Word: lenya
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HAPPY END (Columbia) is the puniest of the four small operas written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. While it lacks the dramatic and social force of Three penny Opera, it can nearly match its songs. The work has never been better performed than in this version. Lotte Lenya, Weill's widow and faithful interpreter, memorably croaks Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao-Song, and other dirges from the shadows...
...Lotte Lenya owned Kurt Weill's music long before she became his widow. Her ravished soprano perfectly matched the temper of his Berlin theater songs-tough, bragging, wicked, hopeless-and no one could have done more with Bertolt Brecht's lyrics than a singer whose voice combines the chilling qualities of sober screams and drunken laughter. Even now-years past the peak of her career-Lenya's artistic claim frightens other singers off her turf...
...French and American music (J'attends un navire, My Ship). Last week Interloper Schlamme extended her welcome trespass by turning up in a Bowery theater-café called The Howff with a show devoted entirely to Weill. The show and its setting would have been just right for Lenya, but Schlamme could hardly be better...
Married. Lotte Lenya, 64, widow and singing disciple of Composer Kurt (The Threepenny Opera] Weill; and Russell Detwiler, 37, a plump U.S. impressionist painter; she for the third time; in London's Caxton Hall Registry Office. Said tawny-haired Lotte: "When you are really in love, age just becomes something written in your passport...
...opera unfolded, detailing the eating, loving, fighting and drinking habits of the inhabitants of Mahagonny during seven workless days of each week, the audience repeatedly broke in with applause-most notably at the end of Alabama-Song, a savage but haunting number in which Lotte Lenya made her debut as a singer more than three decades...