Interview: Grammy nominated West End and Broadway star UTE LEMPER on new album and concert

In honour of revolutionary composer Kurt Weill’s 125th birthday this year, acclaimed singer and actress Ute Lemper recently announced her new album, Pirate Jenny, which is released on Friday (25 April) via The Audiophile Society. A concert with the repertoire is also coming up on 13 June at Cadogan Hall. We spoke to Ute ahead of her album release.

For people who may not have come across the work of Kurt Weill, who is he and how has he inspired you and your work?

In the eighties, I was on a mission to revive the music of Weimar, especially the music of Kurt Weill. I was a young German actress, living in West-Berlin, a divided city, surrounded by the Wall in the middle of the DDR. It was a time when Europe was still in the midst of cold war trauma and Weimar seemed simply a forgotten era that eventually facilitated through its political failures the pathway to Nazi Germany.

I had moved to Berlin in 1984 after studying and performing in Vienna, Austria and I felt that art was a lot more political in West-Berlin than in the rest of the world. The devastating face of history was written all over the walls, and my mind and heartbeat grew angrier and more rebellious. I studied the music of Weill and conceived my first concert dedicated uniquely to the composer. I wanted to tell his story to the people of my generation, and so I did, in jeans and a T-shirt in little experimental theatres in the dark but feverish West-Berlin. Kurt Weill’s story was exemplary as a revolutionary German Jewish composer during Weimar, then persecuted by the Nazis, thrown out of the country but able to pursue and create more fascinating compositions and collaborations in exile in a new world, of course with enormous sacrifice and pain.

When I started to re-record the complex songbook of Kurt Weill and the Berlin Cabaret Songs with UNIVERSAL/DECCA, it initiated a wave of revival and the ‘Dance on the Volcano’ of the 20s in Berlin was back in fashion and fascinated a wave of young performers and audiences in its progressivity and exotism. Being the protagonist of all these recordings was a great privilege that came with enormous responsibility. To be a German with an international career was still a complicated affair in those years. I was confronted with stereotypes and a strangely fascinated hostility based on the stigma of the German character and language. I felt sometimes that I had to carry the horrible Nazi history on my shoulders simply by carrying the German passport. The Holocaust inflicted unbearable pain on my soul, and I wished nothing more than to run away from Germany to bring the story of the Jewish composer Kurt Weill with me to fuel a dialogue about the past. This is when the mission became heartfelt and I dedicated many years to travel the world to celebrate his music in recitals or with symphony orchestras, string quartets, or my band to sing the magical creations from Weimar, mostly with Berthold Brecht, as much as the unknown and known song books of the French and American periods.

For more than 40 years, the journey of this simple and brilliant man who died in America of a broken heart has inspired my life.

Now, the world is once again in the chaos of more cold and hot wars. The compositions, especially the ones with Berthold Brecht as the lyricist are written almost 100 years ago now, yet still breathtaking and completely unique. There is nothing like it. Rock, Pop, Cabaret and Classical artists have been inspired by his works since the nineties. The biting words meet the melancholic melody and the harmonic context evokes in a quirky way colours of Jazz, Ragtime, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. There is theatre in all the stories and political, satirical commentary about morality and a corrupt society. Exotic characters tell us about their survival, risen from the ashes of racism, disadvantage, and neglect. It all sounds oh so contemporary!

I love to sing these ballads of the truth even more 40 years later, after living through the mills of life and witnessing that history wanted to be a good teacher but it could not find any students.

This album presents another take on the songs. David Chesky said a couple of years ago to me, you should reinvent Kurt Weill, put a contemporary edge to it and bring it to the younger generations. I said ...let’s do it....let’s celebrate his 125th birthday in an unusual way.

‘Mack the Knife’ has been romanticised in the US, becoming more of a catchy jazz standard, but I am trying to bring back its original message and tone in this single.

I always stayed truthful to the original. Well, not always, like in 2001, I performed the jazzy big band version at the Royal Albert Hall for the AIDs Gala with Liz Taylor and Michael Jackson. Michael asked fascinated during the intermission, “who wrote that fantastic jazz tune?” And I told him the story that it was written in 1928, once upon a time in Weimar Berlin by two revolutionary artists, Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht, who wanted to change the world. I told him it was a saga of the most outrageous criminal who intended to overthrow the government. Michael looked very concerned but kindly acknowledged the history of the song. Like many others, he thought it had been written for Ella Fitzgerald in the 50s.

A similar episode happened during my first run of Weill shows in 1989 in the Rockefeller Center Rainbow Room. I sang the ‘Alabama Song’ and people yelled, why would I sing a song written by The DOORS?

Another person screamed, oh no it’s the song by that communist Berthold Brecht. I smiled calmly and let the audience fight about the origin of that song and kept singing: oh show us the way to the next little dollar… oh don’t ask why, oh do not ask why....here.... in the Rockefeller Center....

The next day, the Berlin Wall fell. I will never forget my disbelief about the incredible news I heard on the radio in a yellow cab in NY that morning. A week after my run at the Rainbow Room, I was back in Berlin to perform in the Berliner Ensemble Theater in East Berlin. I was the first West German permitted to perform in this now broken and damned high-profile Socialist establishment after the fall of the Wall. After all, it was the old Theater am Schiffbauer Damm where The Threepenny Opera had its opening night in 1928.

Five years earlier, I had witnessed the concerts of the established East German Chanteuse, Gisela May, on that same stage. She had proclaimed the songs rather than sung them with a militant, idealistic undertone and tempo. I always had preferred the way Lotte Lenya sang Weill, with a slow and melancholic interpretation.

Now, it was my turn. The city was just united, everywhere the seams were fresh and fragile and people were in wonder about history taking a fast train, rolling over people’s consciousness in this new world between shock and enthusiasm. After my concert, I sat with the audience until 3am on the old cracked wooden floor of the stage that carried so much history and we talked about Weill and Brecht, and the uncertain but exciting future.

The world rediscovered the works of Weill and Brecht throughout the 90s, but in Germany for a while too much history was attached to these works. People took distance from the complicated cold war status symbol of the East, especially Berthold Brecht, while Weill was continuously celebrated in America for his compositions for Broadway shows and Hollywood movies.

How did you decide on the track list for your latest album? How does it feel to be returning to the London stage with your latest album?

On 13 June, I will perform at Cadogan Hall with only a piano. It is the opposite dimension of the album regarding the arrangement, it will be pure and theatrical. The songs I present are chosen from all three periods of his life; the Weimar time, mainly with Berthold Brecht as the lyricist, the melancholic but striking French period at the beginning of his exile after having fled from Nazi Germany and of course, the beautiful and entertaining songs of the American creations.

Having performed all over the world, how do you find audiences differ in different countries?

As we are talking about MY audiences, they are not that different. My audience is vibe, cosmopolitan, educated about the repertoire I present and speak several languages, and they love music in its pure and creative form. Some Mediterranean audiences prefer thee French repertoire to the American one.

What have been some of your career highlights to date?

I am really very sure about Marlene Dietrich Programm to be one of the strongest. It is based on the three-hour telephone conversation I had with her in 1987. The show involves a dialogue between the old Marlene and the young Ute. Two German ex-pats speak about history, pain and love about entertainment, and Marlene shows her bitter and melancholic still devilish soul to Ute. I channel Marlene at this point and the story becomes a contemporary extension of the ‘Woman of the Future’.

What do you still hope to achieve in your theatrical or musical career?

I always go with the flow, listen to my intuition, inner needs and curiosity. At the moment, I am working with the Pian Bausch Dance Theatre, a revival of a piece I had done 30 years ago and it is a wonderful deja vu but with very different older eyes. My interpretations have changed a lot.

What advice would you give to people who are seeking to build careers in music and theatre simultaneously as you have?

Life comes in chapters. I did not do everything at the same time. Follow your curiosity and instinct, and go with your heart. And never let yourself be corrupted for the market value of or as a product of show business.

For further info on Ute’s new album and upcoming concert, please click here.