A Lotte Lenya Christmas

September 23, 2012

It’s a few days before Christmas. In fact, it’s the Wednesday night before Christmas. I don’t know how I know this, but I do.

My parents have decided to surprise me with tickets to see the Austrian-born entertainer, the toast of Weimar era Berlin, Lotte Lenya. She’s performing at a theatre only a mile or so from our home. I can’t believe my good fortune, and my mother and father are beaming in that way that only a parent can when they realize they've done something to make their child truly happy.

The concert is sort of a blur, and before I know it I am home in bed. But I hear voices downstairs, and what do you know, my parents have arranged another surprise. Sitting around our kitchen table, I find my parents, my grandmother, and Lotte Lenya, who has agreed to join us for a late night cup of tea and regale us with memories from her long and storied career.

In her time she appeared in the original production of “The Threepenny Opera,” fled the Nazis, gave countless concerts and stage performances, and even played a Bond villain in “From Russian With Love.” But all I want to know about is the day in 1955 when she recorded Mac The Knife with Louis Armstrong.  I pepper her with questions, and she does her best to answer politely before finishing her tea and disappearing into the December night.

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I know this is a weird little dream, and really not much happens in it, but it is one of my very favorites for many reasons. Seeing my parents together again and happy, seeing my grandmother, Christmas time, all big pluses. But why Lotte Lenya? Who the hell is she and why do I care enough to dream about her? Well, her biographical sketch is simple enough. Born in Austria, she came to great acclaim in the Berlin theatre scene during the mid 1920s. She married composer Kurt Weill (twice) and as Berlin, and then Paris, fell to the Nazis she made her way to America and performed on stage, film, and television until shortly before her death in 1981 at age 83. 

I've been an admirer for many years, since I discovered her as part of my preparation to perform in a play by German writer (and frequent Weill collaborator) Bertolt Brecht, though I admit her singing voice is an acquired taste. The incident I mention in the dream, her recording with Louis Armstrong, actually took place.  

Here is why I find their encounter so fascinating and really would ask her all about it if I could: By 1955, Lenya had been singing "Mack The Knife" for nearly 30 years, since it was introduced in The Threepenny Opera in 1928. In an eight and a half minute outtake from the session, Armstrong is placed in the role of teacher, introducing to Lenya a new arrangement of the song she has sung literally hundreds of times. The jazz rhythm is unfamiliar to her, and you can sense her nervousness as she giggles and tells him, "that's easy for you, dear!" 

There are many stops and starts, and at one point the whole room erupts into laughter as the engineer stops things in the middle of a take due to Armstrong's absentmindedly mumbling into the microphone as Lenya sang.

"You mean I was singing it? No, no. Her voice is just turnin' like mine. The forest for peaches was happening there!"

No one laughs harder or more good naturedly than Lenya herself, and it's such a contrast to the image I'd had in my head of this no nonsense, chain-smoking, former child prostitute, I find myself completely enchanted every time I listen to it. Really, it's no wonder I dreamt about it.

Here's a bit of a confession (if you've read this far, I might as well give you something real and honest about myself.)  I  keep my favorite picture of Lenya on my nightstand. She's wearing a lush red overcoat during a visit to Hamburg, carrying a purse and looking for all the world like someone's grandmother. It never fails to make me smile. 

Since this is my first dream post in over a year, I decided to do something a little different. I basically drew two sketches of Lenya and then added them to different collages, or hand colored printed copies to give her a variety of different looks. In other words, several illustrations will accompany this post.