvelous collaboration, The Seven Deadly Sins, the heroine is split into two Annas: Anna I, the calculating self who sings and speaks (created by Lenya), and Anna II, the instinctual and appetitive self who dances (created by Tilly Losch...

...eventually, the duo worked up a dance act and set out to conquer Weimar Berlin...

...It was her intonation, her inflection...

...Now that she was in her 50s, the affairs, usually with younger men, were no longer forthcoming...

...No one has surpassed her...

...There was, in other words, a slight contrariness in the delivery...

...To appreciate her artistry, we must consider separately her singing and her acting...

...L.L...

...A War of the Widows was to rage as long as the two women lived, interrupted by occasional strained armistices...

...Later, she wondered whether she had ever really known him...

...If he'd asked me anything else about the Presidents, I'd have answered wrong...

...He apparently knew all about his wife's involvements, but it wasn't until they came to the United States that he discovered what was sauce for the goose could be sauce for the gander...

...This was clearly a concession to the dead sister...

...Eventually, the Jew Weill and his non-Jewish wife had to flee Germany...

...Perhaps it was also the wear and tear of an often difficult half-a-lifetime put into every sung phrase...

...Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blamauer, as Lenya was christened, was born on October 18,1898, into a Viennese working-class family...

...There are two possibilities: Carter, Reagan— ugh...

...Her father insisted that she be given the name of a previous daughter, a talented little dancer dead at age three...

...This was not highbrow stuff, certainly not Schönbergian Sprechstimme...

...She could not read music and she never studied singing...

...By 1966, when she conquered Broadway in the musical Cabaret, Lenya described her voice as "an octave below laryngitis...

...About the elections, she wrote a friend in 1979, "What the big excitement is for I don't know...

...She managed to get a few tiny roles, then things improved when she became the protégée of Richard Révy, a thriving stage director...

...Weill, whose adaptability was phenomenal, speedily achieved an American style, modeling himself chiefly on Porgy and Bess...

...Lenya was getting crankier and kept rewriting her will...

...Lotte was not nearly so generous about his minor dalliances with Hollywood starlets while she remained in the East...

...she became beautiful...

...Actually, things progressed more slowly...

...He, too, was 27 years younger...

...he, too, died of the consequences of drink...

...Itwastobe a semi-open marriage, with Lenja having numerous affairs while Kurt's only mistress was (at that time) serious music...

...This was Kurt Weill, and she later claimed that by the time she had got him to shore, he proposed to her...

...He came over, gently touched her face and said, "Lenya, darling, whatever you do is epic enough for me...

...The conductor Julius Rudel has observed: "There are some few people who have an incredible magnetism...

...Spoto is a bit self-contradictory about what Kurt's appeal for Lenja was...

...She who had no business aptitude or experience now negotiated with publishers and drove hard bargains, saw to it that productions the world over were faithful and was ready to stop them even if the director was as prestigious as Giorgio Strehler...

...Only the name wasn't Karoline any more...

...A whole world is visible in the way she moves...

...There exists, too, a tape of her playing Mother Courage in Recklinghausen (1965), where Lenya apparently made a very fine showing, as Spoto persuasively argues and as a friend of mine confirms—even if the German critics were unforgiving of her Viennese accent and unwillingness to resettle in Europe...

...He predicted a great future for her...

...Well, yes...

...In either mode, few have equaled her...

...Then she thought, "Oh, the hell with all this, I'll just sing as I always have...

...celebrating...

...Although the former Karoline was known to her friends as simply Lenja, she devised for theatrical purposes the catchily alliterative Lotte Lenja...

...And that life speaks as well as it sang...

...He drank more, painted less—and less well—and devoured all her financial and maternal support...

...She wasn't a beautiful woman...

...three quarters of the singers I could not understand...

...In her later years, there were some very touchy relationships with homosexual women, and help from several others motivated simply by friendship...

...was acting Maria in Twelfth Night whan Révy brought around the major German playwright Georg Kaiser to see her perform...

...Charming anecdotes abound...

...So there came about over the years three marriages to "homosexuals with tragic self-destructive tendencies...

...In Lenya's artistry these songs are full of recognizable fears and longings [couched in] a voice alternately thin with the pain of aging or thick with the hope of youth...

...It was across the lake there that L.L...

...Inflation was raging in Germany and it must have required all of Karoline's ingenuity to keep her head above water...

...He was 27 years younger than Lenya and, when he tried to make love to her, had to be nursed instead for the remnant of a sexual disease...

...Years later, Lenya said, " I'm lucky he asked me that one...

...A friend characterized Lenya's voice as it burst on America in an early concert: "That quivering funny little tone we're not accustomed to—it made people cry...

...From Révy, directly and indirectly, she profited most...

...Though she had a brother and, afterward, a sister, Karoline, nicknamed Linnerl, was the most important child to her father...

...Her mother, Johanna, likewise maltreated by her hard-drinking husband, was nevertheless supportive...

...With the success of the 1953 Threepenny Opera, Lenya's career became assured...

...The next husband, Lenya's favorite, was Russell Detwiler, a painter of some talent undermined by alcoholism...

...Now add to that Lenya's acting—considerable, as we can see in G.W...

...She was lively, clever, witty, and she knew how to make a man's ego feel pampered...

...You sing classical music mainly with your voice and your technique...

...Yet there is something gallant about it as well, as in her stipulation that she be buried with no other makeup except lipstick—the crimson mouth that had been her trademark...

...After stays in Paris and London, the Weills sailed for New York in September 1935 with Max Reinhardt and Franz Werf el, with whom Weill was to collaborate on the superspectacle The Eternal Road...

...it soon became apparent that Linnerl's real interest was acting, not dancing...

...Pabst's filmed Threepenny Opera (1931) and in L.L.'s much later and far too few American movie stints, sometimes in minuscule parts—notably in The Roman Spring of Mrs...

...No need to rehearse here the ever greater successes of Weill on our musical stage...

...But two virtues never forsook her: She never acted the grande dame and, however ill, she did not lose her uncomplaining good humor...

...by 1924, she was virtually a member of the Kaiser family both in town and in their country house at Grünheide...

...Of such singing, Lotte Lenya was and remains the exemplar...

...still, suitability is something one makes as much as one finds it...

...She was living in the final home she had shared with Kurt, the country house at New City, New York, and maintained a Manhattan apartment...

...appeared in The Pioneers of Ingolstadt by a female disciple of Brecht' s, the leading Berlin theater critic, Alfred Kerr, wrote: "By the way she moved her legs, Lotte Lenja portrayed a particular character...

...At her citizenship test, for example, Lenya identified America's first President as Abraham Lincoln, and the benevolent judge let it pass...

...Johanna, widowed, had married another drunken brute who was taking things out on her and Karoline's younger sister, Maria...

...Her social life flourished and her wealth increased impressively...

...If her singing was mostly intoning, her acting was largely stage presence...

...Few, if any, hard facts exist about Lenya's lesbianism, and Spoto is confusing here —he has her getting involved with women for the first time at three disparate stages of her career...

...Kurt and Lenya took to America right away...

...She died on November 27, 1981, aged 83...

...They spoke nothing but English and tried to avoid other Europeans...

...Lenya, whose early poverty was now turning her into a terrible miser, nonetheless indulged her darling Russi in every way until his premature death, which hit her harder than her previous widowings...

...As Spoto writes: "Lenya's voice, with its sudden vibrato and equally sudden hoarse speech and whisper, conveyed the possibility of fatal turmoil...

...The great singers of pop music—from jazz to musical comedy, from folk to the sophisticated but subclassical chanson or lied— have generally been vocally unremarkable...

...ditto the Communist Brecht...

...And when, well into her 80s and gravely ill, she couldn't stand the sight of her body and insisted on cosmetic breast surgery, her friends, like Spoto now, viewed this as pathetic...

...Lenya's brain, heart and gut, recalling and reliving her existence, were of much greater importance to her art than her vocal chords...

...At his deathbed, she told him she had always loved him—a white lie...

...No, Linnerl, you are not pretty," the laundress-mother would respond to urgent inquiry, "but men will like you...

...She did appear in concerts and on the radio, and perfected her English, which, though heavily accented, got to be pungently idiomatic, as the letters and journals Spoto quotes from attest...

...That was Lenya...

...Culture Watching THE WOMAN BEHIND THE SONGS BY JOHN SIMON Lotte Lenya is known to those who care about 20th-century theater and music as the actresssinger married to Kurt Weill and wedded to his and Bertolt Brecht's work— the person who did more than anybody to put the Brecht-Weill team across in America...

...Well, there were a few setbacks...

...but if someone else wanted to offer that to him, she'd raise hell...

...But she had charm and sex appeal to spare, as everyone who knew her was to testify...

...Stone (1961), From Russia With Love (1963), and SemiTough (1976...

...She was beginning to make a career for herself when, in 1950, Weill died at the age of 50...

...Sixtyodd years later, when I interviewed her for public television, I, too, was struck by those traits...

...So it is good to have Donald Spoto's Lenya: A Life (Little Brown, 371 pp., $19.95), whatever its shortcomings...

...With Grete, a middle-class dancer colleague, Karoline had some wild experiences including abortions...

...What, at this point, was the future Lenya like...

...Yet already in her early, higher-pitched efforts, there was asexy rasp that, intime, turned Rabelaisianly raucous...

...It was as a singing actress in the two versions of Mahagonny and in The Threepenny Opera that Lenja's career really began...

...But she could not be alone without some form of male companionship...

...In 1955, as she was about to record her famous "Berlin Theater Songs," she sought out Brecht in East Berlin for help...

...As early as 1929, whenL.L...

...Soon, however, they parted company...

...when she failed to replicate her dead sister, she became the most resented and abused one...

...Yet no matter how rich a man was, she never outstayed her interest in him...

...Or as the British composer-conductor Constant Lambert explained about her, "There is no such thing as intrinsically good tone in singing—there is only suitable tone...

...Thus she wrote me in a letter of April 1977 about Richard Foreman's Lincoln Center production of Threepenny, "I know the text fairly well...

...If they stand in a particular place, your eye invariably moves toward them even if they're doing nothing while everybody else is going crazy...

...Some had little or no formal training, some shot their voices in sundry ways, some were simply old...

...They all sounded like they had heisse Kartoffeln im Mund [hot potatoes in the mouth...

...was asked to row a young composer coming to see Kaiser about collaborating on a stage work...

...you sing popular music mainly with your life...

...The Weills' finances improved, and the couple were soon part of the theatrical and musical establishments...

...Similarly, there was Lenya I and Lenya II...

...Maria Piscator remarked that Lenya "always sang sad songs with an incredible joy fulness and joyful songs with a great sadness...

...She walked into men's lives—and out of them—willfully and ruthlessly, always learning something from her diverse lovers...

...But she stopped midway: "Maybe this isn't epic enough for you, Brecht...

...It is compulsively readable and manages to be outspoken without sensationalism, sympathetic without idolatry...

...The most arduous fights were with Brecht and, subsequently, his widow, the actress Helene Weigel...

...Meanwhile Lenya had several platonic, mostly epistolary, relationships with other men, and quite a few female relationships, not all of them platonic...

...An aunt, working as a housekeeper in Zurich, and Johanna's sacrifices made it possible, in due time, for Linnerl to become a sort of au pair for a Zurich family and simultaneously study ballet...

...Yet what they poured into their singing was the life they had lived, the griefs and deprivations they were trying to escape from, the hopes that (as they well knew) could be fulfilled nowhere else...

...Herinfluence, in fact, spread all over the world...