On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music FORTY-NINE DEADLY SINS By John Simon This year we are midway between two centenaries: 1998 was Lotte Lenya's; 2000 willbe that of her husband, Kurt Weill. There is something rare...
...Herewith a brief discussion of the available CD versions...
...She knows it with gloves on and off...
...But the ballet chanté is a must...
...That female voice, originally soprano, turned mezzo-soprano in Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg's 1955 transposition for the older Lenya, and thus more suited to the usually low-voiced chanteuses of our day...
...But Lenya was not really a diseuse...
...reciter, someone who speaks rather than sings poems and songs—think of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady...
...I recall a bunch of us Harvard students, in 1943, listening enraptured to an album of Lenya singing six Weill songs on the Bost label...
...And her tone is not always pure...
...The family is sung in four-part close harmony by two tenors (the brothers), a baritone (dad), and a bewigged, mustachioed, barrel-chested basso profondo (mom...
...She knows life in its every fashion...
...But that's not thepoint...
...The set can be obtained from the Kurt Weill Foundation, 7 East 20th Street, NY, NY, 10003...
...And a great deal of her repertoire stays with you for many a year...
...What is a great chanteuse, as against an opera singer on one hand, and a mere pop singer on the other...
...And knows what she sings...
...Lenya, on CBS Masterworks, remains artistically unsurpassed...
...What emerged from the strained collaboration was one of the great satires of all time, dazzlingly choreographed by George Balanchine...
...In Philadelphia, Anna II's gluttony—actually a natural joy in food —makes her overweight and she is forced by Anna I to starve herself...
...She holds the high C in low esteem...
...It works without beauty too...
...Though having begun as an indifferent dancer, she switched to acting and singing, but only in the legitimate theater: "As soon as my feet hit the stage, I feel safe," she told Kurt...
...For she sings with more than her mouth...
...I wouldn't go near Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic's version with the offensive Angelina Réaux, and have likewise avoided Simon Rattle's unidiomatic conducting for the pallid Elise Ross...
...So Brecht makes all his virtues double-edged: The cure for the sin is worse than the sin...
...She knows the shit through which we're dragged exactly as well as we do, and knows quite a few songs on that score...
...As the Annas earn more money to send to the family, we see the house back home growing sin by sin...
...Dismal, too, is the live recording on Erato of Peter Sellars' movie version, with Teresa Stratas' by now frayed soprano, inadequate German, operatic intonation, dramatic ineptitude (Anna II sounding tougher than Anna I), all terribly balanced...
...Since it is necessary here to limit my focus, I will concentrate on the final maj or collaboration of Brecht, Weill and Lenya, The Seven Deadly Sins of 1933...
...As a friend remarked, her voice sounded "one octave below laryngitis...
...Also on CBS, Julia Migenes, an operatic soprano, does beautifully with Michael Tilson Thomas' first-rate conducting but her German is slightly off, and she does get a bit operatic...
...In Los Angeles, it emerges that anger at injustice, however just, makes her unemployable...
...Anna I makes her give up Fernando for Edward...
...I have not heard the Anja Silja-Christoph von Dohnanyi version, available only in a special Cleveland Orchestra edition...
...Incidentally, the cagey Weill, given to reusing material almost as much as Brecht was, based his last classical composition, the impressive Second Symphony, on reworked material from The Seven Deadly Sins...
...That brings me back to Kästner's poem, which I offer in an unrhymed, literal translation: She's not very pretty...
...At most, the melody She sings what she knows...
...Recordings of the work are available in both registers...
...Her songs belong in no drawing room...
...The quaver in her voice, thejadedness, the slight suggestion of sprechstimme, or the actual parlando where the performer becomes both Annas in dialogue—which Lenya does heartbreakingly—all argue in favor of this version, though the sound is not great...
...They share one bankbook, its fate jeopardized (to quote Kowalke's excellent essay in The Seven Deadly Sins: ? Sourcebook, published by the Weill Foundation) as, in every city, "Anna II is tempted by one of the seven deadly sins to succumb to normal needs and human responses...
...Easily the equivalent of a semester-long seminar in Lenyalogy, it presents essays, tributes, and a discography by scholars, artists and critics...
...In her youth, the self-taught Lenya sang soprano...
...One of his poems, "Der Abschiedsbrief " ("The Dear John Letter"), was stunningly set to music by Weill...
...The first was to be incarnated by Lotte Lenya, then Weill's temporarily estranged wife, the second by James' even more estranged one, the ravishing Tilly Loesch...
...Here, again, Anna II must unlearn her dancer's pride and show her naked behind "worth more than a small factory," because that is what people pay for...
...Quite splendid is the version (on Polydor or Berlin Classics) with Herbert Kegel's racy conducting and the magnificent near-growl of the great chanteuse Gisela May...
...And so on with the remaining three sins...
...She's a woman...
...For me, the best description of such an artist is a poem by the marvelous poet, novelist, screenwriter, and cabaretist Erich Kästner, best known hereabouts for his sublime children's novel Emiland the Detectives...
...depressing examples abound of dubious talents making it on the shirttails of a distinguished spouse...
...In another low-voice version from the by now terminally mannered, unbearably cutesy Ute Lemper, John Mauceri conducts too Mahlerianly...
...Asjointly conceived by the millionaire dilettante Edward James and the ex-Diaghilev aide Boris Kochno, this was to be a ballet chanté, whose heroine, Anna, is divided into a no-nonsense singing Anna I and a flighty dancing Anna II...
...She, in turn, could not have dreamed up abetter repertoire than her husband's compositions, whether in his operatic or quasi-operatic works, or in his cabaret-style songs for a chanteuse, with the words often by that poet-playwright of genius, Bertolt Brecht...
...In the end, I return to Lenya's CBS Masterworks rendering, subtly improved in the Bear Family reissue...
...The biggest disappointment for me is the recording by that superb mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter, who sings the soprano version with a bit too much cool distancing and gets strange tempos from John Eliot Gardiner...
...later, her voice deepened...
...There Anna II is kept by the rich Edward, and she, in turn, keeps her real love, impecunious Fernando...
...For the Lenya centenary a small German operation run by the eccentric Richard Weize, Bear Family Records, has brought out the finest imaginable tribute to Lenya—and, coincidentally to Weill and even Brecht...
...Instead of a mere booklet, the box offers a profusely illustrated hardbound book of 250 pages...
...The gender-bending allows for a parody of the barbershop quartet while also making fon of matriarchy, as it nicely sets Anna I's female voice against the four male ones...
...I wonder how many other performing artists' careers have been so thoroughly captured...
...So she sang in theaters or on records...
...It is a large box holding 11 CDs that contain just about everything Lenya ever did...
...We follow her from the early 1929-32 recordings through radio performances, appearances on TV talk shows, recording sessions, recitations of German poetry, readings from Kafka —all sorts of previously unavailable material from sundry European and American sources...
...Andean stand up to a man...
...Throughout, the family interrupts in a cannily varied chorale full of hypocritical moralizing, with the music for the sin sequences based on such popular genres as waltz, foxtrot, shimmy, march, tarantella...
...Jean Cocteau having turned down writing the text, Brecht was dragooned into doing it, but only after being persuaded by Weill that, as Kowalke notes, "he could convert the Freudian psychological sketch into a critique of the corruption of the individual within a capitalist society...
...In Memphis, for example, when Anna II wants to sleep, Anna I persuades her that this is sloth: A blackmailer can't afford to be idle...
...As Kim Kowalke, the Weill scholar, puts it, "Three decades and countless cigarettes had taken their toll, so now all of her music had to be transposed down, usually by a fourth or fifth, to accommodate the vastly different timbre and range of a woman approaching 60...
...But while trying to persuade Fernando to let Anna II go, Anna I herself has a fling with him and is savagely attacked by Anna II, which makes no sense in the scheme of things...
...Kurt Weill, however, could not have asked for a more consummate interpreter of his songs than his wife...
...Though her voice was small and she couldn't read music, she had an unerring ear and assuredness of tone...
...That too is well worth having, and exists in several good CD versions...
...I was instantly hooked on both composer and performer...
...Her heart sometimes hurts during hersong...
...The whole thing becomes a kind of cantata shuttling between a loftily Mahlerian and a jazz-oriented mode...
...The two Annas, really the conflicting sides of the same person, leave behind in Louisiana their parents and two brothers, and seek out the major cities to earn enough in seven years for a fine family house back home...
...But Anna I conquers each sin by enforcing self-repression and self-denial on Anna II, yet finds nothing wrong with Anna II committing the real but harmless sins to accumulate a fortune—prostitution, robbery, blackmail...
...There is something rare and wonderful about married artists who are equally gifted...
...If you augment this with a remarkable volume, Lenya the Legend: A Pictorial Autobiography, edited by David Fameth (Overlook Press), you will have Lenya in music, pictures and words—her own and other people's—in almost superhuman fullness...
...Personally, I prefer the later version, because the soprano original is more suited to opera singers, and wrong for this work calling for an earthier, more gin-soaked voice...
...Oddly enough, Lenya did not perform in cabarets or nightclubs, perhaps not considering them worthy venues...
...You can tell by the way it sounds...
...The marvelous mezzo Brigitte Fassbender on Harmonia Mundi actually sings the soprano version very well, but Cord Garben's conducting leaves something to be desired...
...And some of them she'll sing us now...
...And has music in her gut...
...In any case, lust here is the sin of loving according to your feelings rather than selling your love...
...Boston is the one place where Brecht's conceit breaks down...
...His poem "Ankündigung einer Chansonette" ("Presentation of a Song") was doubtless written to introduce a cabaret artist, known in French as a diseuse, i.e...
Vol. 82 • August 1999 • No. 9
