Word: lenya
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Weill: Die Dreigroschenoper-The Threepenny Opera (Lotte Lenya, with supporting cast and orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Bruckner-Ruggeberg; Colum-bia, 2 LPs). Composer Weill's widow Lotte Lenya (TIME, Aug. n) went to Berlin last winter to handpick and train singers, direct a 30th anniversary recording of the complete score (including some lusty, gutsy sections never before performed) for the first time in Bertolt Brecht's inimitable original German. The result is by far the best recorded recreation of Kurt Weill's jazzy, bitterly ironic score, with Singer Lenya herself heading a first-rate cast. Every sardonic...
...child," as Observer Margot Asquith described her, was Singer Lotte Lenya. The song was by her husband, Composer Kurt Weill, who celebrated the mood of his German generation in such gorgeously tawdry musical plays as The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny. Last week, in Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium, Singer Lenya, fiftyish, stepped before a microphone again and rekindled the feeling of those darkly cynical days. The concert was a tribute both to Composer Weill's remarkable durability and to Lotte Lenya's own great gifts as a singing actress...
...crowd had turned out to hear was a concert version of the Marc Blitzstein adaptation of Threepenny Opera, which last week marked its 1,200th performance at the off-Broadway Theater de Lys. Dressed in a royal blue frock, her carroty blonde hair drawn loosely back with combs, Lenya appeared in the role she created in Berlin in 1928 and made famous-that of Jenny, the bitter, dream-haunted London prostitute...
Poverty & Corruption. "I hear all my melodies," Kurt Weill once said, "sung in my inner ear by Lenya." The daughter of an illiterate Viennese coachman, she started singing at four in a neighborhood carnival; she still recalls being hauled at night out of the coal bin where she slept and made to warble sentimental favorites for her drunken father. Having mastered the techniques of standing on her head and walking a tightrope, Lenya enrolled at the Stadttheater in Zurich, worked up a dance act and moved on to Berlin. There she played the subway circuit, usually in Shakespeare. The year...
...simply echoed himself. Moreover, the lyrics by the late Marxist poet Bertolt Brecht, while brilliant in their own guttersnipe way, carry little of their original meaning for the U.S. in 1958: harsh cynicism can date as easily as gaslight sentimentality. Yet there is in the music-and in Lenya-a quality that defies time. "Threepenny Opera," she says, "will be good a hundred years from now. Corruption and poverty don't go out of fashion...